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Launching an Academic Journal

admin — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 03:18:03 +0000

For the past few days, I have been contemplating what it takes to launch an academic journal. The reason is that although there are loads of academic journals out there on the World Wide Web, there are only a very few in our part of the world i.e. the Orient. Institutions like IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier and PLOS each offer a large number of journals covering a wide spectrum of academic journals. However, they are all offshore. Most of these institutions are now adopting Open access and author pays kind of business models. In such models, the author has to pay a substantial amount of money to get their work published. Journals and transactions of IEEE charge a flat publication fee of USD 1750 to the authors. This is a lot of money that the author has to pay.

So I was wondering that what would it take to launch a journal. After thinking about it enough, I have come up with the following necessary steps to launch a successful journal.

Develop a website. And this should not be difficult at all. You can easily launch a beautiful and stunning website these days using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
Raising a WordPress website would require you to subscribe to a web hosting service. There is a plethora of nice web hosting services that also allow you to raise websites for free. HourB and Hostinger are nice options. Hostinger is particularly nice, but it may not work if you are operating from Pakistan.
Use a journal management software to manage your journal online. There exist a handful of brilliant solutions online for this purpose.
Define the scope of your journal and populate its website with relevant content that addresses this and related issues.
Maintain and mention a program committee and an editorial board. This is probably the most important part. You will have to talk to many people for this and ask them to join your journal as members of its editorial board.

Of course, you will have to do a lot of additional work in order to get your journal and running. The above mentioned steps are just the tip of the iceberg. But they are nonetheless necessary. Moreover, they will help you kick-start your work and develop a momentum that will keep you rolling for the following stages to launch and maintain a high quality journal. By the way, I considered it worthwhile to publish a few links for your kind perusal that reflect on the WordPress and a famous open source software known as open journal systems. I am particularly interesting in seeing how they both work together.

Open Journal Systems (OJS) – Software – Public Knowledge Project

The official home of OJS, the most widely used researcher-to-reader software to run scholarly journals and publish research articles.

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Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide part 1

Prefatory note (2016) Please note that I receive several email requests per week from individuals asking for help or detailed guidance in how to setup an OA journal. With my deepest regrets, I am afraid my time is simply insufficient to provide such guidance beyond what is here on these pages.

Photo by quinn.anya

The post Launching an Academic Journal first appeared on Psyops Prime.

Using WordPress to Create a Language Lab

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 05:45:25 +0000

While a collective reflection on what a language lab should look like can be delayed for some contemplation to complete, I would like to share an experimental learning management system (LMS) I just created using WordPress. You can log on to this system below:

Learners

username: clandestine

password: matters (this is not going to work anyway, just read on the article)

What I have simply done is that I have installed WordPress somewhere on the web. It literally takes a couple of minutes and a few clicks. I changed the theme and installed a newer LMS plugin called LearnPress. A year ago I was experimenting with WordPress to create an LMS for myself from where I could manage my lessons. So I am kind of familiar with various types of LMS plugins. Honestly speaking, I find this learnPress plugin quite awesome. It is quite new and open source. It also has a premium version with added features. You can read about it here.

Anyhow, what I got as a result is a really nice looking sample course written by the developer of the plugin. This sample course can also be viewed online now. It looks nice!

What it does is that it teaches a user how to use this plugin, which I think is also nice. The plugin can be integrated with other plugins in WordPress, such as Buddy-press and bbPress to create somewhat of a social network in which people can signup (using a social login tool) and take courses. Creating courses in it is also very simple.

A few words about Moodle are also in order here as it is a much celebrated CMS for creating LMSs. One thing that can be scary about Moodle is that it can be difficult to use. But that is the headache of the manager of the LMS. He also offered to give a presentation about this to us, which could be quite handy. Using it by instructors is a totally different thing and I have a feeling that the already developed web-interface is quite user friendly.

Having said this, there exist a handful of plugins for WordPress that can be used to import courses (into WordPress) from a Moodle based LMS. So this could be quite handy. WordPress is definitely child’s play. It does not assume any technical exposure on the part of the user, whatsoever. All a user has to do is to deploy a website and install all the relevant plugins and get going with what he wants to do with the website. It can be quite fun and even addictive at times.

