Category: Course Management Systems

Moodle OCW Module

http://metasolutions.us/resources/moodle/mods/
ocw_metamod.php

So I usually don’t “blog on demand” but when Michael Penney emails me stuff it’s almost always worth a post, and this time is no exception (and totally by chance it turns out I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with the developers in November). As it says on the site, “OCW MetaMod for Moodle provides instructors and designers with the ability to mark individual resources or activities in a Moodle course as ‘shared’ (allowing guest viewing) or ‘private’ (only visible for registered students). Additionally, the MetaMod tags resources and activities as ‘C’ (copyright) or ‘CC’ (Creative Commons/Copyright Cleared).” This is a great step forward in enabling easy sharing of resources, allowing instructors to do it right from where the resource has been used.

As Michael wrote “Despite Mr. Small, the beat goes on…:-)” speaking of whom, the next chapter is slowly unfolding. – SWL

educate/innovate = use patents?

http://www.educateinnovate.com/

OK, so at least they did post something back on August 7 about the patent (a staff member posting a letter on behalf of Michael Chasen, the CEO), but otherwise, the Blackboard “blog” has been thunderously silent given the amount of hoopla in the blogosphere over the last month directly concerning them.

Not really surprising, but also not what I’d call an “authentic” engagement with the concerns of their readers/customers. (And my reaction to the notes from their conference call with ALT in the UK is the same as Stephen’s – apparently I’ve found another use for our stockpiled baby wipes now that our kids are out of diapers).

I did say that I was reserving judgement on the BB ‘blog’ until there was more to judge. Looks like the evidence is in, though, and on the charge of “falsely impersonating a blog” the evidence is based on the omissions as much as what is there. – SWL

And the winner is….’Course Management Systems’?

http://www.educause.edu/2006/10958

From the “that’s not a zeitgeist, just a bump in the road” department comes this news, that the inaugural winner of the new Educause ‘Catalyst’ award is “Course Management Systems” (yes, the entire field of them, not just a signle one, competing claims to the contrary notwithstanding). What’s so interesting, though, in light of those recent claims, is to read the text of the award which talks about CMS being “developed among faculty in pockets of innovation throughout the world” and that the “developers of these systems pulled together many strands of technology.” [empasis mine] Indeed! – SWL

Blackboard Patent and Prior Art

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ctt.bc.ca/landonline/

I am officially still on holidays until next Tuesday but made the mistake of checking my email (I have managed to abstain from my bloglines account though!) and through a mailing list I subscribe to saw a post on the nastiness that is Blackboard’s patent application. If you can beat them, sue them, eh?

The ensuing effort to create a history of LMS/VLEs through Wikipedia is great and to be applauded. When I saw the posts about Blackboard’s patent I immediately thought of our Edutools site, actually its predecessor, Landonline, developed by my colleague Dr. Bruce Landon and hosted by my former employers, the now defunct Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2).

Bruce originally created that site in 1996 (pre-Blackboard, in fact the early version was pre-WebCT as well.) I checked the Internet Archives, and while they don’t have a copy from 1996, they do have ones from 1997, 1998 and 1999. If you have a look at the copies on the Wayback machine. The copies on the Wayback machine aren’t pretty (lots of broken images) but you can see, for instance in this comparison from 1998, that Blackboard (here called Courseinfo) and WebCT show up in this apples to apples comparison with 4 other systems at the time.

It’s not like Landonline/Edutools is the only example you can point to that was comparing Blackboard and WebCT to competing offerings – Marshall University’s Center for Instructional Technology’s comparison of LMS/CMS tools from 1999 is still available online, as is Virginia Tech’s from 1998. What I do think is significant, however, is that at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one – certainly with changes and modifications over time, but it has been a relatively consistent point of comparison for almost 10 years now.

I am not a lwayer and don’t play one on TV, and I am sure there is enough weasily language included in the patent that Blackboard will have some success using it to bludgeon competitors and customers alike. But if the creation of this behemoth didn’t light a fire under your ass to do something different, maybe consider this a second opportunity to change course. – SWL

Article – “A Graduate’s View of the Course Management System”

http://www.campus-technology.com/
news_article.asp?id=18864&typeid=155

This article is a follow up to one written 2 years ago by Frank Tansey’s son, now a recent graduate of the University of Puget Sound. It is of course purely anecdotal so its unfair to draw broad conclusions from it, but for me it provides a refreshing perspective on the issue.

The situation described seems to be very much a ‘blended learning’ or ‘classroom augmented’ use of a CMS (in this case Blackboard). The advantages seem to be along the lines that regular use of the CMS by instructors makes for more efficient, effective and engaged classroom work, and the biggest danger seems to be uneven use by faculty.

