Tag: CMS

New Book – Online Education and Learning Management Systems

http://www.studymentor.com/studymentor/

From eLearning Eclectic comes mention of this new book by Morten Flate Paulsen which brings the Scadanavian perspective on “Online Education and Learning Management Systems.” This is of particular interest because, in addition to being the original home of possibly the largest open source iniative, Linux, Scandanavian countries have also produced a number of very good elearning environments (MimerDesk and FLE3 to name two) that very much challenge the more content-focused paradigm that seems to predominate in many of the systems that have originated from North America. Short snippets of the work are available online but one must pay to get either the hard copy or an electronic version. – SWL

Logicampus – new open source CMS

http://www.logicampus.com/

New open source CMS that was the result of a joint project between Tap Internet and Tarrant County College in Texas. The PHP-based system is quite full featured and will be quickly comprehensible by anyone who has used any of the more ‘content-focused’ style CMS.

Note I have added this to the ongoing list of open source course management systems, which has moved from its previous location. It can now be found as a wiki page at http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
EdTechPost/OpenSourceCourseManagementSystems

CETIS on SAKAI

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20031124150257

Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has a lot more information on the proposed SAKAI project that I posted on last week. As reported, it’s a collaboration by a number of the former OKI participants in conjunction with folks from uPortal and introducing work around the JSR 168 Portlet specification. As Wilbert writes, “SAKAI is meant to come up with production level application almost within a year.” – SWL

CMS Evaluation report for the Swiss Virtual Campus

http://www.edutech.ch/edutech/tools/Platforms-report-03-03.pdf

Summary report of an evaluation of 5 CMS platforms (a strangish mix of well known CMS, European ones and very training-focused Learning Management Systems) performed for the Swiss Virtual Campus in spring 2003. They looked at Blackboard, Clix, IBT-Server,
Qualilearning/Luvit, Globalteach, and WebCT Vista. None of them seemed to match exactly what they were looking for, but the recommendation seems to have been to provisionally go with Vista until something better came along. The full evaluation site, along with detailed reports on each of the products is also available. – SWL

Atutor 1.3 released – now with IMS content packaging

href=”http://sourceforge.net/forum/
forum.php?forum_id=328649

New releases of existing CMS don’t usually warrant a posting, but this one’s maybe an exception – the folks at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre have been working hard to develop a full featured suite of accessible online learning and communication tools. Their latest effort is to include IMS compliant content packaging utilities for creating interoperable learning objects into the existing Atutor LMS. The software is PHP and MySQL-based. Where the software really excels, as might be expected, is in being immensely re-skinnable/reconfigurable to adapt to almost any device or user need. It is worth taking a look at if only for that reason, as an object lesson in adaptable, accessible design. – SWL

Sakai

http://staff.washington.edu/oren/
weblog/archives/000085.html

Also announced in Educause (the above was the only link I could find offhand, not an official release) came news of this collaboration from some of the original OKI players, but now with the addition of uPortal to the mix. It seems the goal is to build around the recent JSR168 specification, which will “define the portlet API and the portlet-container responsibilities as the runtime environment for portlets” in Java-based portal environments. – SWL

Living in Parallel Worlds: Blogs and Course Management Systems

http://www.syllabus.com/news_issue.asp?
id=155&IssueDate=11/12/2003

Blogs are ‘outside’ the CMS. Should they be? There’s really two questions here. One involves the functionality involved in creating and maintaing a blog, what we typically think of as the blog software itself. Should this remain outside the CMS? No, it’s an obvious candidate for inclusion and you should expect to see it in a CMS near you soon. The second, far more interesting question, one that actually doesn’t seem to be asked in the article, is whether student blog content should remain inside the walled off ‘silos’ as a few have called them, or whether they should be out in the wild like all the rest of the blogs. This is a far thornier issue, and in my experience gets to the heart of some of the resistance to using blogs that I’ve seen so far. – SWL

Florida Distance Learning Consortium Selects Desire2Learn

http://www.micta.org/newsdetail.asp?ID=139

Earlier this year I posted on MiCTA and their extensive RFP process that led to Desire2Learn winning ‘Endorsed‘ status for their members, and WebCT earning an ‘Approved‘ status. There was a third vendor that MiCTA was trying to negotiate a licensing arrangement with, Blackboard, but as MiCTA states on their site they were “not able to arrive at a contract that was beneficial to the MiCTA membership.”

Today came the announcement that the first of MiCTA’s members has taken advantage of the licencing terms that were brokered as part of that RFP process. Florida Distance Learning Consortium has chosen to go with D2L after their own extensive evaluation. – SWL

LEDA Project

http://www.ledanet.org/

Via Edward Bilodeau comes a reference to this interesting sounding project. LEDA which stands for “learning environments for the digital academy” is a project by 4 European partners, three of them design schools, to create a next-generation learning environment, one that can “capitali[ze] on the knowledge generated by students within research and design programs”

Not much info available – the final report is available, but the site they highlight to get access to the software seems a bit thin. Still, worth keeping on the radar screen. – SWL

LMS Selection Site from Simon Fraser University

http://www.sfu.ca/lidc/LMSSC/

Site to support the selection of a new CMS that is still ongoing at SFU. If you dig around there’s some generally useful material – these results of a technical comparison between WebCT and Desire2Learn by B.C.’s Ministry of Education (though I’m not sure how they got it), as well as this latest progress report that contains a lot of interesting anecdotal feedback gather from various stakeholder sonsultation sessions on what they are actually looking for (short answer – ‘better’ systems that are ‘easier’ to use, look nicer, and are infinitely customizable 😉
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