A few word about today’s presentation are in order. As a matter of fact, I was not really impressed by the software that was displayed today in the lab. My apologies for that! But I have a feeling that the rest of the people who attended the presentation also have the same feeling. Or at least the people I talked to have the same feeling. But a rational commentary on this should be provided. A few thoughts are as follows.

The thing is that what the software offers to be able to do can be accomplished with a minimum installation of the WordPress easily for free. I would suggest logging in to the experimental WordPress setup discussed above and see. Login details are reiterated as follows.

Learners

username: Don’t Worry

password: About this

The other feature that was talked much about was the remote desktop feature of the software. This can be accomplished easily by something like team viewer. I wonder, however, that what is the real benefit of controlling the desktop of the student.

There was apparently nothing about the kind of content they would upload on the students. All of that is left to the user (teacher perhaps). And this is where we can say that we don’t need that either. We can always leverage from the services of more seasoned professionals in the field of education to help us create content that would be useful. As a matter of fact, the need for developing content ourselves presents to us a window of opportunity as well. We can give it away as research problems to students to figure out and see what sort of content is more suitable for people to learn. The idea is that as the researchers in question develop the content and content management strategies for this LMS, they will benefit the system, on one hand, and, on the other hand, they can complete their studies as well. I personally think that a few PhD problems in the field of education that have significant inter-marriage with other domains such as statistics (to develop and evaluate surveys etc.) and psychology (or neuroscience) can be coined. This can lead to significant achievements. Having said that, I hope that I have conveyed my ideas in this paragraph pretty well. Otherwise, what I can do is that I can write specific articles (if not proposals) about my thoughts on this separately, should there be a need.

Another thing that I want to mention is the hardware paraphernalia that our guest was holding with her in a box. That was actually meant to boost up the processing of the system, while controlling all the desktops simultaneously, in a way that our own Ethernet cables would not be overwhelmed with network traffic. This sounds like a brilliant thing. However, and as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, that it would be really nice of all of us if we installed Ubuntu cloud in our labs. Ubuntu cloud is an open source cloud OS. Being open source means that it is free and also that it is maintained by a huge community of open source developers world wide. Having a cloud based IT infrastructure would simply boost our computing abilities manifold. This will also be extremely beneficial to us while undertaking complicated research problems, as some problems are simply difficult to crack because they require huge computational resources. A cloud will definitely benefit us in many ways. Moreover, it is absolutely free and totally world-class. Many well known universities around the world like Oxford and UC Berkeley have now based their IT infrastructure on Ubuntu cloud.

One last thing is that the software that was shown to us today might begin to look quite old fashioned a few years latter. It is needless to say that it already gave similar looks. This will be more apparent in the wake of open source platforms such as WordPress and Moodle taking fast strides solely due to the fact that they are backed up by huge communities of open source developers and a commitment to open source philosophy. The software also had a very limited functionality that can be achieved in fifteen minutes using WordPress. WordPress offers a lot more than that for free though.

So this is pretty much all what I had to say about this. There is of course a great deal of confirmation bias from which I suffer about this venture. But I don’t think that I suffer from this confirmation bias irrationally. I suppose I have reason to believe in what I have suggested. Someone else may totally want to differ from me. That would be quite surprising though.

Photo by The Shopping Sherpa

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A Roadmap For Developing an Online Learning Management System

admin — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 07:43:34 +0000

This article highlights certain general guidelines for developing an online learning management system. In developing a good learning management system, it would possibly be required to take care of three things.

A technical development strategy.
A content development strategy.
Two teams of experts each one of which would be involved in the development of the technical development and the content development strategies.

In what follows, a brief reflection on each of the above clauses is given.

A Technical Development Strategy

The purpose of a nice technical development strategy is to broadly see as to which types of software development tools would be required to develop an LMS. Once the tools have been decided upon, it should be an inherent part of the strategy to develop a plan of development and deployment of the required software. The details of a typical software development life cycle are omitted here. However, it would be nice if good software engineering principles are practiced.

Since it is sought to develop an online LMS, it would be nice to reflect on some of the most suitable online content management systems (CMS). There plenty of open source CMS present online, that can be suited to the development of an LMS with varying degrees of convenience, ease of customization and affordability. Some of them are described as follows.

