Tag: CMS

WebCT Announces the Beta Release of WebCT Campus Edition 6

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/
index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view
&newsId=20050425005245&newsLang=en

The next twelve to 18 months should prove to be a very interesting time for folks dealing with CMS-related issues on campuses. As per this news release, WebCT is leapfrogging any sort of ‘5.0’ release in favour of a new Campus Edition 6.0 – from what I understand, an effort to bring together their product lines (Campus Edition and Vista) around a single architecture and code base rather than apply more duct tape to the plate of PERL spaghetti code that had previously been Campus Edition.

Add to this the upcoming release of Sakai 2.0 in June (on which the scoop is we’ll finally start to see more of the promise of Sakai), the maturing of various ‘service-oriented’ visions and practices, more folks experimenting with blogs, wikis and ‘community’ systems like Drupal to deliver their online courses, and not to leave out options like Moodle and ATutor, and you get what looks to me like a CMS landscape increasing in instability (and not in a bad way).

In some ways, it’s all about timing. From where I’m sitting, many current licensees of the big CMS are frustrated with the costs associated with these platforms, and more than a few instructors express frustration as well. The migration from current Campus Edition platforms to WebCT 6 will not happen overnight, and will present the opportunity for a new round of decision making for many instituions. Will Sakai present a viable alternative in time for any but the largest and most brave adopters? Will any specific ‘service-oriented’ models emerge that are easily adoptable by schools that aren’t already exhibiting maturity in their elearning architecture practices? Will Drake marry Moira, and is Hudson their bastard love child? (Oops, sorry, wrong blog). Time will tell. But clearly, if there was a time to consider alternatives, at least for WebCT adopters, the coming months, when they will be asked to swallow Oracle or SQL server on top of WebCT, seems opportune. – SWL

Campus Technology Article on the benefits of an integrated CMS

http://www.campus-technology.com/
news_article.asp?id=10963&typeid=156

I’d like to believe that lots of what this article has to say is true; that, putting to the side for a moments complaints about the nature of CMS systems themselves, giving faculty an ‘integrated’ environment saves them (and the students) from the duplication of lots of dull, administrative tasks and frees up time to spend on the more critical tasks of teaching and learning. That was, after all, supposed to be one of the initial drivers behind this approach in the first place.

But this piece is just so anecdotal (“I recently did an informal survey of faculty members by email” or “One faculty member responded,” etc.) that it almost reads like a surreptitious piece of WebCT marketing. Indeed, I found it via an agent I have monitoring WebCT’s pages for news announcements.

So, make of it what you will. Studies on this topic ARE important – a large amount of time and effort has been poured into system integration efforts, standards, architectures and the like, on the assumption that removing duplication and increasing seemless integration is a “Good Thing™.” But not enough actual studies have similarly happened to determine if these efforts do increase usage, decrease barriers, decrease costs, and so on. And unfortunately, this piece isn’t one of them either. – SWL

Blackboard “Blogging” their Annual Conference

http://blackboardblog.blogspot.com/

So I open my emailbox this morning to find a message from one of our former edtech blogging brethren, Greg Ritter from Ten Reasons Why. As many of you will know, Greg works for Blackboard (yes that Blackboard) who are having their annual conference right now in Baltimore. Greg wrote to ask if I’d point to a blog they have set up for the conference.

Well, I was a bit torn (as torn as I can be at 8 o’clock in the morning) – this breaks one of the blogging commandments to not blog on command, and to make matters worse, so far it looks basically like a more efficient means to distribute press releases into the blogosphere. Yet here I am, shameless shill of the corporate overlords, pointing to this Blackboard conference blog. I decided to let you be the judge yourselves – as is so often the case, folks in the blogosphere can sniff things out pretty well for themselves, and it’s definitely not the case in this medium that any press is good press. – SWL

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666?ID=MWR0566

Hey, I’m as excited about the potential of service-oriented architectures and the ‘loosely coupled’ appproach as the next guy, but on a regular basis I find myself lamenting the seeming lack of real world working examples one can currently point to.

