Tag: CMS

“Monoliths,” APIs and Extensability – A presentation on the past and future directions of CMS

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/CMS_overview.ppt

I was very fortunate recently to deliver the above talk to a CMS task Force at UBC on the overall lay of the CMS land. It seems relevant to share it here, especially in light of a recent post by James Farmer on integrating open source pieces with WebCT, and the great follow up by Michael Feldstein.

I think Michael’s read is mostly accurate. As I try to lay out in the presentation, CMS have evolved as a series of “wrappers” around a set of applications, and there were good reasons for this innovation (it was an innovation when it began 10 years ago) in terms of handling scale and providing some stable service across all or many departments in a post-secondary institution within a limited budget.

But this model, which does tend towards monolithism, is now 10 years old; in part because of rapidly maturing alternative models (service oriented architectures and distributed applications development environments in general), in part because of pressure from customers to allow more pedagogically-driven choices in their tools, and in part because of challenges from Open Source and elsewhere, all of the CMS, be they commercial or open source, are moving, some slowly, some more quickly, towards increased extensability and interoperation with other tools. This is in my mind an undeniable trend, and the issue for organizations is not if this will happen, but instead a question of how best to obtain the core services and acceptable level or “service” while increasing the amount of flexbility and choice for instructors and students, and at the same time not increasing the cost (and hopefully decreasing it if you’re really adept).

I don’t think the commercial CMS companies are going away, at least not anytime soon. There are still many organizations (often small ones, but not always) for whom more sophisticated ‘elearning architecture’ approaches, “best-of-breed,” or the choices (and demands) facilitated by open source are not (yet, maybe ever?) realistic choices. There is value in providing a set of tools (however limited you might feel these tools to be) in an integrated environment that can with relative ease tie into other parts of your infrastructure and for which you need to hire application administrators, not developers, to run. But even those customers want more freedom to make choices, and the CMS companies know this and are trying to mediate it without cutting off their own nose. But it’s also clear that they are under fire, and that many institutions will have the wherewithal to adopt or create what Michael terms a “Learning Management Operating System” into which they can insert, or on which they can build, different application choices and approaches. As I read it, the impetus behind OKI, and to the extent to which it embodies openly agreed upon APIs, Sakai, is a step in that direction. Michael’s predicition of a timeline (about 5 years) also seems about right; it will take a while for the implications of this approach to flow through and for the various systems needed to implement it to mature to the point where each implementation is not a large software development initiative of its own. But it is coming, and it will change the landscape of these systems considerably. – SWL

U of T’s CMS Selection Consultation Process

http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/services/lms_rfp.html

Early this year the University of Toronto issued an RFI to select an organization-wide CMS. This site is part of the public documentation of the process. The results of the faculty and student surveys are of particular interest to me – in some places there seem to be a slight disconnect (say between the facultys’ and students’ perception of the need for quiz and test support) while in others I feel rather vindicated by the results (in particular, the overwhelmingly lackluster demand for PDA and mobile device access to the CMS.)

I have so far not been able to track down anything public on the results of their RFI process, but this news item posted today on the Sakai site which states “Our intended long-range goal is to use Sakai as the educational platform for its more than 65,000 students and 6,000 faculty members. A pilot group of units (including FIS) have committed themselves to adopting it immediately and demonstrating its long-term viability in the U of T context” as well as the nomination of Jutta Treviranus to the Sakai Board of Directors seems like a strong indication of what the results might be. Expect more of these types of competitions to be happening in the next year as people are faced with license renewals and the need for large scale change management processes to facilitate product “upgrades.”- SWL

Moodle, Open Source, and the “Mission Critical” Bugaboo

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/
discuss.php?d=22640&parent=107125

One of the favourite weapons in the “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt” arsenal is the claim that such-and-such open source app is maybe nice, but not quite “enterprise ready,” not able to support “mission critical” computing. And certainly, in the realm of Course Management Systems, it’s one you will hear levied at all of the open source contenders. more…
Continue reading “Moodle, Open Source, and the “Mission Critical” Bugaboo”

SUNY Learning Network’s Next-Generation Technology Strategy Recommendations

http://sln.suny.edu/pdfs/taskforcefinalreport.pdf

Over on e-Literate, Michael Feldstein shares this link as well as some back story to the above document, a report which lays out the goals, principles, and key functional requirements for a next-generation learning enviornment for SUNY Learning Network. It’s well worth a look and the principles it holds up are laudable. I was especially pleased of the use they made for the Edutools CMS comparative framework. They seem to have taken and used it much as it is intended, as a factual and non-evaluative description of current CMS functionality (and not as the prescriptive or evaluative document some folks have on occassion misunderstood it as). – SWL

LAMS integrations

While it’s already been picked up in various places, it seems useful to note some recent developments with the LAMS system as I am so far not aware of it getting any traction in Canada.

In addition to the recent announcement of some initial integration work between Moodle and LAMS (this walkthrough is a good place to start to understand how the two systems can work together), Oxford University also announced as part of the Tools Integration Project that LAMS had been integrated with the open source Boddington VLE. While Boddington may not have the installed base of Moodle, both of these bode well for the continued uptake of LAMS and for continued practical demonstrations of what using a learning design tool in conjunction with a CMS/VLE as delivery environment might look like.

