In my last post, I gave quick overviews of PBwiki, Zoho Wiki and Google Sites. This time we’ll look at three others: Wikispaces, Wikidot, and Wetpaint.

Wikispaces

Things I like about Wikispaces:

• WYSIWYG editor is a breeze; love the preview function.
• Easy to add widgets.
• Extensive default widget list with video, audio, calendar, spreadsheet, polls, RSS, chat and IM, slideshows, map, bookmark, and custom html plugins.
• Easy to add a logo.
• Easy to invite users with a personalized greeting.
• Built-in user statistics, with an overview and breakouts by members and pages.               
• Wikispaces badges, which let you easily place a graphic link to your wiki on any Web site. There’s a live-changes badge too.
• Fairly logical information architecture; easy to find the settings you’re looking for.

What I don’t like:

• Advertisements on right pane of page. You have to pay to get an ad-free version.
• Free versions can’t be private; public wiki can be viewed and edited by anyone, protected can be viewed by anyone but edited only by invited users.
• Private wikis start at $5 per month; custom-permissions functionality starts at $20 per month.
• Limited, cheesy selection of free skins.
• Logo size limited to 150 x 150 pixels.

I really want to like Wikispaces. I think the WYSIWYG editor, selection of widgets, and built-in analytics are great features. I don’t like the limits of the free versions; the permissions settings don’t give you enough control over users and access. Aesthetically, the free Wikispaces are a disappointment; if you prefer to have a customized, professional appearance you’ll probably want to go with a paid version to get more functionality. This isn’t a bad free wiki; but it’s not at the top of my list.

Wikidot

Things I like about Wikidot:

• Mathematic equations on the page—a great feature for educators.
• Bibliography block and citations feature.
• Custom code can be easily displayed on the page.
• Free version has customizable permissions settings.
• Forum and per-page discussion features.
• WYSIWYG editor has a preview function.
• Decent selection of free skins, fairly wide variety.
• Customizable CSS.
• Active support community, extensive catalog of wiki code snippets for page customization.
• Google Analytics.

What I don’t like:

• WYSIWYG editor is kind of kludgy, more an html editor than a Word-type WYSIWYG.
• Not as intuitive as other wikis.
• Plugins hard to find or nonexistent.
• Have to customize CSS to include a logo.

Wikidot is not the most intuitive wiki to use, but its ability to display mathematic equations, programming code (javascript, html, etc) and academic-text formatting like bibliographic information and footnotes makes it a smart choice for educators. It’s a bit short on easy multimedia features (you won’t find a drop-down of easy-peasy plugins, for example), but with its ability to customize look, feel, and access it’s worth a look for tech-savvy users who aren’t easily discouraged or intimidated.

Wetpaint

What I like about Wetpaint:

• Easy, intuitive WYSIWYG editor.
• Nice selection of multimedia widgets: video, messaging, maps, slideshows, video mail, etc.
• Multimedia search and embedding is a breeze.
• Add photo feature makes uploading images, searching Yahoo images, or adding a slideshow easy.
• Customizable permissions setting.
• Spellcheck!
• Add An Edit note feature: leave a description of your edits and/or contribution. 
• Discussion forum.
• To-do feature.
• Google Analytics or SiteMeter for site statistics.
• Wetpaint Central, a resource-rich online help and support community.

What I don’t like about Wetpaint

• Limited range of free skins.
• Can’t customize page layout.
• $10 – $15 monthly to get an ad-free wiki.
• Feels a little impersonal.

It’s hard not to like Wetpaint. It’s intuitive, with lots of thoughtful features like spellcheck, discussions, and Google Analytics. And it can’t be beat for multimedia ease of use. For example, you can search for and embed a YouTube video directly from the Add YouTube Video dialog box. No need to leave the wiki, go to YouTube, find the video, copy the code, and then return to and embed the code in your wiki. My complaints are few: I’m not crazy about the aesthetics, and I think the ad-free price is a little steep. However, Wetpaint is extremely easy to use, it offers customizable permissions, and its rich multimedia feature set makes it a good bet if you plan to use lots of video or Web 2.0 apps.

For those of us who rely on Outlook to manage our activities, trying to schedule a meeting with those who do not use the Outlook Calendar can be a pain. For me, that pain usually comes when I work with a faculty group, because many of our faculty do not have their schedules on Outlook.

That is why finding a tool called “Doodle” was like finding a painkiller for meeting schedulers like me.

