August 14, 2006
Blackboard Patent reported in Toronto Star
The story "Shades of another Battle of Waterloo" by MICHAEL GEIST was published in the August 14, 2006 edition of the Toronto Star.
From the article:
"Moreover, educators have expressed concern that the patent will create confusion within the academic community, leading some institutions to drop better learning management systems alternatives due to the legal uncertainties.
Educators in the developing world are particularly uneasy, given that many rely on distance education and the delivery of electronic course materials as a primary, more cost-effective method of education.
The open-source software community has also reacted with alarm, since there are several ongoing open-source learning management systems projects that have gained increasing popularity in recent months.
These projects, which include Moodle and Sakai, are freely available and therefore represent a significant competitive threat to the proprietary learning management systems vendors such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn."
Posted by mlindema at 06:33 AM
June 21, 2006
Moodle 1.6 is now available for download!
On Tuesday, June 20 2006 Martin Dougiamas announced that Moodle 1.6 is now available for download!
ION will be upgrading its ION Moodle server (used to host non-MVCR moodle courses) this week. The MVCR Moodle server will be upgraded following the conclusion of summer courses.
Some of the major highlights include:
* 100% Unicode support - all 70 existing languages are now compatible and can be mixed wherever you like.
* New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle itself.
* Database module - a new activity module for collaborative collection and display of arbitrary data
* Blogs - finally Moodle has blogs for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by course, by group, by individual etc
* New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and share new report types. New statistics reports are included in Moodle 1.6.
* Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised structure so any module will be able to use them in future.
* LAMS - a new activity module and course format allow LAMS to be easily integrated with Moodle if you need to
* My Moodle - a new customizable dashboard page with an overview of all your own courses and what is new
* Hive integration - Moodle can be closely integrated with Hive, a leading object repository, with single-sign-on etc.
* Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of groups in a course
* IMS content packages - can now be loaded as resources
* New Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser on the fly!
* Granularised backup - allows you to backup only selected activities
* Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle's enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS Enterprise methods
For full information see the Moodle 1.6 release notes
Posted by mlindema at 08:56 AM
June 04, 2006
How to select a CMS?
After attending the presentations of Moodle, Angel, Desire2Learn and Sakai at the Course Management System Days for Illinois Higher Education, an event co-sponsored by Illinois Community Colleges Online and the Illinois Online Network, I have come up with the following list of factors that I would use to choose a CMS:
• Features
• Support
• Cost
• Company philosophy / attitude
• Ease of use
• Course conversion process
• Use of standards (SCORM, IMS, WebDAV)
• Accessibility
• Hosting options
• Multiple institution support
• Authentication (e.g. LDAP)
• Stability of Platform
Posted by mlindema at 11:32 AM
June 02, 2006
Here in D.C., the Quiet Rise Of a Software Powerhouse
Steven Pearlstein, Business Columnist for the Washington Post, writes about the success of Blackboard.
"Blackboard has quietly become the world's leader in the software used to connect students to their teachers, their textbooks, their course materials and one another. By some estimates, Blackboard now has as much as 80 percent of the U.S. market, with sales growing at 20 percent annually, 20 percent operating margins and a stock price that has doubled since its first stock offering two years ago."
It seems the business crowd really likes Blackboard. See Forbes and Motley Fool. But I think I would agree with the following conclusion in the June 2, 2006 blog entry of The Education Technology Group:
"Finally some blogish speculation of my own: Blackboard is a pretty small company (with a market capitalization of about $770M it’s a little smaller than SPSS ). Blackboard’s customers, on the other hand, include many of the largest institutions of higher education in the country, and its product, for which it has a virtual monopoly, is an increasingly critical part of their academic offerings. This strikes me as an anomaly that won’t stand up over time. I suspect that either Blackboard will be absorbed into a much larger company, or that viable competition (perhaps in the form of Sakai) will eventually emerge to challenge it."
Posted by mlindema at 10:04 PM
Oracle joins Sakai as commerical affiliate
"The Sakai Foundation announced Wednesday that Oracle has joined its collaboration and learning environment project as a commercial affiliate." Read more...
So, yet another Sakai commercial affiliate (Other affiliates of interest include Pearson Education, r-smart group, and unicon). I guess this is good news for PeopleSoft institutions. However, I don't see Oracle's partnership with Sakai influencing IT directors at Community Colleges in Illinois in their decision of whether or not to adopt Sakai as a course management system. There are only a handful using PeopleSoft and after all, how many Community Colleges can afford to run Oracle enterprise edition?
In my opinion, Sakai continues to be more appropriate for large-scale implementations (large four-year institutions like Univ. of Michigan or large consortiums like the ETUDES Alliance. However, two small liberal arts colleges participate in the Sakai Educational Partners Program, and apparently one of them is getting ready for a fall 2006 deployment. So maybe we will start to see implementations of Sakai at smaller higher-ed institutions in the near future.
