Tag: CMS

Mostly just a note to myself – The below links point to two lists CMS-specific content packages, one at Blackbaord and one at WebCT. This is of interest to me for a number of reasons:

– at recent IMS and Canadian e-learning standards meetings, one question that has been rolling around in my mind was ‘where are the publishers?’ The answer I received from a few knowledgeable people are that they are bidding their time. Well, maybe, but not according to this.

– I know these aren’t necessarily ‘learning object repositories’ in the official usage of the term, and their context circumvents a number of problems that standards-based meta-data and packaging efforts have to address, but still, it struck me as a useful exercise to look at the number and types of searchable fields here when it came to identifying what meta-data is important searching for this kind of object.

http://www.webct.com/content/viewpage?name=content_showcase

http://cartridgecatalog.blackboard.com/
catalog/cartridge_catalog.pl

At C2T2 we’re hoping to use uPortal as the portal software for a future version of BCcampus. We’ve wanted to get trained up in it and related technologies for quite some time, but couldn’t necessarily justify the costs to fly to Boulder or one of the other cities where the training has been hosted recently.

So we tried to organize it ourselves. And luckily got connected with the good folks at UVic’s library, who were both interested in the training and had the facilities to host it. They picked up the ball and ran with it, and now we get to attend some training right here in Victoria. Hooray! Why don’t you join us? uPortal is a more and more viable solution, especially in the higher ed context, and I’ve also had a promise from the folks at Unicon, the new parent company to IBS who deliver the training and are key uPortal participants, that they will show a bit of their Academus CMS product, a course management system that runs within a uPortal shell. – SWL

http://www.opencursus.be/modules.php?op=modload
&name=Web_Links&file=index&l_op=viewlink&cid=11

It’s funny how this all works – I posted a quick reply this morning to a posting by Elizabeth Lane Lawley on her mamamusings blog regarding open source course management systems. I ended up back there after seeing that same post again in Stephen Downes’ blog, only to see another response that led to this site.

Part of my reaction was – oh no, not someone else confusing *course* management systems and *content* management systems (there is a difference, which I think I’ve tried to state before, but let me know if you want me to hold forth 😉 And there is some of that, but in fact there are some good links in here to open source CMS/LMS-type systems that I hadn’t seen before. For example:

• the .LRN system, based on the old OpenACS system
• this site, edvisor.org, which seems to have a combination of open content and software (with I think a K-12 focus)

I only wish I read Dutch as this site looks like it could have even more interesting stuff. – SWL

http://telr.osu.edu/surveys/cic-lms/reportOct02.cfm

This is a survey, run out of Ohio State University on the 12 large institutions that make up the Committee for Institutional Cooperation on the status of the CMS/LMS systems and plans. We run a similar survey on a regular basis with the Educational Technology Coordinators group here in B.C., but it was facinating for me to see this for these large institutions in the U.S. – SWL

http://webct.ualberta.ca/2003/

This came from the WWWDEV list. I’m acutally kind of interested to see what other forums it comes through, as I am noticing some real splintering going on these days, partly along blogospheric lines. – SWL

http://www.ltsn-01.ac.uk/resources/vle/ViewData

Kind of a wacky site out of the U.K. It seems to be a wiki dedicated to Virtual Learning Environments, Brit-speak for Course Management Systems. As far as I can tell it is run out of The Learning and Teaching Support Network, a UK wide network that promotes high quality learning and teaching in higher education through the development and transfer of good practices in all subject disciplines. Sadly, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how, in the spirit of all things wiki, one could contribute, as some of the material was dated. Still, worth a look, if only to stumble across even more products in this space that you’ve never heard of before. – SWL

http://www.dls.au.com/SCORMSkinViewer/viewer.html

An interesting piece from the folks at Digital Learning Systems developed for Avilar. It allows you to re-skin SCORM objects on the fly. The way they do this is not currently part of SCORM, but it doesn’t seem like a huge derivation – they do a javascript API call for the style sheet from within the SCO, and the LMS needs o be able to recognize this call. Very cool. – SWL

http://home.avilar.com/corporate/
press_releases/20030212.pdf

“Avilar® Technologies, Inc., announced today that its WebMentor® Learning Management System (LMS) has been issued the first certificate of compliance with the SCORM specification, Version 1.2, under the new certification program administered by the Academic ADL Co-Lab in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“To be certified, an authorized Certification Testing Center must independently verify and validate the successful processing by the LMS of the SCORM Test Suite, Version 1.2.3.”

I haven’t had a chance to catch up with the various news feeds that I follow for over a week now, so I’m not sure what kind of profile this announcement is already receiving, but this is no small thing. We reviewed Webmentor, the Avialr product, on edutools, and I was impressed with it as a training product (which in theory we don’t review, only CMSes, but some of them slip through because they do have post-secondary clients, one of our selection criteria.). – SWL

http://www.opensourcecms.com/

“Quote: ‘This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.’ See also http://www.cmsinfo.org/ “

This is interesting to me for so many reasons. Bruce, if you’re reading this, there’s a something akin to a business model in here. The folks at Athabasca may also be interested, although sadly many of the systems reviewed here seem less than enterprise ready. But isn’t that the truth for all but some of the larger open source projects? – SWL

– via: [Serious Instructional Technology]

http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/genericcentre/index.asp?id=18376

Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) group have created a database of case studies related to Learning Environments and Pedagogy. Let’s you search by either specific system or pedagogical issue. Fascinating. – SWL