Yet every time I feel this way, along comes another presentation like this one, in this case describing the use of RSS to display library resource holdings within the Sakai CMTools application, that help me believe the grand vision of diversity and choice with stability and integration may actually come true. So don’t dispair; ‘network economy’ effects to the contrary, slowly cracks are forming in the vendor lockdown and silos we all lament … really … I think. – SWL

WebCT announces participation in IMS Tools Interoperability Working Group

http://www.webct.com/service/
ViewContent?contentID=25561480

I’m sure the chattering masses (hey, I don’t exclude myself from this grouping) will have something to say about this one – yea, as the prophets foretold, in the year of the mark of the sign of the beast, the ‘evil empire’ took control, yada yada yada – but from where I’m sitting, if there’s a way that 3rd party learning tools can interoperate with different learning environments that is not based on proprietary APIs, that seems like a good step forward. If, instead, the Tools Interoperability specification becomes ‘Powerlinks for everyone,’ well then clearly the eschaton is near, so praise the lord and pass the hand grenades 😉 – SWL

EdTech Terms in Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_learning_environment

EdTech bloggers may be interested to get in on the action over at wikipedia where a number of edtech terms are being defined – the above link points to the already reasonably flushed out artcle on ‘Managed learning environments‘ and there are many other related terms, including ‘learning objects‘ and ‘elearning‘ for example.

I personally didn’t mind any of the entries too much, though was slightly put off by the redirection from Course Management Systems to ‘Managed Learning Environments,’ but the wonderful thing about wiki is to add your two cents if you don’t agree. Wonderful opportunity for those in the field who are interested in wikis to ‘walk the talk’. – SWL

New Questia CMS built on top of Library System

http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21E1465A

I know nothing about this system, but it caught my eye as significant as it is the first CMS that I know of coming from a library catalog vendor and being built on top of collection of library materials.

For those who lament the seemingly dominant instructivist bent of current CMS this seems hardly a good thing, likewise the ‘small pieces’ crowd. But as my colleague Bruce Landon keeps reminding me in our discussions about learning object repositories, at the end of the day, libraries are the ones with the budget dollars and seemingly more entrenched institutional mandates and may well end up being where many of these systems get located. – SWL

E-Learning and Sustainability – Report by Graham Attwell

http://www.ossite.org/Members/GrahamAttwell/
sustainibility/attach/sustainibility4.doc

I am kind of surprised this hadn’t been posted on yet as it makes such extensive reference to ideas being promoted in ed tech blogs, but I couldn’t see any references so far. This report by Graham Attwell “commissioned by the University of Bremen as part of its contribution to The European Commission Socrates supported Lefo Learning folders project” could well be considered a survey of most of the discussions I have seen unfolding both in ed tech blogs and other forums for the past 2 years, but wrapped in the context of ‘sustainability.’ Some of it won’t seem that new to those already immersed in the discussion, but taken as a whole it seems a valueable report and a bit of a summation of a seemingly widespread call to shift directions in the elearning world. – SWL

Next-Generation Course Management Systems: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy presentation from Educause Conference

http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/
666&ID=EDU04151

Already the Educause resource centre RSS feeds mentioned below bear fruit – this page points to an interesting presentation from the Educause conference on ‘Next Generation CMS.’ This is by the same folks who wrote the Educause Quarterly article of the same title a while back.

There’s a few good things in the presentation (I really liked the graphic of TV convertors they used to illustrate where CMS are today) but even more I just liked this model of recording conference presentations as a way to leverage face to face conferences and create a larger knowledge base. – SWL

2 New Articles presenting Student View of Ed Tech

Via elearning dialogue newsletter comes two interesting pieces. The first, “A Student View of CMS,” is from a 3rd year student at the University of Puget Sound and details his views of his instructors’ uses of Blackboard, and reveals some of the basic things students hope to find in their online courses.

The second is the ECAR study on students’ uses of IT. It gives an interesting picture of the increasing IT competencies of today’s undergrads (the so-called ‘digital natives’) and the last two pages give some details on student uses and attitudes towards CMS. – SWL