Category: Course Management Systems

Sakai 2006 Conference Presentations available

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/
Conf2006Vancouver/Conference Sessions

My only regret about going to the BC ETUG sessions last week is that it coincided with the Sakai conference being held just across the Straight in Vancouver which would also have made for an informative few days.

Alas, all is not lost, as the good folks there are posting their slides and podcasts of the sessions to this wiki. See also their conference ‘facebook’, a great idea for any conference, but especially one like this trying to create community.

Lots to digest here; a good presentation on small institutions implementing Sakai, (though clearly the concept of ‘loosely coupled‘ is understood a little differently here.) But that’s just nit picking, lots of exciting things going on, but it left me wondering about two things. Why were there only 3 Canadians in the facebook for a conference hosted in Canada (presumably the rest are just shy?) and is there a whole segment of the edu-blogosphere I don’t know about that is simply buzzing about this conference, because I haven’t heard a peep in my aggregator. – SWL

SUNY Learning Networks Stakeholder Feedback on their Technology Strategy Report.

http://le.suny.edu/sln/sln_rpc_publicresponse.htm

In June of 2005 I pointed to SUNY’s Recommendations on their Learning Network’s Next Generation Strategy, which had been published on the web.

If you follow Michael Feldstein’s blog e-Literate (and you should) you’ll also have noted that in October of last year SUNY announced its plans to build an open source ‘Learning Management Operating System (LMOS),’ and as part of these plans issued a Request for Public Comment on this strategy.

SUNY has now made available the responses to this public request for comment. If you are a decision maker in a large post-secondary organization or system who is wrestling with the choices of what to do next around your course management system strategy, I strongly urge you to scour this site and soak up everything you find there. Rarely has there been a better ‘state of the CMS union (and potential future)’ picture gathered together in one place. I do wish a few of the other open source players’ voices were represented here, but it is rare to find this amount of in-depth discussion and feedback collected in one place. The SUNY Learning Network folks are to be commended both for their courage in the path they are blazing and the openness with which they have shared this material for all of our benefits. – SWL

Reports from Collaborative Moodle Pilot in BC

http://molokai.ol.mala.bc.ca/moodle_doc/index.html

As the original home of WebCT, it is not perhaps a big surprise that it is the most widely adopted CMS in the province of BC, where I live and work. And while that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon on a large scale, 6 institutions have done pioneering working to investigate the viability of Moodle as an alternative, and have made the resulting reports available for all to see. The project was funded by my employers, BCcampus, through an Online Porgram Development Fund grant.

There is lots here to read – in addition to the final report and project recommendations, the partners have produced extensive documentation on each of the 10 distinct objectives (including such useful materials as documentation to migrate WebCT 4.1 courses to Moodle). And all of it is appropriately delivered via a Moodle site!

I know at least one of these partners has since gone on to announce its official adoption of Moodle as its institution-wide CMS, and that one of them was already firmly a Moodle adopter. So whether you are looking for a way out of your current lock-in or looking to buttress your arguments as to why your Moodle pilot should grow, you’ll find some useful evidence here. (If I am sounding slightly partisan here, I have just spent the last few months of my life struggling with getting content out of WebCT servers to interoperate with the rest of the world, and let’s just say I am the worse for wear.) – SWL

LMSNews – Reviews of 4 Open Source CMS

http://www.lmsnews.com/modules/content/index.php?id=15

Although the majority of the site appears to be in German, they do have 4 reviews on the open source course management systems Claroline 1.7.0, Interact 2.0, LON-CAPA 2.0.2 and StudIP. They seem highly anecdotal, but also honest about the ease (or lack of) installing and administering some of these tools. – SWL

Rollyo – Search all major Course Management System Sites

http://rollyo.com/sleslie/course_management_systems/

I knew I had to read Bryan Alexander’s Educause article on Web 2.0 not so much because the ideas would be new but because I knew that inevitably Bryan would point to some little gem in the ever growing Web 2.0 landscape that I hadn’t seen before.

One that was new to me that he pointed to was Rollyo – a site that lets you roll your own search index by providing up to 25 URLs you want indexed. I wanted to check it out, because ever since Atomz was bought out a year ago, I had been looking for a replacement free web-based service that would let me do this.

To try out Rollyo, I built the above index that searches the top 20 (IMO) Course Management System sites. So say for instance, you wanted to find out which of these systems supported the “eXe editor,” or was working on a blog project, you could try searching across just those sites for those terms. It is definitely not infallible, but I have been intrigued by the use of constrained search engines as a way to either augment or replace certain types of directories, where what is being catalogued is well known and fixed (for instance, all of the post-secondary course catalogues in a certain jurisdiction). – SWL

Greg Ritter and Co back and blogging

http://www.educateinnovate.com/

Got an email today from an old blogosphere pal, Greg Ritter, who had gone AWOL back in 2004, that he has started blogging again. Greg, the Associate Director of Research & Development at Blackboard, is part of a new initiative there to start blogging. (I can almost sense the rotten tomatoes flying at the back of my head right now – one nice thing about having comments broken for now is that the knee jerk reactions can happen elesewhere.) Anyways, I plan to add it to my aggregator for now and will reserve judgement until there’s more to judge. Who knows, you might be surprised – I have faith that Greg gets this stuff enough that he can have a positive influence and maybe create an authentic forum for exchange with that company. – SWL

Humboldt College Comparison of Satisfaction of Moodle and Blackboard

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm

Thanks to Alan and John Arle for pointing to this presentation by Dr. Kathy D. Munoz and Joan Van Duzer of Humboldt State University which provides some comparative data of a course delivered through both Moodle and Blackboard. Student satisfaction and performance are fairly similar between the two environments, with a slight preference for Moodle, and the real differences seem to come out when the instructor/developer satisfaction is taken into account too. While Blackboard is hailed for the strength of its gradebook, it’s built-in survey tool and for seeming easier off the mark to beginners, the presentation then lists a whole host of advantages and satisfactions that emerged over time with Moodle. – SWL

An Evaluation of Open Source CMS Stressing Adaptation Issues

http://moodle.org/other/icalt2005.pdf

This paper looks at the ever expanding world of open source course management systems, but adds to the comparison the factors of “adaptability, personalization, extensibility and adaptivity” (this later meaning “automatic adaptation to the individual user�s needs”). The results; Moodle is judged to be the best in terms of its adaptation capabilities, though all of the projects are deemed to be light on end-user adaptivity. – SWL

Unicon provides Sakai ‘Test Drive’ sites

http://www.sakaitestdrive.com/

If you haven’t already had the chance, Unicon has made it even easier to have a look at Sakai 2.1 (just released on December 1, 2005) through their new “Test Drive” sites. The sites, available for free for 90 days, give you access to a demo course and worksite and allow you to change roles so as to see the system from various user perspectives. The background here is that Unicon once developed a CMS on top of uPortal called Academus, but appear to now be piggybacking on offering Sakai support and other uPortal support based on their years’ of experience.

This will not change anyones’ mind who had already decided they were not down with the ‘course managed’ approach, but for those looking for an alternative to their current CMS, this provides one more method to kick the tires, and just in time for Christmas! – SWL