EdtechPost

Quote: “Whiteboard is a fully-featured and -integrated courseware system, targeted toward colleges and universities.  It is written in PHP with a MySQL back-end, and is fully administrable through its web interface.” – source: [Serious Instructional Technology]

Well, I will give this a proper look examination in due course through edutools, but I had a quick look based on this posting. On the surface it does look a bit like Blackboard. It’s not impossible that is in fact a lot like Blackboard – up until version 5 at least, Blackboard was definitely cobbled together and could have been produced through an open source process. My sense, though, is that it is fairly far along as a mature product with a more sophisticated code-based now, and I would be surprise if the resemblance here was more than superficial. – SWL

An *extensive* organized collection of web links, articles and the like on all things ‘web learning-‘ related. I can’t find out anything about the author or company that hosts the site. I wonder how things like this manage to float beneath the radar. For me, as someone who is always trying to unearth new, unfound or obscure applications in relatively narrow product categories like elearning authoring tools or synchronous classroom tools, a site like this is invaluable. no idea how often it is maintained. – SWL

Another small comparison site from CHEST, a software license clearinghouse for educational institutions in the U.K.  They compare five products,

•  Blackboard Learning System
• FD Learning Ltd
• LearnWise
• Teknical Virtual Campus
• WebCT Campus Edition Pilot

Their ‘all -by-all’ comparison grid uses the following features, mostly focused on licensing and cost implications, as the basis of comparison compares

• Product description
• Type of licence
• Users/Location and use permissions
• Rights issues
• Hosted services
• Requirements
• Product support
• Standards and specification
• Cost of product
• Cost of training IT staff Other staff
• Cost of maintenance and support (on site hosting)
• Cost of maintenance and support (off site hosting)
• Other support services

Found out about the announcement of this online session via Martin Buck of Camosun on the ETUG list here in B.C. Thanks for posting this Martin! This sounds potentially fascinating. January 29th session run through HorizonLive, check the above link for more details and registration instructions. – SWL

A bit dated (2001) but still a not bad source for overview info on a large number of CMS/LMSes. This is out of Technologies for Training (TfT), a “national information and advisory service, developed on behalf of the Department for Education and Employment.” I am always interested in seeing stuff from the U.K. and Europe as they definitely have some different systems on their radar, and there appears, at least to this naive eye, to be more discussions about different pedagogical models and a consciousness about the connection between pedagogical models, technology adoption and power. But that’s for another day … – SWL

I found this site during the course of researching the Granada Learnwise product for edutools.info and trying to ascertain whether their claims of SCORM compliance were factual. They use different terminology in the U.K. and this site deals specifically with Managed Learning Environments (MLEs), which I take to be systems in which the CMS and Administrative SIS have been tightly integrated, possibly also including an LCMS (but this later part is not clear, to me at least). In any case, the site contains vendor-supplied responsesto a number of questions from Learnwise, THINQ, WebCT, Blackboard, Digitalbrain, FD Learning, PiSYS, SABA, My Knowledge Map, and MDC learning Systems. It is great when customers and education systems publish information like this as it gives me (and presumably CMS purchasers doing sue dilligence) another third-party source to verify some of the vendor claims. – SWL

I couldn’t resist – it’s not like any of the course management software companies act like this anyways.