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IMOLE Overview - Integrated Manager Of
Learning Environments
What IMOLE is designed to deliver
 | Effective computer assisted instruction (as opposed to computer
based re-distribution of lecture materials) targeted at addressing either
specifically identified pedagogical problems in current educational
strategies or at exploiting "pedagogical opportunities" made
possible by the capabilities of modern information systems. |
| Minimize the development/deployment burden on the faculty. |
| Deliver a significant development/deployment time and cost savings
relative to more traditional approaches where faculty are solely responsible
for both content development and technology implementation. |
How IMOLE accomplishes these goals
| Effective computer assisted instruction
 | Faculty member (content expert) works with instructional designer
(educational delivery expert) to determine how the computer should
present information to address specifically identified pedagogical
problems or opportunities. The result of this collaboration is an
intelligently designed computer interface (intelliface) tailored
to meet these pre-defined pedagogical needs. This collaborative
effort between content expert and educational delivery expert guarantees
that the resulting intelliface is actually adding value to the
educational experience as opposed to being value-neutral or detrimental
to the educational process. |
| Instructional designer oversees daily aspects of intelliface development to ensure
that the interactions it has with students are actually based on
instructionally sound principles. |
| Intellifaces are tested and further refined if necessary based on
observed results of deployment and student feedback. |
|
| Minimize the development/deployment burden on the faculty
| Development of intellifaces permits experts involved in the process to
operate within their area of expertise while making it unnecessary for
them to make significant contributions outside of these areas.
Each member of the intelliface development team - faculty (content
provider), instructional designer (addresses pedagogical issues),
software developer, and multimedia specialist - contributes their unique
knowledge to the overall solution. |
| One of the design goals of IMOLE is to enable reuse of the
intellifaces so that a particular educational strategy, once
implemented, can then be used by anyone who require the same pedagogical
solution. |
|
| Deliver a significant development/deployment time and cost savings
| All the savings in development/deployment time above contribute to
cost reduction and effectiveness. |
| IMOLE specific software costs are small. The currently selected
cross-platform implementation environment would cost the institution
only a few hundred dollars a year per IMOLE
development team. |
| Once the IMOLE development environment is established, it is
anticipated that new intellifaces will be developed over periods ranging
from a few days to a few months. As the library of intellifaces
grows the need to develop new ones diminishes and efforts can be
refocused to working with new faculty to match an existing intelliface
to their educational needs and maintaining the delivery engine over
version upgrades in the engine itself and the operating systems it is
deployed on. |
| The process of developing and maintaining the underlying
IMOLE delivery technology is handled by a small group of people and
leveraged by each faculty member using it. Consequently the
person-days saved by this approach is rougly equal to the person-days
invested by IMOLE team times the number of faculty using IMOLE. |
|
Some problems associated with approaches where the faculty member develops
their own solutions.
| Few faculty encompass all areas of expertise embodied in an IMOLE
development team and of those few, even fewer have the time to utilize it to
develop something. |
| We believe a common misconception is that faculty can develop effective
computer assisted instructional software on their own (or with the
assistance of a graduate student or two) utilizing currently available or
"emerging" technologies. In truth, the time needed to
develop the instructional design, software development and multimedia skills
required for these projects is equivalent to the time faculty have spent
becoming content experts in their own fields. Failing to recognize
this generally leads to frustration after the faculty member has invested
enough time to progress to a point on the learning curve where they realize
realize they're in over their heads. |
| The instructional effectiveness of the resulting product is not an
explicit factor in the design criteria. While the experience of the
faculty member may bias the outcome in a desired way, their relatively
novice status in the areas of instructional design, software development and
multimedia are more likely to bias the outcome in an undesired way. |
IMOLE FAQ
How does IMOLE compare to other computer based "instructional" or
"presentation" software packages that are available?
See feature comparison link to some commonly deployed
campus solutions here.
It is particularly important to note that HyperText
(e.g., traditional web/browser) environments have been demonstrated by peer-reviewed research to
be detrimental to student learning in a variety of situations.