Doodle is an online meeting-scheduling and polling tool. Not only does its name rhyme with “Google,” the simple and clear interface of its site design also resembles that of Google. Once you are on the site, you have two simple choices: to schedule an event or to make a choice. To schedule a meeting is as simple as entering the meeting name, selecting the dates, and adding the time slots, and to make a choice is to generate a simple poll for participants.

One possible drawback is that the system doesn’t authenticate the user. This means you may not want to use it for any formal class survey, where there might be some naughty ones trying to trick the system. But as long as you’re dealing with a collaborative group, Doodle can certainly offer you the quickest and easiest result.

I learned about Doodle from a friend of mine who is a university administrator a few months after the company was founded, in March 2008. Over the past few months, I noticed it becoming popular among DePaul faculty for committee-meeting scheduling. Doodle’s growth rate of more than two million users per month makes me hesitant to blog about it, because everyone may have known about it already! If so, take this as my example of a short and simple blog entry.

As I was reflecting on what we as a department do and how technology fits into that equation, I realized that so much of how we think about technology has to do with how the instructor uses the technology to push/impart information to the student. While this is a valid use, I fear that what we are creating is really just a high-tech version of a correspondence course. Is there really that much difference between a lecture delivered via a video tape and one that is streamed over the Internet? Sure there is the “cool” factor—we can make the Internet version portable so the student can view it on their iPod—but are we really offering the student anything new? I would argue that these technologies should also be used by students to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. I would further argue that when both faculty and students are using these technologies to communicate knowledge to each other, we will have created a paradigm shift in online learning.

For example, when we think about presentation tools, we often think about the instructor using them to deliver a “lecture.” Many face-to-face courses, however, have a requirement for students to present to the class. In a face-to-face class this is easily accomplished—the student stands up and presents his or her material (often using a tool like PowerPoint) and is able to receive feedback immediately. In the online class, this process can be more difficult, and many times, the obvious solution is to have a synchronous webcast session. While not a bad solution, synchronous sessions in online classes can be tricky, because it requires all students to be available on a particular date at a scheduled time—often defeating the reason that the student took the class in the first place! The easy solution is to simply have the students upload their presentation directly into the course-management system and allow for asynchronous discussion. While this works, the personal element tends to be missing.

Instead, why not have students develop their presentations in an application like SlideBoom (see Rick’s post for more information on Slideboom) or VoiceThread. Both tools allow for easy creation and sharing as well as commenting. This is an example of a VoiceThread created by my eleven-year-old for a class project on culture: http://voicethread.com/share/264578/. This is just one example of how the same technology used by faculty can easily be used by students to complete class assignments. Other examples might include students producing podcasts to fulfill a class assignment. At a conference a couple of years ago a presenter talked about a class that produced NPR-like podcasts for a final project. In producing these podcasts, the students put together mock interviews, developed commentary, and produced a high-quality final product. The feedback from the students indicated that they not only enjoyed the project (translation: they had fun) but also learned from the activity.

As I think about what we need to do to make engaging online courses a reality, I see that there are at least two major barriers that are keeping us in a more “correspondence” mode. The first of these is technological literacy. Just like regular literacy, it is important that students who are enrolling in online classes have a common base level of technological expertise. For example, can these students upload attachments? Do they understand how to zip and unzip files? While many online programs provide students technology specifications (tech specs) for their computers, few provide students with guidelines or, better yet, screenings to see that they have the minimum technical knowledge to be successful in an online class. Secondly, student and faculty support is imperative. Many faculty hesitate to have students use technology for assignments, because they are afraid of having to provide technical support. This is a very valid concern and one that needs to be addressed at the programmatic level: faculty cannot be expected to provide technology support for their students while teaching the class. I fear that until we address these issues we will remain in a 21st century correspondence course holding pattern.

It’s time for another edition of the twelve Web tools of Christmas, back by popular demand.  Each of these is a new tool, service, or piece of software that I’ve found useful in the past year.  But, since it’s the holiday season, each of these tools is also free.