Moodle: It would be pertinent to discuss Moodle here first. The reason is that Moodle is one such CMS that is purposefully designed to create online LMSs. Moodle is implemented in PHP and it has come a long way in which it offers a wide range of options to its users to create a highly customizable LMS. Moodle can be installed nowadays using one click installers in the control panels of most of the web hosting service providers. Once installed Moodle provides its user with a graphical dashboard. The dashboard offers its users a huge galaxy of plugins and themes to choose from. It must be mentioned that a theme governs how a website would look like to its viewers. In this regard, it sets the facade of the website for its viewers. On the other hand, a plugin dictates the behavior of a website. A plugin for social sharing would allow users to share the content on social media websites like twitter and facebook. Whereas, a plugin for images may allow users to attach licensed images to their posts. As stated earlier, moodle has a wide variety of plugins that are particularly suited for LMSs. For instance, it has plugins for plagiarism detection that are similar to the famous plagiarism software such as JPlag and MOSS. It is the availability of such plugins that has made Moodle a very strong CMS for creating LMSs, and that is why it is very popular.

Having a large number of plugins to choose from and having the possibility of tremendous customizations comes with certain associated problems. Hence, a common problem faced by the users of Moodle is that they can be easily overwhelmed and confused by the presence of so many options to choose from. The novice user can simply get baffled by so many plugins and other switches that he may simply not get a clue on as to what is actually desirable.

This confusion can be overcome by experience, however. As people play around with the dashboard of Moodle and get more experience about what various plugins and widgets are for, they become more comfortable in using it.

Moodle is much easier to use nonetheless. The person who develops an LMS with Moodle is not required to have any prior programming experience after all. Everything is installed through clicks in the dashboard, which is pretty much like a web page on normal websites. A person having even mundane browsing experience can learn Moodle very fast and develop an LMS within a very short time.

Once a good LMS is developed using Moodle, it has tremendous benefits for its users, who can be teachers and students. Teachers, for instance, can easily develop video lectures and embed them in their courses and lessons, which can also be created inside the LMS. Teachers can also manage to take students’ attendance online, assign grades to lessons taken and implement submission deadlines for submissions of assignments. With plugins for plagiarism detection, it becomes even much easier to impose stricter grading policies and, consequently, to maintain much higher academic standards.

Similarly, students can use Moodle for distance learning and for online submission of assignments. Similar other benefits can be thought about. All in all, Moodle is a great CMS. It does require some training on the part of the user to build an LMS, however. Once an LMS is developed, it can be easily used by the teachers and students alike. Given this, it could be very nice to have a separate small technical team to help in developing and maintaining the LMS.

Due to the fact that Moodle is open source, it evolves very fast just like many other open source systems and platforms. This can be very helpful for the teachers and the students alike to benefit from the latest developments for free.

After reviewing Moodle, it would be quite pertinent to say a few word about another famous CMS known as WordPress. WordPress is also open source and is implemented in PHP. The initial purpose of the developers of WordPress was to develop a blogging platform. However, in its current form, WordPress has evolved a great idea from the initial goal of its creators to be a leading CMS. One of the greatest benefits of WordPress is its ease of use. It is possibly the easiest thing to use on earth. And a user can create stunning websites within minutes. Most web hosting providers have one click installers for WordPress too. It comes with a great variety of plugins and themes. Many people have made multi-million dollar enterprises that sell plugins and themes for WordPress. Having said that, it is important to say that there are plenty of plugins and themes for plugins and themes for plugins that also open source. There is a plugin for almost everything in WordPress. There are plugins for selling cars, managing real estate sales, creating online bookshops, developing websites for schools and universities, managing barber shops, selling used goods and advertising designs for interior designs. Anything a user can conceive nowadays is implemented in the form of a plugin for WordPress. To this end, there is a wide spectrum of highly customizable plugins for LMSs too. WP Courseware, Namaste LMS, WPLMS, GURU, Academy, LMS and Learn Dash are to be named but a few. The purpose of most of these LMS plugins is, of course, to develop LMS in WordPress. Most of them come for free. Some of them also have premium versions which offer additional functionality to the users. All in all, all of them provide the users means to easily create and manage lessons, assignments, and quizzes. And all of them allow the users to easily embed multimedia contents such as audiovisuals to their lessons. With purpose built themes, LMSs created with WordPress simply look beautiful, stunning and have the ability to draw the attention of internet users to themselves.

