Course Management Systems – Page 7

LAMS as a CMS

http://blogs.nitle.org/mane/2005/05/
lams_a_new_open_source_cms.html

I found this short post by Bryan Alexander at the MANE IT Network personally really useful – I’ve known about LAMS for quite a while, but had never heard it described as a “CMS.” My first reaction was – oh that’s just wrong, it’s an “e-learning design tool” (oh the sophistry of labels!). But then I went back and re-read the LAMS material. Sure enough, it does have facilities for delivery to students, accounts mgmt, etc. So I think the characterization of it as a ‘CMS’ is not incorrect. But calling it that potentially overshadows why LAMS is in fact so interesting; it takes as its starting point the design of learning activities and then assists with the delivery of those activities, rather than the traditional CMS perspecitve of giving instructors a series of unconnected generic tools with no scaffolding for tying them together or combining them with the content itself. The filter I had for it in my mind was ‘learning design tool’ but this post made me re-consider what that meant; it’s a new approach to delivering the education that takes as its starting point the design of the educational activity, not the organizational container of a ‘course’ or the pre-set bunch of tools a traditional CMS offers. So thanks, Bryan, for reframing the issue! – SWL

A-HEC Survey on Open Source

http://www.a-hec.org/media/
files/A-HEC_os_survey_report_050305.pdf

Too bad there weren’t more respondents (79 does not a huge sample make) but this survey from the Association for Higher Education Competitiveness presents at least some interesting insight into changing attitudes towards open source. What do we learn – Sakai has a good marketing campaign (at least in terms of name brand recognition), and people who are already interested in open source (I’m questioning the randomness of the sample here) are dissatisfied with the existing offerings almost across the board. Still, the rankings of the predicted successes seems roughly right (though placing uPortal below Sakai in terms of garnering market share just seems plain wrong by definition – Sakai currently employs uPortal). Worth a quick look in any case – SWL

.LRN announced as SCORM Adopter partner by ADL

http://dotlrn.org/news/one-entry?entry%5fid=90509

When people ask me for examples of open source CMS that really might be considered as alternatives to the current major commercial systems, I often cite .LRN as one potential example. It’s been built from the ground up on a portal framework and already contains a host of tools one would recognize from conventional commercial CMS (and apparently there is now a related LOR component as well). This announcement of self-test SCORM compliance is another piece of good news for them. – SWL

WebCT Announces the Beta Release of WebCT Campus Edition 6

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/
index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view
&newsId=20050425005245&newsLang=en

The next twelve to 18 months should prove to be a very interesting time for folks dealing with CMS-related issues on campuses. As per this news release, WebCT is leapfrogging any sort of ‘5.0’ release in favour of a new Campus Edition 6.0 – from what I understand, an effort to bring together their product lines (Campus Edition and Vista) around a single architecture and code base rather than apply more duct tape to the plate of PERL spaghetti code that had previously been Campus Edition.

Add to this the upcoming release of Sakai 2.0 in June (on which the scoop is we’ll finally start to see more of the promise of Sakai), the maturing of various ‘service-oriented’ visions and practices, more folks experimenting with blogs, wikis and ‘community’ systems like Drupal to deliver their online courses, and not to leave out options like Moodle and ATutor, and you get what looks to me like a CMS landscape increasing in instability (and not in a bad way).

In some ways, it’s all about timing. From where I’m sitting, many current licensees of the big CMS are frustrated with the costs associated with these platforms, and more than a few instructors express frustration as well. The migration from current Campus Edition platforms to WebCT 6 will not happen overnight, and will present the opportunity for a new round of decision making for many instituions. Will Sakai present a viable alternative in time for any but the largest and most brave adopters? Will any specific ‘service-oriented’ models emerge that are easily adoptable by schools that aren’t already exhibiting maturity in their elearning architecture practices? Will Drake marry Moira, and is Hudson their bastard love child? (Oops, sorry, wrong blog). Time will tell. But clearly, if there was a time to consider alternatives, at least for WebCT adopters, the coming months, when they will be asked to swallow Oracle or SQL server on top of WebCT, seems opportune. – SWL

Campus Technology Article on the benefits of an integrated CMS

http://www.campus-technology.com/
news_article.asp?id=10963&typeid=156

I’d like to believe that lots of what this article has to say is true; that, putting to the side for a moments complaints about the nature of CMS systems themselves, giving faculty an ‘integrated’ environment saves them (and the students) from the duplication of lots of dull, administrative tasks and frees up time to spend on the more critical tasks of teaching and learning. That was, after all, supposed to be one of the initial drivers behind this approach in the first place.