1. www.evernote.com — Evernote is the ultimate clipping application. It lets you clip files, screenshots, text, photos, and images on any platform, including phones, and keep those clippings organized, synced, and searchable wherever you are.  Evenote’s search functionality is really quite impressive. Evernote can recognize text in images, and that makes that text searchable. Looking for that photo with your friend in the Bon Jovi T-shirt? Just search for Bon Jovi, and you find the photo. On a more practical level, I use Evernote to take photos of receipts and invoices. It gives me an extra copy for my records and makes it much easier when I’m filling out reimbursement forms.
2. www.skitch.com — Skitch is just a really easy, simple-to-use screen-capture and image-editing utility. You can grab a section of your screen or a shot from your webcam, highlight an area, add some text and quickly make images for tutorials or other learning materials. Like Evernote, Skitch is both an application and a Web service. That means the images you create are easy to share and embed on any site.
3. www.slideboom.com — There are lots of services that let you share PowerPoint presentations on the Web, but I haven’t found one that does it as well as Slideboom. Unlike the other PowerPoint-sharing services, Slideboom doesn’t strip out any audio or video files you have embedded in your presentation. It also keeps any transitions and animations that you have built. In addition, any notes that you have added to a slide are included in Slideboom as closed-caption transcriptions. If you happen to be a Windows user, there is a free PowerPoint plug-in that lets you upload presentations to Slideboom directly from within PowerPoint itself.
4. www.sproutbuilder.com — Need a simple mp3 player to put into your Blackboard class?  How about adding your Twitter feed to your faculty-information page? Spout lets you do it with no programming knowledge. Sprout is a Web-widget or “mash-up” creation tool. It lets you take content from other places on the Web, like a YouTube video, an rss feed, or a Google doc and create a mini-application that combines that information into one package. Here’s an example of a fairly advanced “Sprout” I built in about an hour. Note: Its been scaled down to from its original size to fit in the blog post

5. www.animoto.com — As a video producer, I often get asked if I can take a series of photos from an event or seminar and create a promotional video. If I ‘m pressed for time, I let Animoto do the heavy lifting. With Animoto, you upload your images, your music track, add a little text, and—presto!—you have a professional and sophisticated slideshow animated to the beat of your music. Animoto offers free, all-access accounts for educators and students. The accounts keep videos private so any video created for a class assignment is freely available for everyone in the class but blocked to the outside world.
6. www.ustream.tv — Speaking of events and seminars, Ustream lets you broadcast your event live to Web audiences. Plug in a camera to a computer, log on to Ustream, and you are broadcasting your event. Your audience can ask questions by using the chat functionality. It’s a great way to extend the audience of events and provide the campus experience to online students. There are other tools that allow for live Web broadcasting, but Ustream’s simple interface and ease of use gives it the edge over the competitors.
7. handbrake.fr — HandBrake has been the best DVD-ripping software for a couple of years. However, HandBrake is now no longer limited to DVDs. The latest release accepts other video files as a source, which makes Handbrake a great, high-quality video-encoding solution.
8. www.celtx.com — Celtx is an independent filmmaker’s dream come true.  It’s a scriptwriting word processor, a storyboarding tool, and a production calendar all rolled into one.  It lets video producers keep all of a production’s documents centralized and organized. Celtx’s online repository, Production Central, allows you to collaborate on production documents on the Web with your team and share best practices with other producers.
9. feedly.com — I love Google reader.  It’s fast and efficient—but not that pretty. Feedly is a Firefox 3 plug-in that leverages the power of Google reader and makes it prettier. Feedly allows you to browse your feeds with the look and feel of an online newspaper and magazine. Feedly also adds functionality that’s not available in Google. For example, Feedly offers a one-click tweet feature that automatically adds a tinyurl address to the article, which makes sharing interesting articles simple.
10. www.inquisitorx.com — Inquisitor is another browser plug-in. It becomes a part of your browser search box and makes searching faster and more elegant. Once it is installed, start typing, and Inquistor will start giving you search results and options before you are through.  Inquisitor also learns from your searching history and gives you results based on your past searches. The more it’s used, the better the search results you’ll get.
11. http://ubiquity.mozilla.com/ — The final browser plug-in to make the list, Ubiquity has the most potential in saving time and making the computing experience more enjoyable. It’s an attempt to add natural language commands to browsing. Say you want to grab an address, map it, and then send that map to a friend. Normally, you would highlight the address, open Google maps, map the address, copy the link, and then open your e-mail and send the link to your friend. With Ubquity, you just highlight the address, launch ubiquity, and type “map,” “e-mail,” and your friend’s name. Its easier to understand the power of Ubiquity by seeing in action. Take a look at the video below.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo

12. http://openid.net/  — OpenID is not a tool or a service but an initiative. Ever get tired of having to sign up up for multiple services with a myriad of user IDs and passwords? The OpenID plan is to have one universal ID for all of your Web services. Once you have an OpenID account with a provider you can use that username to sign on to other sites. Google has recently become an OpenID provider so if you have a Google ID or Gmail account you are already part of the program. When asked to sign up for a new service, look for the OpenID logo and just use your Google ID to sign in. Here’s a directory of sites that already accept OpenID accounts.

