Research projects

The mission of my work with Fulbright in Mukdahan is to develop an online learning resource for the campus. Moodle version 2.6 (LMS) has been installed at soeleos.com, a temporary site that will allow IT administrators in Ubon Ratchathani University (UBU) and the IT faculty in Mukdahan to test the system. This aspect of my work has taken some time to prepare. While installing the LMS was easy to install, UBU currently uses a suite of Google applications to support online learning. In order to realize the usefulness of pairing these two systems, it seemed reasonable to set up a single-ID login system. Fortunately, the Moodle community offers a plugin which is based on OAUTH and there have been a number of schools (universities, colleges) that are using these two systems together. Moodle docs has some instructions and most questions are answered in one of several forums. On Wednesday the 11th of February, I went with two colleagues from the Mukdahan campus to meet with the UBU IT administrators.

We had a wonderful meeting with two IT directors, each who have doctoral degrees in computer science (one from a US university and the second having completed master's and doctoral work in Japanese institutions). I felt completely at home working through the issues and deciding on a course of action with my new-found colleagues. During the meeting, I discovered that the UBU IT group had been considering integrating a LMS with the Google community, but did not have the resources to dedicate the research and development of such a system. The meeting, then, was a win for the Mukdahan campus and a win for UBU as my work will contribute to their overall effort to improve distance learning at the UBU campus.

The UBU IT group set up a test site and provided the necessary authentication information to make it possible for students to log into Moodle using their Google authentication keys. After a few days, the UBU IT group had worked through the privacy and security concerns and started the process of "going live" by closing the test site and finalizing the integration of OAUTH with the UBU Google community. I can't stop saying good things about how effective and willing the UBU IT group is to help. In a word, they are great.

The goal of the visit was to enable a system so students could use a single user name and password to login to either Moodle or to the Google community using their Google credentials.

The Moodle project, however, is only one of three research projects that I have developed and are in motion for the campus.

Assessing readiness for distance learning

Currently, UBU Mukdahan has a group of 20 students who are enrolled in a basic science class which is simulcast from the UBU Ratchathani campus. This research project, then will use the same survey delivered twice to the same group followed by interviews. The first round will be during the week of the 23rd of February, and the second will take place near the end of March just before the semester ends. Our interest is in how students attitudes change toward distance learning (or not) and to gather the students' salient perceptions of their distance learning experience during interviews. We have already observed what has been noted in research -- student satisfaction is highly dependent on the personality (teaching effectiveness) of the teacher.

The second research project uses a variation of the UTAUT as outlined in a seminal paper by Venkatesh et al. (2003 MIS Quarterly Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 425-478/September). The unified theory and the method of analysis is very interesting and has been validated in a number of subsequent articles. We will be using this model (and related theories) to assess student (and potential students from the local community as part of my goal to focus on student development) readiness for distance learning. The goal is to learn more about what is acceptable in order to guide content development for the Moodle web site. While there is a lot of open source content, we're trying to figure out which media (video, slides, interactive) to develop on so we don't waste time going in a direction that may not be as useful for the students.