But this piece is just so anecdotal (“I recently did an informal survey of faculty members by email” or “One faculty member responded,” etc.) that it almost reads like a surreptitious piece of WebCT marketing. Indeed, I found it via an agent I have monitoring WebCT’s pages for news announcements.

So, make of it what you will. Studies on this topic ARE important – a large amount of time and effort has been poured into system integration efforts, standards, architectures and the like, on the assumption that removing duplication and increasing seemless integration is a “Good Thing™.” But not enough actual studies have similarly happened to determine if these efforts do increase usage, decrease barriers, decrease costs, and so on. And unfortunately, this piece isn’t one of them either. – SWL

Blackboard “Blogging” their Annual Conference

http://blackboardblog.blogspot.com/

So I open my emailbox this morning to find a message from one of our former edtech blogging brethren, Greg Ritter from Ten Reasons Why. As many of you will know, Greg works for Blackboard (yes that Blackboard) who are having their annual conference right now in Baltimore. Greg wrote to ask if I’d point to a blog they have set up for the conference.

Well, I was a bit torn (as torn as I can be at 8 o’clock in the morning) – this breaks one of the blogging commandments to not blog on command, and to make matters worse, so far it looks basically like a more efficient means to distribute press releases into the blogosphere. Yet here I am, shameless shill of the corporate overlords, pointing to this Blackboard conference blog. I decided to let you be the judge yourselves – as is so often the case, folks in the blogosphere can sniff things out pretty well for themselves, and it’s definitely not the case in this medium that any press is good press. – SWL

WebCT announces participation in IMS Tools Interoperability Working Group

http://www.webct.com/service/
ViewContent?contentID=25561480

I’m sure the chattering masses (hey, I don’t exclude myself from this grouping) will have something to say about this one – yea, as the prophets foretold, in the year of the mark of the sign of the beast, the ‘evil empire’ took control, yada yada yada – but from where I’m sitting, if there’s a way that 3rd party learning tools can interoperate with different learning environments that is not based on proprietary APIs, that seems like a good step forward. If, instead, the Tools Interoperability specification becomes ‘Powerlinks for everyone,’ well then clearly the eschaton is near, so praise the lord and pass the hand grenades 😉 – SWL

EdTech Terms in Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_learning_environment

EdTech bloggers may be interested to get in on the action over at wikipedia where a number of edtech terms are being defined – the above link points to the already reasonably flushed out artcle on ‘Managed learning environments‘ and there are many other related terms, including ‘learning objects‘ and ‘elearning‘ for example.

I personally didn’t mind any of the entries too much, though was slightly put off by the redirection from Course Management Systems to ‘Managed Learning Environments,’ but the wonderful thing about wiki is to add your two cents if you don’t agree. Wonderful opportunity for those in the field who are interested in wikis to ‘walk the talk’. – SWL

New Questia CMS built on top of Library System

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21E1465A

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ‘small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. – SWL

E-Learning and Sustainability – Report by Graham Attwell

http://www.ossite.org/Members/GrahamAttwell/
sustainibility/attach/sustainibility4.doc

I am kind of surprised this hadn’t been posted on yet as it makes such extensive reference to ideas being promoted in ed tech blogs, but I couldn’t see any references so far. This report by Graham Attwell “commissioned by the University of Bremen as part of its contribution to The European Commission Socrates supported Lefo Learning folders project” could well be considered a survey of most of the discussions I have seen unfolding both in ed tech blogs and other forums for the past 2 years, but wrapped in the context of ‘sustainability.’ Some of it won’t seem that new to those already immersed in the discussion, but taken as a whole it seems a valueable report and a bit of a summation of a seemingly widespread call to shift directions in the elearning world. – SWL