Stanford University announced today the Open Source release of its course management system, CourseWork. This is big news as it is one of two reference implementations for the OKI project that are to be released as part of the Phase 1 milestones (the other being MIT’s Stellar). I will be reviewing this for the edutools in the not too distant future so will spend more time on it then. – SWL
Tag: CMS
The LCMS Council
“If you’re losing sleep over learning content management systems, here’s a resource that may help: LCMS Resource. I have some mixed feelings on the role of LCMS’ in elearning. If deployed within an organization, it makes sense…but learning objects (the things that LCMS’ manage) are apparently valuable because they are shareable and reusable. In that sense, an LCMS is too closed (i.e. inter-organizational sharing). Open repository models are much more attractive (and more web-like).”
– from [elearnspace blog]
ADL Technical Team Releases Beta Version of SCORM 1.3
The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) Version 1.3, Beta release of the Application Profile, Sample Run-Time Environment and Test Suite are available for download and evaluation.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign choose Vista
Another good example of an institutional site to communicate the CMS selection process can be seen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services site, Enterprise Learning Management System Project (what a mouthful!) – SWL
University of Florida Selection Process recommends Vista
Thanks to Michelle L. from UBC for pointing this site out to me – the University of Florida’s CMS selection committee seems to have settled on a recommendation of adopting WebCT Vista. They publish all of their meeting notes here as well as their required feature lists, which may be of interest. In general when we consult with institutions on a CMS selection proces, I always recommend they establish some sort of web presence as part of the process and publish as much material there as they can. CMS selection is already frought without enough issues and lack of transparency need not be one of them – SWL
The OpenLMS Foundation
“The OpenLMS Foundation is a membership-based, non-profit corporation. Its mission is to provide scientific and educational support for open source Learning Management Systems (LMS) software projects The foundation provides technical, legal, and financial support to its members. “
It’s a bit difficult to tell if this is for real, but there seems to have bee updates to their site as recently as March 2003, and there was a link to downloadable source code, though their sourceforge site left one feeling a bit skeptical. Anyone have any other info? – SWL
Current list of open source Course Management Systems
There are more and more of these lists floating around. I keep this one just as a matter of housekeeping on the Edutools project, as at some point we will review most if not all of these, and just thought it might be of interest. The list also includes the license types, countries of origins and some additional notes.
Continue reading “Current list of open source Course Management Systems”
“Important” Characteristics of Course Management Systems.
So I just got back from CADE 2003 conference (the Canadian Association of Diatance Educators) in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where I presented the above paper. If that’s too long (2500 words) the powerpoint slides are also available.
Basically what I tried to do was contrast the picture of what features are broadly supported across CMSes according to the edutools feature set with what features the users at edutools use as the basis for decisions. The hope was to reveal gaps between these, areas where the industry sector is lagging behind user demand. Judge for yourself if any such differences are visible. – SWL
Oncourse and Navigo – Open Source CMS from Indiana University
Just as a follow up to the last post, more digging on the OKI site pointed to these two projects from Indiana University. The first, Oncourse (http://oncourse.iu.edu/Default.asp?action=login) is IU’s current in-house CMS, while Navigo (http://navigo-dev.ummu.umich.edu/community) appears to be a “next-generation online assessment service” which will be delivered as one of the open source reference applications as part of IU’s committment to OKI. – SWL
O.K.I. > Project Information > Timeline
If you subscribe to the OKI announcements mailing list you will have already seen this – as part of reaching their Phase 1 milestones, OKI has announced the release of a number of their Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), a fundamental part of the promise of OKI. As they state in their release (which I have been unable to find on their actual site)
“These interoperability specifications have been designed to support infrastructure level interoperability for a wide variety of enterprise applications, particularly educational software and learning management systems…The Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), released today as 1.0 Release Candidate 4, include services referred to as Common Services, and specifically define how educational software may access various elements of enterprise infrastructure. This release includes the following services: Authentication, Authorization, Filing, DBC, SQL, Logging, Dictionary, Hierarchy, and Shared.”
There are a number of other OSIDs also in development but not currently included in this set of Common Services. OKI is inviting public comment through their SourceForge site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/okiproject. – SWL