Tag: CMS

I typically pay more attention to apps focused on higher ed, but Cisco’s authoring tool, Virtuoso, came to my attention via it’s partnership with Unicon Academus, a CMS based on the JA-SIG uPortal framework. I guess the other reason to pay attention is that Cisco does have some history in the RLO world. Still not clear to me what one would have to do to get this product, though. – SWL

An interesting paper by Rob Reynolds on the new Xplana site.  He mentions OKI at the start but doesn’t pick up on it – this modular architecture that he describes was, in my mind, what OKI has the potential to bring about. In my understanding, once the framework existed, any component that had been written to operate within that framework could in theory ‘plug-in’ to any ‘OKI-compliant’ application (I have never found out what the correct language is for that). – SWL

This piece is a year old (heck I might have even posted on this before) but it came up during extended searching on LORs vs. LCMSes and I thought it interesting because in describing the ‘evolution’ (mostly just history) of LCMSes it gave me some more context for why we have all these LOR initiatives that seem to be relatively isolated from the evolution of LCMSes and learning authroing tools. – SWL

Via a seemingly small reference in David Wiley’s blog, Autounfocus, comes mention of this application being developed by David and others in the Department of Instructional Technology at Utah State, that hints at where learning object repositories and object browsers need to go and seem to be going – towards more direct integration with authoring tools and tools that help instructors apply instructional design principles in (re)assembling objects.

(But isn’t this already the promise in large part of LCMSes within the scope of the training industry? I wonder what will end up being the difference between existing authoring tools aimed at industry [either ones like IBM’s Knowledge Producer, DazzlerMax, Avaltus Jupiter Studio or Cisco’s Virtuoso, or else any of the ones being bundled or built directly in enterprise LCMSes] and the ones being built in post-secondary institutions and for that market? I can guess but I expect some analysis of this would be useful for a continuing elucidation of the need for a CMS product-type separate from LMS/LCMS offerings and why LORs are evolving the way they are.) – SWL

“Kevin Kruse writes an open letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes in response to the latter’s contention that enterprise software providers (such as, say, SAP or PeopleSoft) will not make major inroads into the learning management system market. With a few telling points, Kruse outlines some probable scenarios where this could be exactly what happens. His main advice to LMS vendors? Well, not in so many words, but: bail.” – comment and link reposted from [OLDaily]

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two positions, and one would certainly be naive not to be paying attention to a few of these behemoth enterprise players.

But the more important advice I would give to customers, instead of these vendors, is ‘don’t let up on any of these vendors when it comes to the implementation of standards, and lobby your political representatives (in Canada these would be people like Industry Canada) to implement national conformance testing programs that we can hold vendors accountable to.’ Without such programs, we will continue to see vendors not implement these standards in a full and compliant manner, for lots of reasons, some of them not without merit (e.g. they can be difficult and often present a moving target). But the fact remains that the only hope of not repeating the history of vendor lockins and other dubious achievements in the litany of large systems implementations is in the support of product-agnostic, independantly-developed ,and community-agreed-upon standards. Amen! – SWL

I had to post this because it is the expression of what I was hoping we could do in the course management world with the edutools feature set. This project is an attempt to create “XML to describe content management frameworks, systems and editors. The project will develop a comprehensive feature list for CMS, a controlled vocabulary to describe these features, and appropriate names for each in the XML Schema Document. Features will be grouped in three broad areas (content creation, management proper, and delivery), plus overview information (name, company, website, technology, license, etc.). The current CMS Matrix will be expanded to display a side-by-side comparison of any two CMS.” But I’m not sure I see the business model – maybe there isn’t one, not everything needs one, but I need to find one for the work we are doing at edutools. Still, really encouraging sign – SWL

To be held in Cambridge, Mass, May 28th – Friday, May 30th 2003. Ohh how I wish I could be there!Hopefully there will be a number of ways to participate electronically – SWL

This Slashdot thread seemed relevant for a few reasons – some of the material coming from David Wiley (Online self-organizing social systems: The Decentralized Future of Education); a review I’m working on for Edutools of an open source course management system that like so many of them is stretched so thin supporting the code base that there is virtually no documentation…

– via [Online Community Report]

“We are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has agreed to provide a $98,000 grant to fund a planning project to extend OSAF’s Chandler software application to meet the information technology needs of higher education. ”

– via [Bruce Landon’s Weblog for Students]

A powerpoint presentation by Jean Adams and Gareth Morgan (from the elearning content comapny NewMindsets– it’s Canadian!) that describes the shift to learning object just-in-time training as being ‘2nd generation elearning, for what it”s worth. – SWL 

– via [carvingCode]