Elgg at Harvard, an interview

I recently found out that Elgg was being used at Harvard, so I got in touch with the course organisers and asked them a few questions. They were kind enough to get back to me with some answers.

A couple of the interesting points:

“we decided to abandon the LMS and run the course entirely in Elgg” and “I was surprised to read in the final evaluations how much more our students liked Elgg over Facebook.”

Interesting stuff!

Here is the full interview.

1. How long have you been using Elgg?
   
   
   

   This is our second year. We used the older version last year and upgraded right before the fall '08 semester.

2. What are you using Elgg for?
   
   
   

   It is the home for both of the courses we teach. Last year, we used Harvard's LMS (they developed it themselves) for the home for the course. Then, we supplemented with Elgg primarily for the portfolios.
   
   
   For the Fall '08 semester, we decided to abandon the LMS and run the course entirely in Elgg. We use the Group feature to set up the area for the class. We use Pages to publish a live syllabus, evaluation rubrics, assignments, course policies and other info. We also use the Files extensively to upload additional documents as needed.
   
   
   When we abandoned the LMS, we also made a decision to use blogging instead of threaded discussions. Over the past 8 years, we've become disillusioned with running group discussions this way and were intrigued about requiring a semester long blogging component to the course. Students were responsible to blog about their "take aways" each week about the readings, class discussions, connections to their careers/lives, and articles they run across in their own reading. This kind of meaning making is instrumental in constructivist pedagogy and we were EXTREMELY pleased at how successful the blogging was in terms of the content.
   
   
   Students also create an eportfolio using Pages and a template we provided them.

3. You mentioned that you are using Elgg instead of a more traditional LMS - why did you decide to try Elgg?
   
   
   

   LMS organize students by course; when the course is done, you "go away." With a networking environment, it is organized around students.
   

   They can join and leave Groups (courses), but keep their important content (primarily blogging and portfolio at this point) with them.
   Pedagogically, we believe in students learning from each other and Elgg helps us facilitate that better.

4. What has not been as successful as you hoped?
   
   
   

   The biggest complaint has been around privacy settings and feeds for the blogs. For a system like this to be really robust for us to launch in all the courses in the program and in other programs at Harvard, this will need to be improved. To require weekly blogging, you need to organize students into blogging groups so that they can have a more manageable level of content/collaboration. There is no easy way to do this; you can do it through tagging, but our students would tag differently and get confused about commas (yes in Elgg, no in delicious). Plus, there is no internal Feed to receive the restricted access blog entries and almost all of our students would restrict access to the Group.

   A good feed reader inside the system that can pick up appropriate access items for your level of access would be nice. Alternatively, even a feature to sort Collections of Friends' blogs. Right now, the Collections of Friends doesn't seem to do much. If students could set up different collections, and sort around blogging, that could work.

5. Any surprises/feedback?
   
   
   

   I was surprised to read in the final evaluations how much more our students liked Elgg over Facebook. In terms of functionality, Facebook can be easier to use. However, our students really valued their privacy and the ability to work in a closed system like we provided.

I would like to say thank you to the course organisers for this feedback as it helps us to continue improving Elgg.