Lately I’ve been building, administering, and supporting wikis for our faculty at DePaul’s School for New Learning. When I got the gig, SNL had already contracted with PBwiki, so my experience has been with that tool. Recently, though, I needed to research alternatives for our grad program. I’ll briefly share some of my thoughts on PBwiki and two other wiki tools; then in a future post, I’ll follow up with an overview of three others.

PBwiki

Things I like about PBwiki

• Easy to set up.
• Clean, uncluttered interface.
• Easy, intuitive WYSIWYG editor and an HTML editor.
• Creating pages, links, and folders is a breeze.
• Easy to add users.
• Easy to set access permissions. Premium versions have page-level access functionality.
• Easily customized with your logo and nine preset color schemes. Premium versions of PBwiki can choose a color scheme based on your logo colors, or you can specify a custom scheme.
• Easy to add media with Plug-ins feature:
• Productivity: calendars, planners, Google gadgets, address link (opens a Google map) spreadsheet, stock chart
• PBwiki magic: equations, html, footnotes, recent changes and visitors, tables of contents, number of visitors
• Chat room
• Photos: Bubbleshare or Slide
• Video: upload file or embed YouTube
• Easy backup and retrieval of pages and files. Easy to revert to previous version of page.
• Extensive library of academic templates.

What I don’t like:

• Can’t add users by e-mail domain.
• Can’t set notifications at page level.

Overall, I like PBwiki. It’s easy to use and administer and has an excellent and responsive support staff and an extensive library of how-to videos covering everything from basic editing to advanced features. It doesn’t allow adding users by e-mail domain, something to keep in mind if you want to easily make a wiki open to a large population of users but still keep it closed to the public at large. It also doesn’t allow JavaScript on wiki pages, which precludes using apps like JS-Kit’s ratings widget. But it’s a solid, versatile tool, and if you’re looking for a free, easy-to-use wiki with a good feature set, you should give PBwiki 2.0 a try.

Zoho Wiki

Things I like about Zoho Wiki:

• Clean, intuitive interface.
• Easy drag-and-drop side-panel customization.
• Customize top panel with your logo and text, or fully customize in a WYSIWYG editor.
• Three wiki editing choices, WYSIWYG Advanced, WYSIWYG Basic, and an HTML text editor.
• Customize the advanced editor with the tools you want (or the tools you want your users to have).
• Easily add subpages.
• Sidebar navigation automatically populates links to new pages.
• Can customize the CSS.
• Easy to add users.
• Flexible access/permissions settings.
• Can grant permission by e-mail domains.
• Control copying ability of wiki contents.

What I don’t like:

• Limited color palette. Can’t customize unless you know CSS.
• Subpages don’t show as links in the parent page automatically.
• Difficult to embed media. Need to work in HTML to format correctly, because the editor doesn’t give visual indication of where the embedded media will appear. HTML embeds appear in front of drop-down actions menu, making editing or selecting functions an exercise in frustration.

My first impression of Zoho Wiki was positive; I liked the look and feel of the interface and the ease of customizing the layout. However, it’s a real pain to embed multimedia and there’s no gadget or widget library. I also hate that Zoho adds a one-pixel border around page elements that appears as you cursor over them; this is likely considered a feature by Zoho, but I find it a distraction. Overall, you get a good feature set for free, but the kludgy editor keeps me from recommending Zoho Wiki.

Google Sites

What I like about Google Sites:

• Free. Sign up with Google account.
• Easy, intuitive interface.
• WYSIWYG editor, HTML text editor, and preview function.
• Twenty-three free skins (site themes).
• Customize colors, fonts, logo, layout, layout element sizes. Great deal of customization possible; can customize the color scheme for a given theme.
• Editor lets you specify one or two column layout.
• Editor makes it easy to insert Google calendar, document, spreadsheet, Picasa slideshow, presentation, video from YouTube or Google Video, Google Gadgets, as well as basic html objects like tables and horizontal rules.
• Easy to add attachments and post comments.
• Easy to add users and set access.
• Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Get user data and make your site more visible to Google and users and increase traffic.
• Custom domain feature; for example, mywiki.depaul.edu rather than sites.google.com/site/mywiki.
• Preview page as viewer option.

