Thanks to Michelle L. from UBC for pointing this site out to me – the University of Florida’s CMS selection committee seems to have settled on a recommendation of adopting WebCT Vista. They publish all of their meeting notes here as well as their required feature lists, which may be of interest. In general when we consult with institutions on a CMS selection proces, I always recommend they establish some sort of web presence as part of the process and publish as much material there as they can. CMS selection is already frought without enough issues and lack of transparency need not be one of them – SWL
RSS for Job Postings
Tim Bray’s recent piece RSS: Promise and Peril lists a number of potentail applications for RSS. Here’s another one that’s a bit of a personal crusade – job postings!
Is this not obvious to anyone else? Well apparently not to most HR departments, many of the ones I have to deal with will not accept anything but hand delivered paper resumes and only got dragged kicking and screaming on to the net a few years back! Maybe it just seems obvious to me as I spend more time now looking at potential employers’ job openings sites. But wouldn’t it be pretty straightforward at the bottom of your (regularly refreshed on a chronological basis, hint hint) job postings page to place a link to an RSS feed? Not only could it then be aggregated together with other postings at more central sites, but individual job seekers who are specifically interested in *your* company, as opposed to just any old company, could actively be pushed potential openings. You’d think reaching people who are already interested in your firm might be a good thing. But perhpas I simply don’t understand the hiring game well enough. – SWL
The OpenLMS Foundation
“The OpenLMS Foundation is a membership-based, non-profit corporation. Its mission is to provide scientific and educational support for open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) software projects The foundation provides technical, legal, and financial support to its members. “
It’s a bit difficult to tell if this is for real, but there seems to have bee updates to their site as recently as March 2003, and there was a link to downloadable source code, though their sourceforge site left one feeling a bit skeptical. Anyone have any other info? – SWL
MnM – Ontology Driven Semi-Automatic and Automatic Support for Semantic Web
“MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools.” ok….
See also Amilcare (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/amilcare/) an “adaptive Information Extraction (IE) system intended as support to document annotation in the Semantic Web framework” and Dot.Kom (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/dot.kom/) another tool for the “automatic or semi-automatic … extraction of information from web-related documents.”
In fact the the entire Knowledge Media Institute site at the Open University is utterly fascinating.
And finally a ‘backwards link’ search on the MnM page leads to http://annotation.semanticweb.org/tools which I wish I had found earlier – a seemingly authoritative list of semantic web authoring and annotation tools. – SWL
Current list of open source Course Management Systems
There are more and more of these lists floating around. I keep this one just as a matter of housekeeping on the Edutools project, as at some point we will review most if not all of these, and just thought it might be of interest. The list also includes the license types, countries of origins and some additional notes.
Continue reading “Current list of open source Course Management Systems”
e-Learning Policies Comparison Site
Some of you know that I work part-time as a researcher on course management software for the Edutools project. But the scope of the Edutools project was always meant to be larger than just course management software. The intent has been to extend the model of comparative analysis and idealized decision making to other technologies and areas of concern for educational technologists, instructors and administrators.
Yesterday the latest part of the site was announced – the e-Learning Policy site which “ focuses on the unique policy issues that are created by the e-delivery of higher education courses and programs,” specifically the major policy areas of:
- Funding
- Intellectual Property
- Quality Assurance
- Transfer and Articulation
- Tuition
- Fees
In addition to providing background and related links on these policy areas, the new site allows you to search the database for policy excerpts and synopses from specific institutions using a large number of criteria and compare these policies in a side-by-side manner. If you use the site and find it useful, please let the good folks at WCET know. – SWL
“Important” Characteristics of Course Management Systems.
So I just got back from CADE 2003 conference (the Canadian Association of Diatance Educators) in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I presented the above paper. If that’s too long (2500 words) the powerpoint slides are also available.
Basically what I tried to do was contrast the picture of what features are broadly supported across CMSes according to the edutools feature set with what features the users at edutools use as the basis for decisions. The hope was to reveal gaps between these, areas where the industry sector is lagging behind user demand. Judge for yourself if any such differences are visible. – SWL
Oncourse and Navigo – Open Source CMS from Indiana University
Just as a follow up to the last post, more digging on the OKI site pointed to these two projects from Indiana University. The first, Oncourse (http://oncourse.iu.edu/Default.asp?action=login) is IU’s current in-house CMS, while Navigo (http://navigo-dev.ummu.umich.edu/community) appears to be a “next-generation online assessment service” which will be delivered as one of the open source reference applications as part of IU’s committment to OKI. – SWL
O.K.I. > Project Information > Timeline
If you subscribe to the OKI announcements mailing list you will have already seen this – as part of reaching their Phase 1 milestones, OKI has announced the release of a number of their Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), a fundamental part of the promise of OKI. As they state in their release (which I have been unable to find on their actual site)
“These interoperability specifications have been designed to support infrastructure level interoperability for a wide variety of enterprise applications, particularly educational software and learning management systems…The Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), released today as 1.0 Release Candidate 4, include services referred to as Common Services, and specifically define how educational software may access various elements of enterprise infrastructure. This release includes the following services: Authentication, Authorization, Filing, DBC, SQL, Logging, Dictionary, Hierarchy, and Shared.”
There are a number of other OSIDs also in development but not currently included in this set of Common Services. OKI is inviting public comment through their SourceForge site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/okiproject. – SWL
Livelink from OpenText
Via this Econtent mag article on a new online Canadian health education initiative (well, soon to be ‘released’ in July though it has been in the works for some time now) comes word that they are using this software, Livelink, from OpenText as their ‘elearning platform.’ Sure looks like a behemoth – it’s billed as a ‘knowledge management and collaboration system.’ Will be interesting to eventually see some of the results of this large CANARIE-funded project.
On another note, I’m travelling for most of the next two weeks (Vancouver, Montreal and then Newfoundland for the CADE conference) so posting will be sporadic. I look forward to the middle of June when I can stay at home for the rest of the summer and try to figure out my plan for work come this fall. – SWL