Can IMOLE support different interfaces for the same content?
Yes (in some cases). Most online content consists of text, images,
navigational structures, etc., that make some sort of instructional sense only
after being visually assembled on a page by the content provider. The
presentation mechanism itself usually has no knowledge of how these content
elements relate to each other. Consequently, the creation of a different
set of relationships requires the content provider to hand-assemble them in the
new format - again without the presentation package itself possessing any
understanding about these relationships. This can be quite tedious if two
formats are required since each must be maintained independently even though the
underlying content is the same. The IMOLE process results in a
categorization of each data element in a custom structure representing, in a sense,
meta-knowledge about the content elements and their relation to the content
subject as a whole (our implementation is much less esoteric than it sounds and
does not explicitly rely on abstract knowledge representation paradigms).
This permits, where it makes sense, the same content to be presented in
different interfaces, i.e., linearly, hierarchically, relationally, etc.
In one IMOLE deployment, the hierarchical
interface had many hyperlinks among content elements and created, for students
not familiar with the hierarchy and used to a linear presentation style, a
rather confusing environment. This shortcoming was recognized and a linear
presentation interface developed (being developed) without requiring any
content alterations on the part of the faculty member. It is
anticipated that the linear interface can be given to novice students to assist
in their acquisition of hierarchical relationships - if the hierarchical
interface doesn't work with a new crop of students when deployed from their
initial exposure to the content - while the hierarchical interface itself can be
presented only to more advanced students if that proves necessary.
The technology underlying IMOLE
How IMOLE accomplishes this
| The current IMOLE engine is being developed in a commercial rapid application development
tool known as Metacard which runs in Microsoft (95/98/NT/2000), MAC
and UNIX environments. However, because of the high modularization of
IMOLE, and the separation of its content portions from the delivery engine,
a completely different commercial development tool could be selected if
the existing one went away or a better one came along,
and no additional
effort would be required of the faculty member to re-deploy their intelliface running on the new delivery engine. |
| A professional software developer and graphic artist round out the
development team ensuring that the software will perform even in the face of
constantly changing and evolving technologies (operating systems, multimedia
standards, software upgrades of Metacard, etc.) |
| Software is designed to take advantage of the computer's ability to truly
serve as a non-linear instructional platform as opposed to simply being an
information distribution platform. |
| Faculty are responsible only for maintaining content. Skill sets
associated with the software aspects of the project, i.e., development,
deployment, maintenance, instructional design, and graphic arts do not
become additional burdens the faculty must bear. |
| The group will work with faculty to develop new ways for the software to
present material. These new interactions can then be made available to
all faculty who are using the software. For example, it is a future goal to
build adaptive testing into this software and this feature would be
available as an addition even to projects already deployed. |
| For more information, contact our Instructional Designer and Multimedia
group leader, Tim Bleiler: (bleiler@buffalo.edu). |
These QuickTime movies are under development and the current incarnations are
a bit rough, but they are designed to give a
preliminary introduction to IMOLE and how it illustrates the direction being
taken by HSIT to deliver on-line instructional materials to HSIT constituents
You will need a QuickTime viewer to see these presentations. This is
available free at:
http://www.quicktime.com
The presentation consists of two parts, available in a variety of resolutions
to meet your bandwidth capabilities.
Note: these are not streaming video's. You may need to save them
locally before viewing them to achieve satisfactory playback results. Your
PC must also be equipped to play the sound associated with these presentations.
IMOLE System Requirements ...
IMOLE has been tested on the following Operating Systems
used by the University: Windows (Win95
/ 98 /
NT / 2000 / XP / VISTA), Apple OS (10.x).
The technology underpinning IMOLE supports the following
additional operating systems, though these have not been specifically tested:
Unix,
Linux
IMOLE requires Apple QuickTime for these environments for
multimedia playback (freely available here: http://www.quicktime.com).
We are testing IMOLE for use with a CITRIX server. The
program can run off local machines with CD/DVD ROM drives. IMOLE can also run
off networks (including the Internet) to any supported computer.
Content last reviewed: 3/1/2007 |
