What to do when your OWL loses its feathers? Learn how a small team of technologists and instructional designers used open source software (WordPress and H5P) to rebuild the award-winning Excelsior College Online Writing Lab. We’ll examine the challenges of in-house development, evolving user expectations about technology, and after-grant sustainability.
What do you do when your award-winning Online Writing Lab (OWL) begins to lose its feathers?
The Excelsior College OWL (owl.excelsior.edu) is a free, award-winning, mobile-friendly website with over 700 pages of text and multimedia instructional content, 220 interactive and embeddable activities, and a new Reading Comprehension Lab section. The OWL offers instructional support for college-level writing and reading skills for students as well as a collection of powerful resources for educators.
Within three years of its launch in 2013, the OWL was beginning to show signs of age. Its custom-built platform grew challenging to update, the site was prone to errors and bugginess, and it featured dozens of assets made in Flash, a waning technology. The OWL was in desperate need of help.
In six months, a small distributed team of in-house educational technologists and instructional designers rebuilt the OWL in WordPress and translated the learning activities from Flash to H5P, an HTML5 authoring tool. The newly re-launched OWL features a logged-in area where students can track their activities and educators can create custom views of the OWL (we call them OWLets) for use in their courses. The newly minted learning activities can be embedded anywhere on the Web making the OWL more than just a simple website.
Through the story of the OWL’s decline and resuscitation, this presentation will examine the challenges of in-house platform development for higher education, the impact of evolving user expectations about educational technology, and how to build sustainably so that when the grant is over you can still fly high.
In 2013, the Excelsior College OWL was built with grant support totaling $600,000. That money went to curriculum development, subject matter experts, and technology development with an outside vendor. Three years after the OWL was built, there were no grant monies to fund system upgrades, redesigns, platform improvements, and other maintenance. We had an ailing OWL on our hands and no way to get it back on its feet. So, we decided to bring development closer to home. Building the new OWL in-house presented several challenges:
- Fostering effective collaboration between several departments
- Coordinating a small distributed team
- Leveraging College resources on a zero dollar budget
- Introducing new open source technologies to the College
Technology advances quickly and so do user expectations about technology. Only a few short years ago, the thought of building a 700-page mobile-friendly website would have been unthinkable. Today, the mantra of many designers is mobile first. To ensure that all users can access the OWL on the devices of their choice, the newly rebuilt OWL conforms to current best practices in design and development:
- Responsive across all device sizes (layout changes based on screen dimensions)
- Cross-browser capable (gone are the days of “best viewed in IE”)
- Accessible (we strive to meet both Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Level AA guidelines)
- HTML5-based learning activities (all Flash assets replaced)
The new OWL was built using WordPress and H5P. Both are free and open source, easy to use, and simple to develop. Did you notice the word free? A brief part of the presentation will include an insightful overview of these software tools. The price for technological innovation can seem high, but with open source software, your institution has options when it comes to choosing between buying and building.
The new OWL is up and running, but what about its future? We now face concerns such as how to continue funding this resource while growing and maintaining it, how to ensure that College leadership will continue to provide a stable environment for the OWL to flourish, and how to create a long, sustainable lifespan for the OWL. The last part of this presentation questions:
- Is free and open source really free? What are the hidden costs?
- How can you ensure that the institutional support will remain strong?
- Is it possible to make the OWL a self-sustaining entity?
The presentation will include a brief demonstration of the OWL, a brief slide show, audience interaction, opportunities to share experiences with others, live feedback, and take-away materials. The audience of this presentation (educators, technologists, instructional designers, higher education leaders) will come away with new ideas about the possibilities free and open source software can provide, the importance of using home-grown talent to create technology-driven educational resources, and how to innovate in resource-strapped environments.