Moodle 1.9 – Potential Vulnerability

I recently wrote a small article for CMS Report about Moodle 1.9. One of the site’s contributors has let me know that there is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability that hackers have used on older builds of Moodle. According to The Register:

Twenty schools' sites have fallen victim to the spoofed or defaced web page porn assault, the Times Educational Supplement reports. Many of the sites use Moodle, an open source content management system that is used to create online learning sites, sparking the theory that flaws in older versions of the package have been used to mount the attacks.

The Register article continues:

If vulnerabilities in Moodle are indeed the cause of the attack then … a Moodle script insertion and cross-site request forgery flaw (here) as the likely candidate. Another Moodle bug (here) is another possibility.

Moodle.org are taking this very seriously. According to their Security page, this is a Sev Critical issue, and they recommend that all Moodle users install the latest Moodle package from http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=448.

Be warned…

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A Virtual Learning Environment gets grounded

Strange to tell, Microsoft has been at the forefront of producing popular, immersive learning environments for over 25 years. Sadly, it looks as though their involvement in this domain is about to end.

Is this goodbye, Microsoft Flight Simulator?

Microsoft has decided to close its ACES Studio, which developed the simulator series. The ACES Studio was shut and its 150 staff laid off as part of 5,000 planned layoffs to control costs. Since 1982, Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS) has been one of the most popular serious games available. However, in my view, it is less a game and more an immersive virtual environment; it provides the user with a highly sophisticated and realistic human-computer interface (HCI) that enables "players" to learn according to a non-linear constructivist model.

For those who would assert that FS has little or nothing to do with learning and development, remember that early e-learning specifications emerged from the aerospace world: in the late 1980's the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) developed guidelines for the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT, WBT, and related training technologies. The AICC specifications were designed to be general purpose (not necessarily aviation-specific) so that learning technology vendors could spread their costs across multiple markets and provide products needed by the aviation industry at a lower cost. This has resulted in AICC specifications gaining broad acceptance and relevance to non-aviation and aviation users alike long before IMS, SCORM, and QTI.

In FS, the user "flies" accurately-modeled aircraft in an open microworld. The flying area encompasses the whole of the real world (in varying levels of detail) and even (in FSX) low-earth orbit, including over 24,000 airports. Individually-detailed scenery can be found representing an ever-growing number of towns and cities, and geographical major landmarks. The latest versions of FS include complex weather simulation, as well as the ability to download real-time weather data. There is also a air traffic environment with interactive Air Traffic Control, player-flyable aircraft ranging from the WWI aircraft to the modern Boeing 777. In addition, the two latest versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator have a “kiosk mode”, which allows the application to be run in kiosks. It is the wide availability of upgrades and add-ons, both free and commercial, which give the simulator its great flexibility and scope.

As is the case in good e-learning design, introductory orientation ("flying lessons") provides the player with a virtual instructor who, through a modular series of tasks and activities that are understood and responded to by learners within in the game context. This combines the elements of content and display to present the instructional content in a way that promotes learning through organized instructional resources, and a user interface that is not confusing, dissatisfying, or cognitively taxing. As well as interactive lessons, the simulator also provides missions, airport maps, navigation aids / GPS, and even aircraft checklists to enable the advanced user (and this can even include learner pilots with a very reasonable facsimile of the piloting experience.

To create this immersive world that meets the needs of players as learners, several interface attributes are be integrated into the HCI design. Generalizing from usability evaluations of eleven applications and about 250 usability problems Nielsen (1994, pp. 25-62), described these ten heuristics for usable design:

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

When considering the pedagogic value of microworlds I would agree with Roe, Pratt & Jones (2005) when they assert

We believe that this paradigm has much to teach developers of e-learning platforms and that reflection on the design of our microworlds can help to crystallize what those lessons are.

(Putting the learning back into e-learning, p.3)

The authors of the paper "distil" the characteristics of microworlds as a means of providing context and motivation for engaging with learning content:

Characteristic	Description
Quasi-Concrete Objects	Turkle and Papert (1991) have referred to the way that the computer offers access to formal ideas in a concrete way, since abstract mathematical ideas, represented in iconic form on the screen, can be manipulated directly by the user.
Using Before Knowing	In our everyday lives, we typically use artefacts for particular purposes. Through that use, we learn about the effectiveness of the tool, its limitations, how well it serves that purpose and sometimes we may gain some understanding of how it works. In schools, mathematics is a subject where you learn how to generate the object before you use it. In practice, more often than not, the former task proves too difficult, especially when disconnected from purpose. The computer offers the possibility of turning the learning of mathematics round so that use precedes generation (see the Power Principle, Papert, 1996).
Integrating the Informal and the Formal	diSessa has suggested that we incorporate versions of the formal representations of the mathematical objects in such a way that the child may be able to make connections between the various formalisations and their informal use (diSessa, 1988).
Dynamic Expression	When Papert proposed the turtle as a tool for constructing a dynamic notion of angle (and of course much else), he acknowledged that the computer offers a medium which unlike paper and pencil can incorporate dynamic representations of the world. He suggests that the use of systems which are expressive of dynamic and interactive aspects of the world are more engaging to learn than static and abstract formalisms.
Building	Constructionists base their approach on a tenet that encouraging the building of artefacts is a particularly felicitous way of teaching mathematics. Pratt (2000) has demonstrated how this approach can be modified into related approaches such as mending.
Purpose and Utility	In so doing, emergent knowledge is imbued with utility (Ainley, Pratt & Hansen, in press), in which the abstractions are seen as useful and the limitations of those abstractions are gradually discriminated.