WordPress can also be integrated with other software through plugins. To this end, it is worthwhile to mention that wordpress can be integrated easily with Moodle through various plugins. It would be particularly useful to mention the plugin wordpress2moodle. This plugin allows users to fetch courses from a Moodle-based website into a WordPress-based LMS. To this end, by integrating WordPress with Moodle an LMS developer can provide its users with the extensibility of Moodle all wrapped up in the usability of WordPress. This is to say that on the back-end of the LMS, a user has Moodle running with all of its extensive features of a thorough LMS. On the front end, however, the user only gets to play with WordPress, which is a lot more easier to use, and makes the life of the user a lot more easier and enjoyable.

A Content Development Strategy

Once an LMS has been put online, the designers of the LMS should have a nice strategy to fill it with valuable contents. These contents normally comprise of courses, which are in turn composed of lessons, assignments and quizzes. Filling the whole LMS with the desirable contents has to be a well thought out process. It is needless to say that it would consume considerable time of the order of months or even years to fill the LMS with valuable contents. The reason is that while it is much simpler to conceive the creation of lessons, assignemts and quizzes, in reality it requires a lot of effort to create that sort of contents that will really fulfill the needs of the users of the LMS for the long run. This is not supposed to be a difficult process, however. As a matter of fact it can be very enjoyable depending upon the propensity of the team involved in designing and developing contents for an LMS. If the members of the team enjoy content management, they will naturally find it enjoyable. Whereas, if the members of the team are too much obsessed with other disciplines, say proving esoteric mathematical theorems, they would find this whole exercise mundane, boring and rather futile. So the vigor one may have for content development is a matter of perspective for the designers. It must be mentioned here that the overall process of content development and management can be tedious nonetheless. The design team will have to keep track of many things. When to record certain lectures, what sort of mutimedia equipment to use, how to edit the recorded lessons, how to assign exercises to the students and which ones, how to prepare quizzes, finding suitable sequences for lessons quizzes and assignments are all questions that require delicate planning. To this end, developing of the overall software for the LMS may naturally sound a lot more easier than developing the contents it is going to host. The reasons, as cited above, are a lot more obvious.

It should be an inherent part of the content management strategy to leverage from other sources of knowledge. For instance, in the case of designing a language lab, the members should have a scheme for benefitting from various online sources which could help in learning. Hunting for appropriate multimedia, such as, lessons, music and films that are available for free use online should be a part of a good strategy. Movie clips from documentaries of the National geographic and the discovery channel etc. could be used for developing lessons for improving and testing listening comprehension of the listeners.

Technical and Content Development Teams

This is possibly the last aspect that merits reflection, although many more could be thought about. It would be nice to maintain two separate teams for the management of maintenance of the LMS. One of them can be thought of as a technical team, while the other one can be thought of as the content development (or management) theme, depending upon which nomenclature is more suitable to the developers of the LMS. As the name suggests, the technical team will be involved in developing the LMS software. After the software is developed, the team can be assigned to keep track of the technological developments and to catch up with them. To this end, it would be nice to have a dedicated technical team, even if open source technologies such as Moodle or wordpress are to be employed that have their rather user friendly graphical user interfacfes.

Similarly, a separate content development and management team should be prepared that can be expected to work in close collaboration with the technical team and the teachers and their assistants. The role of the content management team is slightly above. So this team would keep track of all the content that is to be uploaded to the LMS for each course offered through the LMS. They would be involved in recording, editing and uploading of lessons, designing assignments and quizzes in collaboration with the teachers and their assistants and to work with the technical team and provide them with their changing requirements so as to keep the LMS in the best possible state.

The content development team should also be provided with required paraphernalia, such as good camcorders, movie editing tools such as iMovie, Camtasia, RecordMyDesktop etc. It would also be nice to have a reasonably powerful IT infrastructure to satiate the adventuresome instincts of the people involved. Deploying a cloud-based IT infrastructure on the campus laboratories could be really good to this end. Members of the content development team could be assigned the roles of content management once the whole LMS has been developed as initially anticipated.

Photo by Marcus Pink

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