What I don’t like:

• Cheesy free skins.
• Limited selection of page templates.

It’s hard to find something not to like about Google Sites. I love the ease of use and broad functionality, its integration with other Google apps is a tremendous advantage over other wikis, and I love the ability to easily change the layout. I like that I can choose to have a border around the video player without writing code for it; it makes it easy for noncoders to maintain a consistent and defined visual space for their embedded videos.

I find the twenty-three site skins a bit cheesy, but that’s merely a matter of personal taste; you could play with the settings and certainly find something to your liking. Google Sites offers more options, more functionality, more administrative features, more data resources, and more ease of use than other free wiki tools, and I recommend checking them out.

That’s it for this post. In a future post I’ll share my thoughts about Wikispaces, Wikidot, and WetPaint.

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article written by Stanley Fish on the Power of Passive Campaigning. Being a nonnative speaker and not born to the Christian culture, I found a number of the terms and references Dr. Fish used unfamiliar. So I tried to learn the definition of these words through my usual method: highlight the word, copy it, open Answers.com, and paste the word into the search field. However, this time when I highlighted a word, a little question mark icon showed up at the upper right corner. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon, and guess what I found—a pop-up window with an Answers.com page giving me everything I wanted to know about the word! A closer look at the header of the pop-up window told me that this was a New York Times reference search powered by Answers.com. The word “powered” is used very appropriately here, because the function did serve to empower this online newspaper by offering users like me an easy way to access the meaning of every single word in an article.

Answers.com is an online dictionary, encyclopedia, and much more. While visitors usually come to the site to find the meaning of a word, one can always find much more. The site offers visitors a whole spectrum of meanings, examples, related Wikipedia pages, and references.

As a first generation immigrant to the United States, I came to the country at age twenty-four. To make up that twenty-four years’ absence of both culture and language, I have to absorb like a sponge every piece of linguistic, cultural, and historical information in my daily surroundings, from Winnie the Pooh to the Keating Five. In this journey of language, culture, and knowledge acquisition, a tool like Answers.com provides me with a vehicle to ride on, and it makes this trip fun and safe.

Why safe? Because it saves me from any embarrassing language clashes. Like most English-as-a-second-language people, I learned most English words by reading them in books without hearing them pronounced. For those words, especially the odd-looking ones, I would not dare to speak them until I’ve checked with one of my native-speaker friends. And that friend, now, is Answers.com, who gives me the pronunciation of every word. I know some other online dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster, have an audio file attached to the word as well, but Answers.com also gives you the translation of the word in multiple languages. So if I’m really not getting a clue from the English explanation, I can always scroll down to check its Chinese translation as a last resort.

While writing this blog, I found some exciting new tools on Answers.com, and they’re free! One of them is a download called 1-Click Answers^TM. Once it is installed in your computer, you can Alt-click (click while holding the Alt key) any word in any program to get an AnswerTip, which is a short version of the Answers page; and if that doesn’t satisfy you, you can click “Read More” to get the full Answers.com entry. So if the publishers of the site you are reading have not become as thoughtful as New York Times, you can download 1-Click Answers^TM.

Many publishers—blog masters and Web masters—are becoming more sensible to the needs of readers like me. WordPress.org, for example, has added AnswersLink as a plug-in to allow blogger to link a word to Answers.com by simply clicking the AnswersLink button on the tool bar.

Research has shown that it takes 5 to 16 encounters for one to truly master a word. And how many words are in the English language? According to WikiAnswers, there are 171,476. Even if you only need a quarter of that for daily communication, we are still talking about 42, 869 words or 214,345 to 685,604 encounters for someone who didn’t get the words through any natural context as a native speaker. But even for native speakers, acquisition of vocabularies remains a learning task from kindergarten through adulthood. And this task becomes more demanding for any discipline that has specialized vocabularies for its own field, such as biology and physiology. So even by simplifying some of the encounters from multiple steps of copying and pasting to one-click access (I guess we can forget about flipping through the dictionaries now), thoughtful technology like 1-click Answers is making a big a contribution to boosting the efficacy of learning.

Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

Examples

I) MIT’s Open Course Ware (OCW), established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, currently offers over 1,800 online courses that are enriched with multimedia content and teach thirty-five subject areas within the arts, sciences, and humanities. Being created exclusively by MIT, OCW is backed by MIT’s commitment for permanent updates but is not open to user contributions. It is essentially an electronic and multimedia-enriched version of almost all of MIT’s academic curriculum, including lecture notes, video lectures, exams, etc., offered for free, offering no certification or credit, requiring no registration, and, as indicated on the site, providing access to “materials that may not reflect the entire content of a [given] course.”

