Applying VaNTH Learning Technologies to TRUST Education and OutreachOverview and Educator's Guide
Larry Howard
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Introduction
The Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) Science and Technology Center aims to create and/or re-purpose learning materials addressing multiple aspects of trustworthy systems in multiple application domains and to make these materials broadly available to educators through the web. The near-term aim of disseminating these materials is to enable educators to rapidly infuse concepts and technologies originating from the work of the Center into existing curricula. The ultimate aim is to enable a transformation of curricula to afford a systemic treatment of security in the design of systems and the technologies upon which they increasingly depend.
In pursuing these aims, TRUST will leverage existing infrastructure for courseware design, delivery, and dissemination created and used by another NSF Center—the Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies, called VaNTH after the participating institutions: Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Texas at Austin, and Harvard/MIT. The purpose of this page is to introduce the capabilities of the VaNTH infrastructure to TRUST researchers and educators and to describe ways that it can be employed to achieve the objectives of the Education and Outreach Program (EOP) of TRUST.
Some of this exposition will be by reference to how the infrastructure is being used by VaNTH today. This approach enables a view of the infrastructure in a more mature state of use and is not meant to suggest that TRUST will mimic precisely what VaNTH has done. The component technologies of the infrastructure—most particularly, the dissemination portal—are highly adaptable and we anticipate that customizations made for TRUST will involve much more than simply skinning. Indeed, the role of this concept paper is to create sufficient awareness within the TRUST community so that decisions can be made by the community about how best to tailor the infrastructure to increase the impact of the Center's education and outreach missions.Infrastructure
Three technologies make up the VaNTH learning technology infrastructure:
- A courseware repository and dissemination portal
- A design environment for adaptive online courseware
- An online courseware delivery platform
An adaptation of the first technology platform—the courseware repository and dissemination portal—has been created for TRUST and will be known as the TRUST Academy Online (TAO). Below are two screenshots from this platform that show the front page and the courseware profiles page. Courseware profiles are the portal's dissemination "units" that bundle learning resources (curricular materials) made available by an educator with consistent descriptive elements that can be browsed and searched by visitors of the portal.
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The TAO Portal supports creating and modifying courseware profiles through the web, including support for WYSIWYG HTML editing and multimedia content resources. Profiles are further supported by templates providing a consistent look and feel and consistent metadata whose specification are supported by standard forms-based interactions (checkboxes, pull-down lists, etc.). Profiles are subject to a definable editorial process and when approved for public release are automatically incorporated into the profiles listing (shown above) presented to visitors of the portal.
These and other capabilities of the TAO Portal are summarized by means of a concept map presented below. If the map's text is too small, you can view it in a separate window.
The CAPE and eLMS technologies identified in concept map are the remaining two platforms in the VaNTH infrastructure. CAPE is a visual language-based design environment for adaptive online courseware and eLMS is an online learning platform for delivering courseware authored with CAPE to learners through the web. These technologies support online courseware that can adapt its behavior or content based on what is known about individual learners. This knowledge is gleaned from formative assessments employed in the learning designs, together with observations of the learner's use of the courseware, such as her or his selection of particular resources when presented with alternatives. CAPE enables reasoning to be performed on these inputs and observations, and it provides adaptation capabilities that can be used in responding to the learner's situation. The screenshots below show the CAPE authoring environment (left) and the courseware delivery interface of the eLMS learning platform.
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The concept map below summarizes various details about these technologies and the courseware they create and deliver. If the map's text is too small, you can view it in a separate window. Additional information is available at the Adaptive Learning Technologies web site.
Demonstrations
The Captivate (Flash) movie below demonstrates creating a courseware profile on the TAO portal and populating it with content. It shows some of the content editing features available to authors when creating or modifying courseware profiles through the web. To view the movie, press the Play button on the play control at the top of the movie. You may need to scroll down or enlarge the browser window to show the entire movie.
The following movie shows features of the VaNTH Portal that are also available on TAO. It shows a populated profiles page, an individual profile, and the metadata-based search and retrieval interface.
Issues
This section presents some issues to be decided by the TRUST community regarding the use of the infrastructure.
A fundamental set of issues concerns intellectual property. The materials and resources provided by the VaNTH Portal are covered by copyrights held by the originating institutions. The use of the assets is covered by a comprehensive usage agreement that outside educators must make with the VaNTH ERC prior to accessing materials provided by a profile—a process automated by the VaNTH Portal. It is expected that, like VaNTH, educational materials created with TRUST funding are subject to intellectual property agreements governing institutional participation in the Center, and institutions contributing other educational materials may wish to retain certain intellectual property rights. When making such materials available to the public as a part of the education and outreach missions of TRUST, mechanisms and agreements must safeguard any intellectual property rights asserted by the orginating institutions. The nature of these mechanisms and agreements must by addressed in conjuction with tailoring the portal framework for TRUST.
Another set of issues concerns the granularity of materials made available by TAO. If TRUST's ultimate stategy for impacting curricula is to enable an integrated treatment of security, then providing educational materials at the granularity of courses seems a less effective tactic than providing more finely grained assets. On the other hand, providing more finely grained assets, like individual modules, increases the effort required to scaffold their reuse. Providing such scaffolding is the rationale for making TAO, and the VaNTH Portal, profile-based. It should be recognized that the portal framework is largely insensitive to these issues: it currently provides a single distribution "unit" (profiles) that VaNTH has used to provide materials at granularities from individual modules to entire courses. So the issues of granularity really concern how the assets to be provided by TAO reflect TRUST's education strategy. One response to these issues is to accept that earlier contributions to the repository will be strongly influenced by existing curricular units and their associated materials. Over time these assets can be refined into more atomic distribution units.
Other issues concern classroom-based versus online learning. The learning technologies made available by VaNTH include robust tools for creating learning experiences delivered to learners online, individually and in the context of traditional courses (called blended learning). We have piloted the creation of a module that teaches role-based access control concepts from tradition network security in the context of chemical plant security to students in a capstone Chemical Engineering design course. This module is self-contained and performed by students entirely online. Our collaborating educator, Ken Debelak of the Chemical Engineering Department at Vanderbilt, will use this module as a complement to existing training given to his students concerning identifying and analyzing design issues. Making this module available as an online resource was of benefit in not further stressing an already over-burdened syllabus. The figures below show the high-level CAPE design for this module (left) and a moment during its delivery to a learner. |
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Getting Involved
The TAO Portal is now available to visitors. To access the site anonymously, as a visitor would, go to https://tao.truststc.org. Presently, there is only a single courseware profile available on the portal, one by Yuan Xue at Vanderbilt, that is at a very early stage of development. Additional profiles are currently under development.
To access TAO as an author requires an account. All TRUST educators from participating institutions can request such an account. To do so, please click on the join link at right on the titlebar of the portal, and then complete the registration form shown in the figure below. Such requests are processed by portal staff as quickly as possible and confirmation of approval is received via email.
Feedback
We welcome your feedback on any aspect of this concept paper. Please send your remarks to the author. Learn more about the technologies at the Adaptive Learning Technologies web site.