Tag: CMS

Assessment of 5 leading open source CMS from Commonwealth of Learning

http://www.developmentgateway.org/
download/201768/COL_LMS_Open_Source_-_July_2003.pdf

Not sure how this one got past me, must have been the summer doldrums, but back in June this report commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning evaluating the field of current open source course management systems was released. It provides a fairly extensive analysis of the 5 shortlisted products (Moodle, LON-CAPA, ILIAS, dotLRN and ATutor) and ends up recommending ATutor for adoption with ILIAS coming in second.

It’s an interesting recommendation. One could contrast it with the recent piece from Rob Reynolds at xplana that looked at some of the same products, but with a very different evaluation framework. It’s also a bit unfortunate that it wasn’t able to assess Stanford’s Coursework, which was only then being released. I guess the other small fault I would find with it is that it takes a naive view of product selection based on feature assessment, as it simply provides a total of the various assessments, thus considering all features as being of equal weight, though it does separate out systemic issues from functional features. And if I was the Moodle guy, I think I might cry foul over a few of their ‘subjective assessments.’ Still, a very worthwhile resource and reference. – SWL

Blogs, course management and content management, from Cyberdash

http://cyberdash.com/node/view/125

Charlie Lowe at cyberdash picks up the thread where John Kruper left of on the viability of blogs as course management replacements. I agree here with Charlie; blogging is interesting, has many educational applications and commercial CMS can learn a lot from watching them, but the real challenge could instead come from one of the existing open source *content* management systems. While some of them have a ways to go, a few of them (Charlie points to Drupal and Postnuke as strong contenders) are emerging as broad platforms on which a variety of applications, not just content management, can be built. And after a while a lot of what is done with a typically C(ourse)MS does start to look a bit like fairly straightahead content management, sadly.

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Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?

http://homepage.mac.com/john_kruper/iblog/
B905739295/C1776019690/E1401376105/index.html

John Kruper of the ‘Electric Lyceum‘ has posted this longish piece that neatly summarizes many of the recent posts concerning alternatives and dissatisfactions with conventional commercial course management systems.

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This Month’s SideBars: Focus on CMS

http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/current/index.htm

If you haven’t seen it before, Sidebars is an always fun and educational newsletter produced by the staff of the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). This month they focus on all things CMS – they are undergoing their own change process currently and have published their well-worth emulating evaluation plan, and various staff also contribute pieces on a few existing open source choices as well as rolling your own CMS.

On this last one, I don’t disagree that you can piece together a variety of inexpensive components that make up part of what we now think of as a standard CMS, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get something that is entirely functionally equivalent, as well as integrated, without a lot of time, effort and money. This is where the CMS movement started from – trying to provide an easier way to access a common set of apps that were being implemented piecemeal. Whether one in fact needs all of that functionality is another question, a good one that doesn’t often get asked enough, and again the folks at Sidebars point to a useful Syllabus article by the Steves from TLTR . Great issue. – SWL

Blackboard to Launch Learning Content Management and e-Portfolio System for Academic Market

I had heard talk recently of Blackboard entering the ‘content management’ marketplace, and the speaker was puzzled why they would want to do this. From the looks of there announcement, they are not necessarily trying to compete with your standard web content management system that serves your public web presence (thought it’s not clear that it couldn’t do that too) but instead taking the step to add learning content management in behind the course management and portal systems. Interesting to me, they seem to have made the move to consider students as just another potential set of content authors, and so the proposed technology to manage learning content also serves your e-portfolio and virtual hard drives for learners. Interesting strategy. – SWL

(As an aside, their attempts to ‘eat their own cooking’ are perhaps leaving them with indigestion – clicking on the ‘standards‘ link on the  right-hand side of the page reveals perhaps more than they wanted to of the content management structure. At least at 9:40 am PST)

Blackboard Announces Revenue of $22.6 Million For Second Quarter 2003

Just as David Carter-Tod mentioned in a comment on an earlier post about eCollege’s latest earnings statement, Blackboard has now come out with this revenue announcement and a statement about “positive cash flow.”

Maybe someone can explain the difference in the two announcements to me (I know that one of them, eCollege, is publicly traded and thus announces ‘earnings per share’ while Blackboard is still privately held, and thus will not) – does this announcement amount to being ‘profitable?’ Can you tell I get trounced in the stock market 😉 – SWL

Open Source Portfolio code released

I’m sure this is not news to anyone actively working on portfolio projects, but it just came across my desk. Apparently the OSPI project released their source code on July 30th.

“Formed in January 2003, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a collaborative, open-source, software development project based on the University of Minnesota Enterprise System’s electronic portfolio software. The initial OSPI core group, consisting of the University of Minnesota (U of MN), University of Delaware, and the r-smart group, founded this collaborative to open the evolution of the U of MN ePortfolio to diverse input, rapid development, and widespread use.”

An online demo of the current system is available. There is promise that the next version will be both IMS and OKI compliant. – SWL

– via a private email from [Bruce Landon]

Blackboard and SCT integration

Via Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes news of the announcement that a certain amount of integration between SCT Banner and Blackboards CMS will now be available through the use of some connector technology from the recent SCT acquisition Campus Pipeline. This is definitely of interest in and of itself, but the article is well worth a read for anyone wanting a good overview of the field of SIS/CMS integration. To be fair, it is still fairly early days (we’ve only been promised this sort of interoperability for 5 years or so) but we are still yet to see the full promise of standards-based interoperability come to fruition. Someday. – SWL

Simply Blown Away by Silicon Chalk Demo

Both Michelle Lamberson from UBC and Bruce Landon had raved about its potential to me before, and I take recommendations from both of them seriously, but in checking out the company website a few months back and downloading a trial version of the software, I must say I was at the time left a bit puzzled about what all the foofraw was about.

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