II) In a slightly different approach, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative currently offers an eclectic list of only about a dozen courses, which, however, are fully and exclusively developed for online students and are supported by ongoing educational research addressing course design and outcomes. Faculty from all over the world can create a free account and use the repository’s tools to create online courses that can be offered for free or at a nominal fee if credit is required. An educational initiative of a much larger scope than MIT’s OCW, the Open Learning Initiative organizes symposia, maintains pedagogical and education-technology blogs, and offers workshops on using and customizing existing-courses and on developing new, effective online courses.

III) Connexions is a collaborative, free, scholarly content archive that seems to share useful features from both resources discussed above, so I will be spending some more time on it.

The Connexions project started at Rice University in 1999, with the first non-Rice Connexions course contributed by the University of Illinois in 2002. Similarly to MIT’s OCW, Connexions has grown extensively and currently holds over 4,500 course modules, covering most typical disciplines and topics addressed in higher education. Similarly to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, new content is welcome and can easily be created by faculty from around the world, following a simple registration process.

The resource offers full courses (called ‘collections’), individual course modules, or stand-alone learning activities. Materials and learning activities are very well aligned, while remaining modular for flexibility in course customization. Based on my use of the resource, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness instructors are best off mixing and matching modules and activities from multiple collections and possibly supplementing them with additional (especially multimedia) materials. Connexions holdings are often linked to relevant course Web sites within the authors’ academic institutions, providing additional resources and context for understanding the materials.

The numerous items related to music (my area of expertise) are listed under “Arts,” with thirteen of the seventeen “collections” and approximately a third of the over four-hundred modules within Arts addressing music or sound-related topics. Items related to acoustics can also be found under “Science and Technology,” and, following a recent partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Connexions will also be developing a set of signal-processing educational modules and courses.

In its vast majority, the content is accurate, well presented, supported by references to relevant literature, and occasionally enhanced through multimedia resources. Depending on subject area, special plug-ins may be required, all of which are downloadable from within the relevant learning object’s page. Usability features may change slightly with each course and contributor, but all courses/modules checked are clearly organized and very easy to use. The repository itself is also well organized and visually appealing, and it has clear instructions for use when necessary. Although not formally peer-reviewed, the collections are monitored by an editorial team and an oversight board, helping maintain high content standards.

The quality and learning impact of the resource was recently recognized by Harvard University’s Berkman Award (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), presented to Connexions founder and Rice University professor R. Baraniuk for his role in creating the repository. The learning impact and sustainability of this and other open educational resource repositories was addressed in a recent article from the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects.

We are all usually wary of anything offered for free, and for good reason. When it comes to free education, however, there are serious reasons (e.g. motivation of those offering it) and evidence (see above) that support rehashing the cliché: “the best things in life are free!” I have personally found the free resources discussed very useful and plan to become a contributor in the near future.

When the final numbers are counted, online advertising is expected to have grown over 25 percent in 2007 to over $21 billion (BusinessWeek). Even a struggling U.S. economy and a looming recession don’t seem capable of stopping the party any time soon (www.clickz.com). One reason online ad spending has grown so rapidly is its ability to provide very detailed analytics. Online campaigns allow advertisers to gather very granular information on who saw an ad, when, how may times, and so on. Ad firms have whole staffs devoted to tracking online campaigns, evaluating data, and determining the effectiveness of the campaign. DoubleClick and Nielson/NetRatings generate millions each year helping to aggregate this data.

Ideally, online classes should be subject to the same level of analysis. Faculty and instructional designers have lots of tools to assist them with the planning and implementation of an online class but very little to assist them in evaluating the class and improving on it for the next quarter or semester. Data is often hard to get at (Have you ever tried to make sense of server logs?) and often there is not enough time and resources to produce a meaningful report that provides any insight.

That’s why I am excited by the Backlot Content Management System by Ooyala. Designed as a video-ad-campaign manager, the system allows you to quickly generate really useful reports that will be extremely valuable to online educators. Backlot lets you see how many times a video was watched, how much of it was watched, how many students watched it, how many times students replayed the video, etc.

The reporting interface is easy to use, and Backlot includes a download-to-Excel feature should you want to slice and dice your data even more. It beats trying to decipher server logs. I think it can be a huge asset in allowing educators and researchers to truly determine the effectiveness of video in online classrooms.