Anyone know of North American institutions experimenting with LAMS or something like it? Drop me a line, I would love to know (I promise I will sort commenting out on this blog in the not too distant future). – SWL

Educause Quarterly Article: Changing Course Management Systems

http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm05210.asp

This is one of those articles that ranks in the “could have been important but ends up being too anecdotal” category. The authors are right in pointing to course conversion as both a potential cost issue and huge concern in switching CMS. All one has to do is ask a collection of system administrators or educational technologists who support almost any of the major CMS and they will nod knowingly, or start frothing at the mouth (depending on whether they’ve actually had to do it en masse or not).

But this is one area where higher ed suffers greatly from diverging from the corporate training world – we have no equivalent to an ADL to provide certification of these products on IMS Content Packaging (the larger scoped SCORM never having taken off within higher ed, for good reason.) So we are left to rely on the self-reporting of the CMS companies about their compliance with the Content Packaging and QTI schemes.

For a while the story that the churn of these specifications was what caused the lack of consistent implementations seemed plausible, but increasingly, less and less so. And fair or not, it’s no small part of the reason why on the LOR front, people are increasingly resistant to the notion of trusting their content to the big CMS vendors, as they have yet to exhibit content exports from their systems that will work well in their competitors’ systems.

The irony of this article is that D2L, one of the 2 companies mentioned here, has in fact done a lot of work to be able to convert content from their competitors’ systems as part of their business growth strategy. So if this is the case in trying to convert to them, one can only wonder what it might look like going betwen some of the others. IMS CP got started as a spec shortly after the formation of IMS in 1997, and was an early goal for good reason. From the customers’ perspective, it represented a major risk mitigation strategy to adopting one of these large systems (at a time when arguably the entire domain space was still in a very nascent state). 8 years later, one has got to ask, has it worked? Has the risk been mitigated? Ask your CMS admins and content developers, I’m sure they will tell you what they think. – SWL

Educause Article – A Capabilities Approach for the Next-Generation CMS

http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0533.asp

I’m sure lots of those disenchanted with the current crop of CMS will enjoy reading this piece by Van Weigel. Weigel suugests another approach to envisioning what the next-generation CMS might look like; what’s missing for me (and to be fair, this is just a chapter length piece, so it’s unfair to expect this as well) is the ‘how.’ If CMS don’t end up looking like this vision (or some of the other suggested alternatives) it will not be the first time ‘better’ technology visions haven’t won out over market forces. So how, given that the the latest available Educause Core Data survey states that 90% of institutions have adopted CMS (of which 75% are commercial ones), is the change to be brought about. Bit by bit, I suppose. – SWL

LAMS as a CMS

http://blogs.nitle.org/mane/2005/05/
lams_a_new_open_source_cms.html

I found this short post by Bryan Alexander at the MANE IT Network personally really useful – I’ve known about LAMS for quite a while, but had never heard it described as a “CMS.” My first reaction was – oh that’s just wrong, it’s an “e-learning design tool” (oh the sophistry of labels!). But then I went back and re-read the LAMS material. Sure enough, it does have facilities for delivery to students, accounts mgmt, etc. So I think the characterization of it as a ‘CMS’ is not incorrect. But calling it that potentially overshadows why LAMS is in fact so interesting; it takes as its starting point the design of learning activities and then assists with the delivery of those activities, rather than the traditional CMS perspecitve of giving instructors a series of unconnected generic tools with no scaffolding for tying them together or combining them with the content itself. The filter I had for it in my mind was ‘learning design tool’ but this post made me re-consider what that meant; it’s a new approach to delivering the education that takes as its starting point the design of the educational activity, not the organizational container of a ‘course’ or the pre-set bunch of tools a traditional CMS offers. So thanks, Bryan, for reframing the issue! – SWL

A-HEC Survey on Open Source

http://www.a-hec.org/media/
files/A-HEC_os_survey_report_050305.pdf

Too bad there weren’t more respondents (79 does not a huge sample make) but this survey from the Association for Higher Education Competitiveness presents at least some interesting insight into changing attitudes towards open source. What do we learn – Sakai has a good marketing campaign (at least in terms of name brand recognition), and people who are already interested in open source (I’m questioning the randomness of the sample here) are dissatisfied with the existing offerings almost across the board. Still, the rankings of the predicted successes seems roughly right (though placing uPortal below Sakai in terms of garnering market share just seems plain wrong by definition – Sakai currently employs uPortal). Worth a quick look in any case – SWL

.LRN announced as SCORM Adopter partner by ADL

http://dotlrn.org/news/one-entry?entry%5fid=90509

When people ask me for examples of open source CMS that really might be considered as alternatives to the current major commercial systems, I often cite .LRN as one potential example. It’s been built from the ground up on a portal framework and already contains a host of tools one would recognize from conventional commercial CMS (and apparently there is now a related LOR component as well). This announcement of self-test SCORM compliance is another piece of good news for them. – SWL