So powerful is the FS platform that Microsoft turned in into a commercial off-the-shelf simulation platform called ESP. As they say themselves:

Microsoft ESP is a visual simulation platform that brings powerful, high-fidelity simulations to widely available, low-cost Microsoft Windows®-based PCs. Organizations that rely on Microsoft ESP can improve their workforce readiness more efficiently and cost-effectively than with traditional computer-based animation or simulation tools. Combined with its developer-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK), Microsoft ESP provides government and commercial entities and modeling and simulation specialists with an affordable, portable, and highly extensible platform for training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling.

According to industry analyst James Governor the implications of this are "stunning:"

...once you know what the world actually looks like and behaves, you can begin to model changes to the system. What if we deforested this area? What if we removed all the natural predators from a particular marine ecology? What if we banned all car traffic from a city? What might the alternatives look like?

At the end of the 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane, a passenger whose only aviation training was playing video games successfully lands a jumbo jet. While this is of course a cinematic fantasy, you can be sure in the wake of the recent Hudson Miracle simulations like FS are being used to replicate the situation that the plane, crew, and passengers encountered to provide training that will maximize others' chances of survival in such a scenario.

I might just fire up my copy of FS9 and take a trip from Newark myself...

Postscript:

One of the best things about writing an e-elearning blog is its flexibility of the medium to mould itself to accommodate new events.

These days, I'm regularly interrupting one series of posts to discuss new developments in another e-learning related topic: this is a consequence of the ongoing financial crisis. So, dear reader, I'll return to Josh Bersin and the emergence of informal learning presently.
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References:

Governor, J. (2008) Living In De-material World: On Microsoft, Train SIM and the Virtual Everything. [Internet] Available from: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/09/25/living-in-de-material-world-on-microsoft-train-sim-and-the-virtual-everything/ Accessed 2 February 2009

Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. In J. Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability inspection methods. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Roe, C.P., Pratt, D., Jones, I. (2005) Putting the learning back into e-learning. In Proceedings of CERME4, Sant Felix de Guixols, Spain [Internet] Available from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wie/courses/degrees/docs/who/students/edrfae/publications/roe-pratt-jones_puttingthelearningbackintoelearning.pdf Accessed 2 February 2009

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The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on E-Learning: February ‘09 LCBBQ

This month’s Learning Circuits Blog Big Question asks

What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?

In response, I returned to a post I wrote about a year ago. While reflecting on the LCBBQ I formed the view that the argument I outlined then bears repeating now. Where appropriate I have updated the article to reflect recent developments as the Recession turned into Depression.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarized in the following manner: will the positive economic, organizational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses an economic crisis? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practice
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The PlayStation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.
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Traditional business practice
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalization occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organizations revert to previously-learned behaviors in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)

• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organization. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...
• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organizations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com Crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colors, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarization and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organizations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

A year ago I wrote that:

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organizations' training needs.

In light of recent research by Bersin & Associates among others, it seems that The Powers That Be in organizations have judged online training to be found wanting, and are responding by cutting budgets and reassessing learning & development strategies, apparently by beginning to disintermediate training by using non-formal and informal knowledge transfer methods in place of ‘e-training,’ LMSs, and VLEs.

Content development methodologies
I would assert that there is a real opportunity for e-learning here (if L&D professionals are in a to position stand their ground). Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly it can be argued that ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The PlayStation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the PlayStation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practiced in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
This is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone or even ‘economical-learning’?). I think that if they are in a position to do so, learning professionals are repositioning themselves to re-use the skills they’ve acquired in different contexts – perhaps undertaking their activities from a different platform, or through working in a different domain of expertise.

Ultimately, I would say that all anyone can do at the moment is keep their powder dry and hope for the best in the short term, while preparing for what may be a completely different business environment when the green shoots of recovery finally emerge.

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Elearning is weather-proof

The Irish calendar does not observe the typical astronomical seasons (beginning, in the Northern Hemisphere, on the equinoxes and solstices), or the meteorological seasons (beginning on March 1, June 1, September 1 and December 1), but rather centers the seasons around the solstices and equinoxes (so that, for instance, midsummer falls on the summer solstice), beginning the seasons at the approximate halfway points between solstice and equinox, following the seasons of the Iron Age (or Celtic) inhabitants of the island.

According to how we measure the calendar in other words, yesterday was the first day of Spring.

Now read on…

As the country experiences the worst snow storm for nearly two decades, according to Irish national broadcaster RTÉ’s website:

The cold snap has resulted in widespread disruption to road and air traffic and the closure of dozens of schools. Sub-zero temperatures and snowfalls in parts of Ireland and most of Britain have led to flight cancellations and long delays for motorists.

So I’m still sitting at my desk at 7.00pm catching up on some paperwork, as the road out of my office is gridlocked and has been for some hours now…

Assuming this traffic clears, I still have to find my car (which is somewhere under all that snow)…

…and I still have to make it home.

It occurs to me, that e-learning is resistant to all of this weather, and traffic.

Normal service resumes tomorrow (as I hope will the weather!).

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