Posted by mlindema at 12:13 PM
June 01, 2006
Setting up a Moodle education server
This introductory article provides step-by-step instructions for installing Moodle, a Learning Management System, on a Fedora Linux server. The article provides everything necessary to setup a full-powered intranet web-server that can support course listings, event calendars, student/teacher communication, and more. Best of all, a prototype server can be functional within about 45 minutes.
Posted by mlindema at 07:42 AM
May 31, 2006
Elluminate and Unicon Provide Low-Cost Trial Option for Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment
I think this is interesting…
Elluminate, Inc., a leading provider of live eLearning and Web collaboration solutions for the real-time organization, and Unicon, the leading independent provider of open-source enterprise portal, collaboration, learning and integration technology for higher education institutions, today announced a partnership. The two companies will collaborate to deliver a joint product and service offering for the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) for academic institutions at the K-12, community college and higher education levels.
ION has an Elluminate license and we use it in conjunction with Moodle, an open source course management system, for our online courses in the MVCR faculty development program. One of the first customizations we did in Moodle was to create a single sign-on solution so that our students who login to Moodle can with a single click enter Elluminate – without having to enter a username and password for Elluminate.
After the Moodle presentation at ION and ILLCO’s Course Management Systems days, a small group met and discussed the possibility of working with a Moodle partner (e.g. ClassroomRevolution.com) to host a Moodle institution that would be used by multiple institutions. I hope Elluminate is talking with Moodle partners to create similar partnerships.
Posted by mlindema at 02:00 PM
April 19, 2006
Desire2Learn Review
Here are my notes from the Desire2Learn presentation today at the Course Management System Days for Illinois Higher Education, an event co-sponsored by Illinois Community Colleges Online and the Illinois Online Network.
According to Stephen Meyer, Regional Sales Manager of D2L, over 400 institutions are using Desire2Learn (full state solutions such as Minnesota and Wisconsin count as one). In Illinois, Elgin Community College and Rosalind-Franklin are using Desire2Learn. It appears that at least one or two more institutions in Illinois are seriously considering adopting D2L in the near future.
Interesting features of D2L that caught my eye include:
• Ability to create infinite number of roles (e.g. admin, instructor, student, guest, guest speaker, teaching assistant, tutor, etc.) creates a great deal of flexibility in how institutions use D2L.
• Ability to define different organizational configurations in D2L allows different units (e.g. departments, institutions, consortiums) to scale implementation of a single installation. This could allow a consortium of institutions in Illinois to use a single installation of D2L.
• D2L is able to integrate with Banner and other Student Information Systems (SIS) by using either snap-shot integration or real-time integration. Snap-shot exports data at regular intervals and imports data into D2L. Real-time triggers SIS database (e.g. Banner) so when there is a new event, D2L is updated.
• D2L “widgets” allow web content (e.g. RSS feeds, Google Searches) to be placed into courses.
• New email feature integrates Campus Mail (e.g. Outlook) into LMS.
• Future developments include off-line synchronization of content, tools to create content in multiple formats (e.g. WAP).
Observations:
1. Somewhat to my surprise, it seems that D2L is not positioning itself as a “cheaper,” “more affordable” alternative to WebCT or Blackboard. It is difficult to compare costs of CMSs, but it seems that for an institution with 6000 FTEs, an annual license for D2L would be about the same as Blackboard.
3. It appears that D2L (and Angel, for that matter) are trying to create a one-stop-shop solution that provides all the tools an institution needs to support web-based education. D2L has or is planning to have an ePortfolio system, a synchronous VoIP conferencing tool, and a blogging tool. But is it better to have an LMS with these integrated tools or is it better to have a LMS that has established partnerships to allow a single user sign-on with other providers of tools (e.g. TaskStream, Elluminate, Blogger)?
Posted by mlindema at 01:23 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2006
Sakai in the news
This morning I listened to the 1/13/06 podcast "Click and Double-Click: Episode Something" which was highlighted in 2/19's edition of Burks' selections. Among other topics, Click (Laura Blankenship) and Double-Click (Mike Zarro) talk about how several institutions are experimenting with Sakai.
And later this morning, in an article by Eric Chen in the the 2/20/06 edition of the Daily Pennsylvanian, I read that Penn is considering a switch from Blackboard to Sakai. Chen reports "Officials are preparing to upgrade software infrastructure and have taken interest in an endeavor called the Sakai Project, Penn Courseware Manager John Kiser said."
So are most universities turning to Sakai as the open source alternative to commercial learning management systems like Blackboard and WebCT?
Zack Rosen doesn't think so. He states that "All signs point strongly towards Moodle kicking Sakai's butt" in his blog posted on 1/29/06, citing statistics such as web site traffic, Business Readiness Rating, and install base.
ION switched from WebCT to Moodle in December of 2004. We looked at Sakai at that time, but the interface was clunky and it seemed difficult to install. We are very happy with Moodle, but it might be time to have another look at Sakai. Probably the best way to do so is to "test drive" Sakai 2.1 through Unicon.
For more on Sakai, see Educause's Sakai Resource Page and Stephen Downes' Innovate Feb/March 2006 article Places to Go: Sakai
Posted by ionadmin at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)