Dot.edu encourages higher ed to keep online development in-house

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, August, 2001

The University of Wisconsin System is evangelizing high-tech self reliance for higher education. In a model they hope to have imitated by other states, their Digital Online Technology. Educational Design Utility (known as dot.edu, www.uwm.edu/Dept/dotedu) provides all campuses in the system and other educational institutions with the necessary elements to offer online learning such as online courses and online supplements to traditional courses.

Dot.edu, says Charlene Douglas, director, was created in the summer of 1999 when central administration realized that 27 campuses were reinventing the same wheel. Dot.edu now offers project management, hosting, course management systems, instructional design consultation, a helpdesk, content development assistance, research and development on products, software training and learner management systems. Accessibility and universal design has recently emerged as a new issue for which they hope to offer expertise. Douglas is also looking at establishing a repository for learning objects.

Two and a half years ago, usage began with faculty posting their syllabi online. Douglas says use has grown by leaps and bounds. Dot.edu has 80,000 unique users in the UW system (more than half of the total enrollment of 150,000) and 6,000 courses. Douglas is also impressed with the quality of courses as the program has grown.

Faculty, staff or even campuses within the system can purchase these services in a bundle or a la carte, and dot.edu hosts all software and course content. The one issue dot.edu stays away from is intellectual property; those agreements are unique to the campuses.

"We want to start franchising this concept," says Douglas, "to show other state education systems that they are capable of taking care of themselves." Meanwhile, Dot.edu is providing their services outside of state boundaries to Minnesota and Illinois. They are likely to work with a large customer in Missouri.

The service is also branching out within the state of Wisconsin. Dot.edu has expanded to four independent colleges and universities in the state, four or five technical colleges, five Cooperative Educational Services Agencies (CESAs) offering professional development and a number of K-12 schools. Douglas expects independent and technical colleges as well as professional development agencies to be the next kind of organization to embrace online learning. She sees tremendous interest at the K-12 level-and dot.edu does work with 162 schools in Milwaukee- but she believes that infrastructure problems will slow the desired progress for K-12 schools.

Dot.edu Vendor Opportunities

The show of independence is not all bad news for vendors. Indeed, it creates a highly centralized buying point for products. Dot.edu currently hosts and provides training and support for course building software from Blackboard Inc., WebCT and Prometheus. The Prometheus software, a new addition, is attractive, says Douglas, for its ease of use and features such as compliance with accessibility guidelines. At one point dot.edu hosted and supported Web Course in a Box, now purchased by Blackboard and incorporated into their product, and Learning Space. The latter, says Douglas, proved too expensive to license and support. Blackboard requires dot.edu to secure a license for each institution. Prometheus and WebCT issued a system-wide license. Users outside of the UW system must license the product independently, though they access it from dot.edu servers.

For authoring platforms and all other services, dot.edu strives to offer their users a choice. Servers are purchased from Dell and Sun. Agreements with XanEdu and Academic Systems provide content. A pilot is underway with Saba for a learner management system, and Douglas expects to soon issue a request for bid in that area.

Because dot.edu is a part of the UW system, all vendors must go through the request for bid process. Even so, Douglas says vendors can make her aware of products and demonstrate them outside of that process. One note: the Madison campus has art Academic Co-Lab of the Department of Defense, and the importance of that work has created the requirement that all products must be SCORM compliant--or working toward it.