Whiteboard- possible Open Source Competitor to Blackboard?

Quote: “Whiteboard is a fully-featured and -integrated courseware system, targeted toward colleges and universities.  It is written in PHP with a MySQL back-end, and is fully administrable through its web interface.” – source: [Serious Instructional Technology]

Well, I will give this a proper look examination in due course through edutools, but I had a quick look based on this posting. On the surface it does look a bit like Blackboard. It’s not impossible that is in fact a lot like Blackboard – up until version 5 at least, Blackboard was definitely cobbled together and could have been produced through an open source process. My sense, though, is that it is fairly far along as a mature product with a more sophisticated code-based now, and I would be surprise if the resemblance here was more than superficial. – SWL

Web Based Learning resources library

An *extensive* organized collection of web links, articles and the like on all things ‘web learning-‘ related. I can’t find out anything about the author or company that hosts the site. I wonder how things like this manage to float beneath the radar. For me, as someone who is always trying to unearth new, unfound or obscure applications in relatively narrow product categories like elearning authoring tools or synchronous classroom tools, a site like this is invaluable. no idea how often it is maintained. – SWL

CHEST – VLE Comparison Grid

Another small comparison site from CHEST, a software license clearinghouse for educational institutions in the U.K.  They compare five products,

  •  Blackboard Learning System
  • FD Learning Ltd
  • LearnWise
  • Teknical Virtual Campus
  • WebCT Campus Edition Pilot

Their ‘all -by-all’ comparison grid uses the following features, mostly focused on licensing and cost implications, as the basis of comparison compares

  • Product description
  • Type of licence
  • Users/Location and use permissions
  • Rights issues
  • Hosted services
  • Requirements
  • Product support
  • Standards and specification
  • Cost of product
  • Cost of training IT staff Other staff
  • Cost of maintenance and support (on site hosting)
  • Cost of maintenance and support (off site hosting)
  • Other support services

Technology Based Training – an overview of authoring systems & learning management systems available in the UK

A bit dated (2001) but still a not bad source for overview info on a large number of CMS/LMSes. This is out of Technologies for Training (TfT), a “national information and advisory service, developed on behalf of the Department for Education and Employment.” I am always interested in seeing stuff from the U.K. and Europe as they definitely have some different systems on their radar, and there appears, at least to this naive eye, to be more discussions about different pedagogical models and a consciousness about the connection between pedagogical models, technology adoption and power. But that’s for another day … – SWL

Managed Learning Enviroments for Further Education Conference – Stirling University.

I found this site during the course of researching the Granada Learnwise product for edutools.info and trying to ascertain whether their claims of SCORM compliance were factual. They use different terminology in the U.K. and this site deals specifically with Managed Learning Environments (MLEs), which I take to be systems in which the CMS and Administrative SIS have been tightly integrated, possibly also including an LCMS (but this later part is not clear, to me at least). In any case, the site contains vendor-supplied responsesto a number of questions from Learnwise, THINQ, WebCT, Blackboard, Digitalbrain, FD Learning, PiSYS, SABA, My Knowledge Map, and MDC learning Systems. It is great when customers and education systems publish information like this as it gives me (and presumably CMS purchasers doing sue dilligence) another third-party source to verify some of the vendor claims. – SWL

Microsoft announces its intention to acquire Placeware

“Microsoft Corp. today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire PlaceWare Inc., a leading provider of Web conferencing services that enable businesses to conduct real-time, interactive presentations and meetings over the Internet.” 

Saw this announcement first in Kevin Kruse’s newsletter e-learningGuru (http://www.e-learningguru.com/, where he also prognosticates that 2003 could see MS acquire Macromedia – oh please don’t let that happen!) I remember first finding Placeware in 1997 when looking for a synchronous system for Mount Royal College. We didn’t choose it as it had a bit of a price tag and I had a budget of $0, but I remember being blown away by the product at the time. Not only did it have advanced communication and presentation features, it was playing around with an auditorium model at the time that tried to locate people ‘next’ to each other in virtual space. I thought this last part was great but then never saw it again in later releases. It seemed like they moved away from Higher Ed as a target market, somewhat understandably giving the much more immense corporate training or marketing markets. Still, even if it is MS acquiring them hopefully this means they will have a future. – SWL

TextWeaver

I’ve been waiting a while to see this – the new threaded-discussion tool that was developed by Andrew Feenberg and the folks at San Diego State has now been released. It is open source. There is a B.C. connection – it runs on top of CourseReader (developed out of SFU/TL-NCE/Linda Harasim). I am going to download and look at a copy as soon as I get a chance. – SWL