Technologies for Learning, Thinking and Collaborating
http://www.atutor.ca/atutor/files/VLE_comparison.pdf
Stumbled across this through a tangential google search. Another comparison of 3 open source CMS, Moodle, Claroline and Atutor, this time by a European training firm. As in the case of the other main comaprison of late, Atutor seems to come out on top. – SWL
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/levesque/
The latest issue of First Monday contains this paper by Michelle Levesque which offers a non-‘fear uncertainty and doubt’-based accounting of some of the common problems with open source projects. Many of these are now commonplace complaints. Based on my own investigations of existing open source learning object repositories and course management systems, I have to concur that many of the problems she outlines, especially the varied quality of documentation and the limited user interfaces, are endemic and do limit the uptake of these systems when they are compared against their commerical alternatives. And as Levesque says, it’s not that any of these failings couldn’t be corrected, and you can point to some open source projects that get it right. – SWL
http://www.becta.org.uk/page_documents/
research/open_source_teaching.pdf
Likely you will have already seen reference to this paper in today’s OLDaily, but I felt it was worth reposting as it is a good paper and early on makes an important distinction that I think is too often left dormant in LOR projects and leads to no end of confusion about what people are trying to achieve.
This distinction has to do with the drivers behind the use of learning objects/repositories. The paper outlines 4:
– The efficiency route: the argument that learning objects and repositories enable scaleable reuse of materials and are thus a more efficient way to develop materials
– The teacher-centred route: sharing LOs will enable cross the board improvement of teaching materials
– The pupil-centred route: LOs, in that they also promote the separation of content and presentation and can be traversed to present new versions, enable accessibility and learning-style-centric versions of online materials
– The freedom argument: the LO approach allows instructors to take control of the means of production and share the intellectual product widely
More proof of open source’s burgeoning effects in the field of course management systems – this Belgian company has taken the open source CMS Claroline and run with it in a value-added hosting/development/services/support model. News to me was that they have made strides developing a SCORM import tool, for which the lack of widespread support amongst many of the open source CMS has at times been used for an excuse not to adopt or investigate them. No longer! (see also Atutor in this regard). And for North American users, particularly those in the West, a small note that at least one of their customers, Washington State Community College, is nearby. – SWL
One of the big “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt” questions I often get asked as someone who spends a fair bit of time looking at the course management system landscape is “But are open source systems really ready for use as enterprise systems?” (Up until recently one might have done well to ask the same questions of the commercial systems that alleged to be ‘enteprise ready’!)
I don’t know what better way to respond than to simply point to where these systems are being used, so as some initial examples:
There are lots of fears held by Directors of IT, EdTech and others (some justified, others extremely unfounded) that need to be addressed before it becomes easy to adopt open source for ‘enterprise’ needs. This should be an easy one, though – any open source project that seriously wants to be adopted and that doesn’t actively solicit information on who is using it and share this back with potential users is clearly overworked or missing something. Better yet, segment your responses (k-12/colleges/universities/corporate training” might be a start for the education sector) so that people can point to a peer group and say ‘look who else has adopted this software!’ You’d be amazed how effective an argument this can be, especially as we move along the famous curve of innovation adopters (e.g. early and late majorities are like that for a reason.) – SWL
There’s been a fair bit of buzz, and rightly so, for a few of the open source CMS systems out there; both Moodle and ATutor have come a long way and are increasingly looking like viable options for those wanting to go the open source route.
There’s another open source CMS that has been around for a little while now that hasn’t received as much press, but seems to me to also be an increasingly viable choice. The .LRN system is based on a fairly ‘old’ (by Internet standards) platform, the OpenACS portal server. It has been developed by folks at MIT (Sloan School of Management) and the University of Heidelberg and has been taken up by a number of major adopters.
They recently reached a major milestone with the release of version 2.0. One feature of particular note to this audience is support for student blogging tools – that’s right, unlike attempts to re-purpose sole-purpose blogging tools as ‘course management systems’ (which I think gives seriously short shrift to the breadth of functionality offered in ‘real’ CMS) this is instead a fairly full featured CMS that offers individual student blogging support.
The current system is a little light on assessment functionality, but there are plans to rectify that in the near future. These folks are clearly aware of existing instructional standards and already support IMS Enterprise 1.1 for exchanging student data, with Content Packaging and SCORM support on the horizon. And given the relatively long history of development around OpenACS, there is already a fairly broad development community built up around this platform.
We just finished our draft review at Edutools – the review should be visible here in the next day or so. – SWL
http://www.opensector.org/1075490138
From OpenSector comes news of the U.N. report, “E-Commerce and Development Report 2003” which contains a chapter that supports many of the canonical arguments for why open source projects produce better software than proprietary projects. Another good URL to have in your pocket when the boss asks you why you decided to deploy Linux (or some other FOSS choice in the myriad of applications now available) over some of the other alternatives. – SWL
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/
Software/Courseware_Tools/
Via an email from Jim Sibley came mention of this list of open or free ‘courseware tools’ – there were a couple of ones new to me (MANIAC and OLAT being examples). But the reference was as useful also for introducing me to the UNESCO Free Software Portal which collects together a large number of resources on the topic. – SWL
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content
&id=12840&repository=0001_article
Via Ray Schroeder comes this article from Stanford outlining the possible future of the CourseWork project and stating a possible $730K a year price tag to keep it going. This seems unlikely, but probably shouldn’t be discounted out of hand. – SWL
http://ets.berkeley.edu/etstandards/sakai/
Similar to the last webcast they provided back in December concerning Lionshare, the University of California system (and specifically UC Berkeley, who seem to be hosting the event) are providing a webcast stream of a presentation by Joseph Hardin, the Director of the Collaborative Technologies Lab Media Union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor concerning the SAKAI project. I only caught the morning of the Lionshare talk, so don’t know if the question and answer sessions in the afternoon are typically broadcast. But hopefully they will be for this one, as the ‘Questions on Chef and Sakai’ put together by the UC Berkeley Educational Technology Services – Learning Systems Group are of great interest and extremely pertinent to anyone embarking on the development or deployment of an open source CMS or other elearning component in an post-secondary enterprise environment. The talk is on Monday, January 12th, 2004 from 9 am – 12 noon PST, so I guess there is some small solace in not being able to get to the CANARIE sponsored sessions in Vancouver that day. – SWL