Tag: CMS

“Map” of Moodle Deployments

http://moodle.org/sites/index.php?country=all

Michael Penney wrote in to let me know that the map of Moodle deployments world-wide that I pined for earlier already exists. While I’m pretty sure this map is not an exact representation of the state of affairs (otherwise Alice Springs is surely the hotbed of all Moodle deployments, with New Orleans a close second) it does give you a sense of how truly spread across the globe the 13,000 or so adopters of Moodle are. (Michael also pointed me to the ‘stats’ pages, which display quite vividly Moodle’s meteroic adoption curve.) – SWL

Must Read – LMS Governance Project Report

http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/
telars/talmet/melbmonash/
media/LMSGovernanceFinalReport.pdf

Stephen’s already recommended it, but I’ll second that recommendation – this is an “interesting and well-informed” report and another one you should try to get in front of as many decision makers’ faces as possible. I’m really grateful to have read it, if only for the references to Paul Pangaro and M.C. Geoghegan that I am looking forward to following up.

It’s not meant as a technical paper so it can’t be faulted for not providing a solution to this:

“the trick for universities may not be to try to create the same spaces within the confines of the university computer network, but rather to make sure that members of the university are able to forge links between their university identity and their other online learning communities.”

Easier said than done.

I do think the section on “Reviewing the business case for LMS” could be strengthened, there’s some straw men there, but that’s nit picking. The biggest missing piece for me concerns acknowledging the key role in institutional learning of ‘credentialing’ – not to reduce it to that, but to acknowledge that in the nirvana of self-forming online learning communities and self-directed learners someone is going to have to start talking about the relationship between that learning and the powerful role of credentialling (and to be fair, this isn’t just the institutions of higher ed involved in this, it’s governments, accrediting bodies, professional organizations, etc.). If you don’t think it’s an issue though, I can point you to 1000 cabbies with medical and law degrees from other nations who would beg to differ. – SWL

Map of Sakai Stakeholders

http://www.dr-chuck.com/sakai-map/index.php

Want to know where Sakai is in production and who the other partners are? Check out this map from Chuck Severance, recently named the head of the Sakai Foundation. An interesting point that Dr. Severance points out in this short video is that 46% of people paying into the Sakai foundation are not in fact implementing it at all yet, either as a pilot or in production; he explains this as being about people paying to “make the market a better place.” Here’s hoping it does. Would love to see a similar map of Moodle adoption throughout the world! – SWL

UMW’s Bluehost/Fantastico Experiment

If posts by the cogdog, blamb AND Jon Udell weren’t enough to convince you, then take MY word too and run, don’t walk, over to Gardner Campbell’s blog to listen to a 45 minute recording from their latest faculty academy on using a 3rd party hosting solution and application ‘control panel’ as a way to inexpensively support faculty innovation and experimentation. (And for the record, this hasn’t changed my mind at all about podcasts, though Brian’s right, Gardner’s voice is remarkably soothing to listen to 😉

I must admit to feeling a little dissatisfied with the discussion about ‘enterprise computing’ -type questions (around minute 20 and following, and in the questions and answers in the end) but it’s not a simple complaint either.

First off, they really should be commended for adopting a mechanism that greatly increases the authentic assessment of new technologies, part of the aim that’s described in the first 20 minutes. And in regards to the ‘enterprisey’ issues, some stock also needs to be placed in the retort of how enterprisey these systems should have become anyways. This has come up a few times in conversation for me over the last weeks – while the use of computer technology in teaching and learning isn’t that new, this beast we call the ‘course management system’ is barely 10 years old…do we really believe we got it right the first time, in just 10 years, and that the model will never need changing? So there’s a lot to be said in general about an approach that stays flexible, especially in light of Web 2.0, which if anything could be described as massive, non-stop disruptive innovation, the only constant being change. Sure, we thought the internet in general meant that, but now it really seems to be unfolding in front of our eyes.

So I’m left both inspired but wanting to eat my cake too – can we not have this flexibility and experimentation AND the guarantees of service we seem expected to provide? (I liked Gardner’s response about trust and agreeing to a certain amount of risk, but I’ve never seen that calm down an irate professor during exams when the system goes down.) Udell’s comment regarding Ray Ozzie’s speech really resonates for me here – “In his vision of the future of enterprise software, services are delivered on demand, they produce value in incremental steps, and theyÂ’re paid for when — not before — that value is proven.”

Still, Gardner and his crew are to be totally commended for their approach – maybe instead of a ‘learning management operating system‘ we might start thinking about a control panel for instructor-controlled (or student controlled, how about sticking that in your pipe!) mix- and matchable lightweight apps that already had the connectors to the SIS and authentication systems built in (or can these be the same thing?) – SWL

(the first step to dealing with your problem is admiting you have a problem…My name is Scott, and I am a blog addict…really, I’m working on my other machine right now as I write this!)

