Tag: CMS

Via this Econtent mag article on a new online Canadian health education initiative (well, soon to be ‘released’ in July though it has been in the works for some time now) comes word that they are using this software, Livelink, from OpenText as their ‘elearning platform.’ Sure looks like a behemoth – it’s billed as a ‘knowledge management and collaboration system.’ Will be interesting to eventually see some of the results of this large CANARIE-funded project.

On another note, I’m travelling for most of the next two weeks (Vancouver, Montreal and then Newfoundland for the CADE conference) so posting will be sporadic. I look forward to the middle of June when I can stay at home for the rest of the summer and try to figure out my plan for work come this fall. – SWL

There doesn’t seem to be anything that surprising in this study, “Faculty Use of Course Management Systems” by Glenda Morgan, the learning technology analyst at the Office of Learning and Information Technology of the University of Wisconsin System (at least not in the key findings document available for free on the web – you have to pony up between $750 and $1500 USD for the full study).

Faculty claim that CMS adoption is driven by the need to address a pedagogical problem, yet when questioned further reveal that it really seems driven by the need to manage the administrative problems of large classes… Faculty use grows once they start using it, but those who don’t say they find them difficult to use. Still it’s good to get some numbers behind one’s own anecdotal observations.  

One point of interest – the study reports that 16% of faculty surveyed limited their use of CMSes because of problems their students reported. Which reminds me of this story, about a raving criminology student…

– via [Online Learning Update]

This was published about a month ago but I just found it today. An interview with Kathy Pletcher who chaired the task force for the University of Wisconsin’s choice of a new course management system. The outcome of this was of much interest to many in the field as it was a fairly well document and rigorous process that ended up selecting a relative newcomer, Desire2Learn, as their final choice. Lots of good tidbits on their process:

“The evaluation scheme was 10% for general requirements, 65% functional and technical requirements, and 25% cost. On a scale of 10,000 points Desire2Learn received 9,700 points.“

97% !! We are seeing similar results in other RFP processes we have been privy too through edutools. This is not an endorsement, just a statement that people are starting to pay attention to this smallish company from Guelph, Ontario. – SWL 

“May 7, 2003 – WebCT today introduced WebCT Vista 2.0, the latest release of e-learning’s premier academic enterprise system, with new features that simplify course development for faculty of all experience levels and accelerate campus and system-wide e-learning deployment. WebCT Vista 2.0 also includes an expanded set of Web services interfaces…”

This may have already done the rounds as the news release came out May 7th, but I’ve been offline since May 1 so thought I would post it anyways. I am interested to get my hands on this new release to see if they in fact have made any major changes since the initial release. Since the 1.X release only went through 1.1 and 1.2 in less than a year, my sense is that the version leap to 2.x was driven more by the marketing department. – SWL 

– via [Edutools News: Course Management Systems]

Quote: “ContentPackage provides ZOPE with the ability to import IMS Content Packages and turn them into Zope objects (see http://www.imsglobal.org).”

Well this bodes well for the future. Has anyone heard from the eduzope folks lately – for a while it seemed like it was going to be vapourware, and then I checked back in a month or so ago and saw so release stuff, but in general it seems to have been quiet. Must check back in – SWL

– via [Serious Instructional Technology]

George Lorenzo at Educational Pathways has a nice write up on OKI and OCW – in fact that’s how I found the piece, via a reference at the end of Rob Reynold’s piece on open source CMSes to ‘OKI and OCW Defined.’

But what I want to know is why OKI have never posted an equally as straightforward explanation on the actual OKI site which is to my mind a model of unclarity. I recognize that there are some subtle concepts at work, but the number of times I’ve had to explain the difference between OKI as an architecture and the various systems (CHEF, Stellar, LON-CAPA, etc) that will be reference implementations, to people who should know better…sheesh! – SWL

Rob Reynolds over at Xplana has posted this useful piece that helps frame some of the issues an institution should factor in when considering looking at an open source solution to course management systems, proposes a rating scheme based on these factors and rates many of the currently available options. While I might differ on a few small points (OCW is not a CMS!!) I think I would also end up suggesting the same four products that show up in his 2 top 3 lists (CHEF, LON-CAPA, Moodle, FLE3) are the most likely contenders.

There are a few things I think we at edutools can learn for the factors he highlights as important (we allow reviews by features, but don’t tie features to these kinds of factors in any strong manner). That said, one lesson I think we’ve learned is that you end up getting way to much clumping in the middle on a 5 point scale (mean on this was 21 with highest score 24 and lowest 17). But I’m probably getting nitpicky as it is getting to the end of the day – SWL

Long before there were blogs, Phil Agre was publishing a great read-only mailing list called Red Rock NewsEater which regularly commented on a mix of technological and social issues and was an outlet for new drafts of Agre’s papers. Agre is a fascinating character – he has a PhD in artificial intelligence studies from MIT, but seems to have spent most of his professional life in  library studies, and information and organizational dynamics. The mailing list changed focus with the new american administration and subsequent events,  and eventually traffic seems to have dropped right off. But as I always valued the insight Agre brought, I dropped by his website today to see what he had been up to, and found this very relevant paper.

The paper sets out to “explore the tension between the engineering story of rationally distributed computation and the political story of institutional change through decentralized architecture…In the case of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, the official engineering story is that computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong feelings that P2P often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but widespread in the culture: that P2P delivers on the Internet’s promise of decentralization.”

It was with profound relief that I read these opening sentences in the paper. I have been witnessing a number of projects adopting p2p or ‘decentralized’ or ‘distributed’ architectures for problems that computationally didn’t seem to call for them – if anything, in some of these cases this architecture seemed to add a layer of unneeded complexity. And since the people implementing these systems are typically very smart people, there must be some other motivation for adopting these models. And there are – what  Agre here calls the “political story of institutional change through decentralized architecture.” Yet what troubled me was the seeming claims in this ‘political story’ that change is bound to these technologies, as it has never seemed obvious to me that the two are inextricably bound – you can have systems with centralized architectures that promotes change, and decentralized ones that don’t.

I think this paper reaches a similar conclusion. As Agre puts it: “The peer-to-peer movement understands that architecture is politics, but it should not assume that architecture is a substitute for politics. Radically improved information and communication technologies do open new possibilities for institutional change. To explore those possibilities, though, technologists will need better ideas about institutions. “

So maybe it’s just the case of many of these projects using the technology as a lever to shift the institutions and realizing that more than just the technologies will need to change. Or maybe we have reached father than we grasp. We shall see. – SWL

This site has some decent resources categorized into:

• Applied eLearning Standards
• Theories of Online Education
• Web Technologies
• eLearning Standards

but NO RSS FEED! Which is o.k. I guess if it doesn’t see itself as a ‘blog’ or want to update people regularly about its contents, but looking at the source code (to see how easy it would be to scrape) it even calls itself a ‘blog’ in the comments!

Note to self – Maybe it would be helpful to gather a collection of pointers to creating RSS feeds from various different sources and from different formats, or what you should do if hand-creating content to make sure you don’t cut certain avenues off – there seems to be hundreds of ways and suggestions out there (can someone point me to an existing list?). In many cases instead of people having to change tools they use to create the more effective approach in some cases is to lead them to ways to bootstrap their current content. – SWL

Huge thanks to David Wiley for pointing to this huge trove of research resources on open source software. He’s right, this is the ‘motherlode.’ – SWL

– via [autounfocus]