Tag: CMS

I help maintain the news page at Edutools where we post timely items of interest to the course management system industry. Our developer kindly enabled an RSS feed of the page, so I can also see it in my aggregator, and will occassionly repost relevant items to this blog. But I thought it would be nice to offer the same content on this site, and this handy code from Dave Winer allows one to display the contents of another RSS feed directly in ones’ own Radio blog. How’s that for write once/publish everywhere! I’ll put a link to this page on my regular nav bar at some point, but for now it seemed like an interesting experiement. – SWL

Great article on using wikis as both a PIM and collaborative content tool (and in fact on all things wiki, though there is so much here you almost have to know quite a bit about this before it starts to make any sense). By David Mattison, Access Services Archivist British Columbia Archives, Canand (GO Canada!!) Also has a great sidebar comparing wikis and blogs. Be warned though: if you haven’t played with wikis and you thought blogs were addictive, be prepared to get sucked into a massively intertwined universe in which you can spend days! Think ‘surfing the web’ to the nth degree! – SWL

http://opencourse.net/home/

Yet another open source course management system I’ve recently come across. It is not in fact just chance that all of these are sprinning up on my list – I am actively looking for more right now to review on edutools. – SWL

http://www.hull.ac.uk/merlin/

Not clear that this has been released to the public or for internal use only, but another ‘virtual learning environment’ from the U.K., this time from the Univeristy of Hull. – SWL

http://etutor.sourceforge.net/

And yet another open source CMS found by following the paths laid out in some of the last posts, this one through the University of Ottawa. Not quite out of beta, but it appears to be actively under development and have some institutional support, which is always promising. – SWL

I have no idea why, but the post by Elizabeth Lawley a few weeks back bemoaning the state of CMSes and stating her desire for an open source option seemed to bring responses from every direction. This one contains a host of options, most of which were familiar but there were a few new ones.

• Spaghettilearning.com – out of Italy but seems to have multi-language support, PHP and MySQL-based.
• Xtention.Net – they offer a free version of their LMS for organizations that only need to deal with SCORM objects. It’s ASP, SQL 2000 based.
• MnITS Internet Teaching System – relies on  Apache, MySQL, and PHP (and I wonder if it is in fact the same systems as another one out of Minnesota that I am currently looking at named MnMaster?)

I will have to recompile the list I have going at http://www.c2t2.ca/article.asp?item_id=3744 as these are coming out fast and furious. I think some finer cateogires are going to be necessary too, as some of these (moodle, atutor, many others) look a whole lot more than others like what we have come to expect from a full-featured CMS. – SWL

http://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/index.html

Another open source CMS-type system, this time from Harvard Law School. – SWL

– via [this post at SeriousInstructionaTechnology]

http://www.imowa.org/curricula/flip/pedagogy_and_cms.pdf

Now here’s a novel idea – instead of telling instructor’s they need to move their courses online, ask them to:

• Determine a goal you would like to achieve in your teaching and/or your student’s learning
• Develop an instructional strategy to accomplish the goal.
• Select an element of the Course Management System (CMS) that can be used in the strategy.
• Identify what skills in the use of the CMS you need to develop in order to implement the strategy.
• Identify any software you need to learn as part of that skill development.

This seemes fascinating on a number of levels – both as a really interesting faculty adoption model, and also for its mapping of CMS features to pedagogical goals. – SWL

http://www.cmswatch.com/

This is probably already on your radar, but if you are interested in either content management or even content management as applied to course management, there are worse places to start than this site – definitely industry focused, but has tons of great articles on metadata, taxonomies, RSS and other issues directly pertinent to learning content and learning objects. – SWL

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0311.pdf

by Colleen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner

This is the second good CMS-wish list piece I have come across in the last few weeks. Hopefully the CMS vendors are actually reading these. As with the other piece (Elizabeth Lawley’s post on open source CMSes) some of the features they are asking for seem like real no-brainers and have been glaring omissions in CMS software since it began, and yet almost nobody seems to be addressing them.

That’s not entirely right – as hinted at in this article, some of these are being addressed in the ‘enterprise’ versions of these products, but with huge associated price tags. So maybe their will be a ‘trickle down effect’ with these features (e.g. the ability to share materials across course containers) showing up in the more basic versions of the products. For the sake of all of the smaller users who seem locked into these systems, lets hope so. But let’s also hope that both the open source developers and smaller vendors are reading these messages too. IMHO, there is still some room in this market for new players to emerge if they offer this type of functionality off the bat – I would point to Desire2Learn as a good example of this.

On this point, if anyone actually reads this, I would be interested to hear if you have come across any good studies on the factors to consider when migrating an entire institution from one CMS system to another, specifically non-technical factors, or at least those ones not specifically related to the technical issues of migrating course content from one CMS to another (things like faculty training issues, staff support issues …) – SWL