Sakai 2006 Conference Presentations available

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/
Conf2006Vancouver/Conference Sessions

My only regret about going to the BC ETUG sessions last week is that it coincided with the Sakai conference being held just across the Straight in Vancouver which would also have made for an informative few days.

Alas, all is not lost, as the good folks there are posting their slides and podcasts of the sessions to this wiki. See also their conference ‘facebook’, a great idea for any conference, but especially one like this trying to create community.

Lots to digest here; a good presentation on small institutions implementing Sakai, (though clearly the concept of ‘loosely coupled‘ is understood a little differently here.) But that’s just nit picking, lots of exciting things going on, but it left me wondering about two things. Why were there only 3 Canadians in the facebook for a conference hosted in Canada (presumably the rest are just shy?) and is there a whole segment of the edu-blogosphere I don’t know about that is simply buzzing about this conference, because I haven’t heard a peep in my aggregator. – SWL

SUNY Learning Networks Stakeholder Feedback on their Technology Strategy Report.

http://le.suny.edu/sln/sln_rpc_publicresponse.htm

In June of 2005 I pointed to SUNY’s Recommendations on their Learning Network’s Next Generation Strategy, which had been published on the web.

If you follow Michael Feldstein’s blog e-Literate (and you should) you’ll also have noted that in October of last year SUNY announced its plans to build an open source ‘Learning Management Operating System (LMOS),’ and as part of these plans issued a Request for Public Comment on this strategy.

SUNY has now made available the responses to this public request for comment. If you are a decision maker in a large post-secondary organization or system who is wrestling with the choices of what to do next around your course management system strategy, I strongly urge you to scour this site and soak up everything you find there. Rarely has there been a better ‘state of the CMS union (and potential future)’ picture gathered together in one place. I do wish a few of the other open source players’ voices were represented here, but it is rare to find this amount of in-depth discussion and feedback collected in one place. The SUNY Learning Network folks are to be commended both for their courage in the path they are blazing and the openness with which they have shared this material for all of our benefits. – SWL

Reports from Collaborative Moodle Pilot in BC

http://molokai.ol.mala.bc.ca/moodle_doc/index.html

As the original home of WebCT, it is not perhaps a big surprise that it is the most widely adopted CMS in the province of BC, where I live and work. And while that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon on a large scale, 6 institutions have done pioneering working to investigate the viability of Moodle as an alternative, and have made the resulting reports available for all to see. The project was funded by my employers, BCcampus, through an Online Porgram Development Fund grant.

There is lots here to read – in addition to the final report and project recommendations, the partners have produced extensive documentation on each of the 10 distinct objectives (including such useful materials as documentation to migrate WebCT 4.1 courses to Moodle). And all of it is appropriately delivered via a Moodle site!

I know at least one of these partners has since gone on to announce its official adoption of Moodle as its institution-wide CMS, and that one of them was already firmly a Moodle adopter. So whether you are looking for a way out of your current lock-in or looking to buttress your arguments as to why your Moodle pilot should grow, you’ll find some useful evidence here. (If I am sounding slightly partisan here, I have just spent the last few months of my life struggling with getting content out of WebCT servers to interoperate with the rest of the world, and let’s just say I am the worse for wear.) – SWL

LMSNews – Reviews of 4 Open Source CMS

http://www.lmsnews.com/modules/content/index.php?id=15

Although the majority of the site appears to be in German, they do have 4 reviews on the open source course management systems Claroline 1.7.0, Interact 2.0, LON-CAPA 2.0.2 and StudIP. They seem highly anecdotal, but also honest about the ease (or lack of) installing and administering some of these tools. – SWL

Rollyo – Search all major Course Management System Sites

http://rollyo.com/sleslie/course_management_systems/

I knew I had to read Bryan Alexander’s Educause article on Web 2.0 not so much because the ideas would be new but because I knew that inevitably Bryan would point to some little gem in the ever growing Web 2.0 landscape that I hadn’t seen before.

One that was new to me that he pointed to was Rollyo – a site that lets you roll your own search index by providing up to 25 URLs you want indexed. I wanted to check it out, because ever since Atomz was bought out a year ago, I had been looking for a replacement free web-based service that would let me do this.

To try out Rollyo, I built the above index that searches the top 20 (IMO) Course Management System sites. So say for instance, you wanted to find out which of these systems supported the “eXe editor,” or was working on a blog project, you could try searching across just those sites for those terms. It is definitely not infallible, but I have been intrigued by the use of constrained search engines as a way to either augment or replace certain types of directories, where what is being catalogued is well known and fixed (for instance, all of the post-secondary course catalogues in a certain jurisdiction). – SWL