Author: sleslie

http://www.imowa.org/curricula/flip/pedagogy_and_cms.pdf

Now here’s a novel idea – instead of telling instructor’s they need to move their courses online, ask them to:

• Determine a goal you would like to achieve in your teaching and/or your student’s learning
• Develop an instructional strategy to accomplish the goal.
• Select an element of the Course Management System (CMS) that can be used in the strategy.
• Identify what skills in the use of the CMS you need to develop in order to implement the strategy.
• Identify any software you need to learn as part of that skill development.

This seemes fascinating on a number of levels – both as a really interesting faculty adoption model, and also for its mapping of CMS features to pedagogical goals. – SWL

http://www.cmswatch.com/

This is probably already on your radar, but if you are interested in either content management or even content management as applied to course management, there are worse places to start than this site – definitely industry focused, but has tons of great articles on metadata, taxonomies, RSS and other issues directly pertinent to learning content and learning objects. – SWL

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0311.pdf

by Colleen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner

This is the second good CMS-wish list piece I have come across in the last few weeks. Hopefully the CMS vendors are actually reading these. As with the other piece (Elizabeth Lawley’s post on open source CMSes) some of the features they are asking for seem like real no-brainers and have been glaring omissions in CMS software since it began, and yet almost nobody seems to be addressing them.

That’s not entirely right – as hinted at in this article, some of these are being addressed in the ‘enterprise’ versions of these products, but with huge associated price tags. So maybe their will be a ‘trickle down effect’ with these features (e.g. the ability to share materials across course containers) showing up in the more basic versions of the products. For the sake of all of the smaller users who seem locked into these systems, lets hope so. But let’s also hope that both the open source developers and smaller vendors are reading these messages too. IMHO, there is still some room in this market for new players to emerge if they offer this type of functionality off the bat – I would point to Desire2Learn as a good example of this.

On this point, if anyone actually reads this, I would be interested to hear if you have come across any good studies on the factors to consider when migrating an entire institution from one CMS system to another, specifically non-technical factors, or at least those ones not specifically related to the technical issues of migrating course content from one CMS to another (things like faculty training issues, staff support issues …) – SWL

Mostly just a note to myself – The below links point to two lists CMS-specific content packages, one at Blackbaord and one at WebCT. This is of interest to me for a number of reasons:

– at recent IMS and Canadian e-learning standards meetings, one question that has been rolling around in my mind was ‘where are the publishers?’ The answer I received from a few knowledgeable people are that they are bidding their time. Well, maybe, but not according to this.

– I know these aren’t necessarily ‘learning object repositories’ in the official usage of the term, and their context circumvents a number of problems that standards-based meta-data and packaging efforts have to address, but still, it struck me as a useful exercise to look at the number and types of searchable fields here when it came to identifying what meta-data is important searching for this kind of object.

http://www.webct.com/content/viewpage?name=content_showcase

http://cartridgecatalog.blackboard.com/
catalog/cartridge_catalog.pl

At C2T2 we’re hoping to use uPortal as the portal software for a future version of BCcampus. We’ve wanted to get trained up in it and related technologies for quite some time, but couldn’t necessarily justify the costs to fly to Boulder or one of the other cities where the training has been hosted recently.

So we tried to organize it ourselves. And luckily got connected with the good folks at UVic’s library, who were both interested in the training and had the facilities to host it. They picked up the ball and ran with it, and now we get to attend some training right here in Victoria. Hooray! Why don’t you join us? uPortal is a more and more viable solution, especially in the higher ed context, and I’ve also had a promise from the folks at Unicon, the new parent company to IBS who deliver the training and are key uPortal participants, that they will show a bit of their Academus CMS product, a course management system that runs within a uPortal shell. – SWL

http://www.opencursus.be/modules.php?op=modload
&name=Web_Links&file=index&l_op=viewlink&cid=11

It’s funny how this all works – I posted a quick reply this morning to a posting by Elizabeth Lane Lawley on her mamamusings blog regarding open source course management systems. I ended up back there after seeing that same post again in Stephen Downes’ blog, only to see another response that led to this site.

Part of my reaction was – oh no, not someone else confusing *course* management systems and *content* management systems (there is a difference, which I think I’ve tried to state before, but let me know if you want me to hold forth 😉 And there is some of that, but in fact there are some good links in here to open source CMS/LMS-type systems that I hadn’t seen before. For example:

• the .LRN system, based on the old OpenACS system
• this site, edvisor.org, which seems to have a combination of open content and software (with I think a K-12 focus)

I only wish I read Dutch as this site looks like it could have even more interesting stuff. – SWL