The recommendations reflect, unsurprisingly, an ‘outsiders’ view of how post-secondary institutions should work, giving far too much credit to the power of central authority and far too little responsibility on the shoulders of individual faculty (but then the decision making and management itself of the CMSes often naively perpetuates this mis-casting, as the LMS governance report I pointed to last week made clear.) Still well worth the quick read. – SWL

“Map” of Moodle Deployments

http://moodle.org/sites/index.php?country=all

Michael Penney wrote in to let me know that the map of Moodle deployments world-wide that I pined for earlier already exists. While I’m pretty sure this map is not an exact representation of the state of affairs (otherwise Alice Springs is surely the hotbed of all Moodle deployments, with New Orleans a close second) it does give you a sense of how truly spread across the globe the 13,000 or so adopters of Moodle are. (Michael also pointed me to the ‘stats’ pages, which display quite vividly Moodle’s meteroic adoption curve.) – SWL

Must Read – LMS Governance Project Report

http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/
telars/talmet/melbmonash/
media/LMSGovernanceFinalReport.pdf

Stephen’s already recommended it, but I’ll second that recommendation – this is an “interesting and well-informed” report and another one you should try to get in front of as many decision makers’ faces as possible. I’m really grateful to have read it, if only for the references to Paul Pangaro and M.C. Geoghegan that I am looking forward to following up.

It’s not meant as a technical paper so it can’t be faulted for not providing a solution to this:

“the trick for universities may not be to try to create the same spaces within the confines of the university computer network, but rather to make sure that members of the university are able to forge links between their university identity and their other online learning communities.”

Easier said than done.

I do think the section on “Reviewing the business case for LMS” could be strengthened, there’s some straw men there, but that’s nit picking. The biggest missing piece for me concerns acknowledging the key role in institutional learning of ‘credentialing’ – not to reduce it to that, but to acknowledge that in the nirvana of self-forming online learning communities and self-directed learners someone is going to have to start talking about the relationship between that learning and the powerful role of credentialling (and to be fair, this isn’t just the institutions of higher ed involved in this, it’s governments, accrediting bodies, professional organizations, etc.). If you don’t think it’s an issue though, I can point you to 1000 cabbies with medical and law degrees from other nations who would beg to differ. – SWL

Map of Sakai Stakeholders

http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-map/index.php

Want to know where Sakai is in production and who the other partners are? Check out this map from Chuck Severance, recently named the head of the Sakai Foundation. An interesting point that Dr. Severance points out in this short video is that 46% of people paying into the Sakai foundation are not in fact implementing it at all yet, either as a pilot or in production; he explains this as being about people paying to “make the market a better place.” Here’s hoping it does. Would love to see a similar map of Moodle adoption throughout the world! – SWL

UMW’s Bluehost/Fantastico Experiment

If posts by the cogdog, blamb AND Jon Udell weren’t enough to convince you, then take MY word too and run, don’t walk, over to Gardner Campbell’s blog to listen to a 45 minute recording from their latest faculty academy on using a 3rd party hosting solution and application ‘control panel’ as a way to inexpensively support faculty innovation and experimentation. (And for the record, this hasn’t changed my mind at all about podcasts, though Brian’s right, Gardner’s voice is remarkably soothing to listen to 😉

I must admit to feeling a little dissatisfied with the discussion about ‘enterprise computing’ -type questions (around minute 20 and following, and in the questions and answers in the end) but it’s not a simple complaint either.

First off, they really should be commended for adopting a mechanism that greatly increases the authentic assessment of new technologies, part of the aim that’s described in the first 20 minutes. And in regards to the ‘enterprisey’ issues, some stock also needs to be placed in the retort of how enterprisey these systems should have become anyways. This has come up a few times in conversation for me over the last weeks – while the use of computer technology in teaching and learning isn’t that new, this beast we call the ‘course management system’ is barely 10 years old…do we really believe we got it right the first time, in just 10 years, and that the model will never need changing? So there’s a lot to be said in general about an approach that stays flexible, especially in light of Web 2.0, which if anything could be described as massive, non-stop disruptive innovation, the only constant being change. Sure, we thought the internet in general meant that, but now it really seems to be unfolding in front of our eyes.

So I’m left both inspired but wanting to eat my cake too – can we not have this flexibility and experimentation AND the guarantees of service we seem expected to provide? (I liked Gardner’s response about trust and agreeing to a certain amount of risk, but I’ve never seen that calm down an irate professor during exams when the system goes down.) Udell’s comment regarding Ray Ozzie’s speech really resonates for me here – “In his vision of the future of enterprise software, services are delivered on demand, they produce value in incremental steps, and theyÂ’re paid for when — not before — that value is proven.”

Still, Gardner and his crew are to be totally commended for their approach – maybe instead of a ‘learning management operating system‘ we might start thinking about a control panel for instructor-controlled (or student controlled, how about sticking that in your pipe!) mix- and matchable lightweight apps that already had the connectors to the SIS and authentication systems built in (or can these be the same thing?) – SWL

(the first step to dealing with your problem is admiting you have a problem…My name is Scott, and I am a blog addict…really, I’m working on my other machine right now as I write this!)