e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • Sakai Board Platform – David Goodrum

    This is a guest post by David Goodrum, a nominee in the 2010 Sakai Foundation Board of Directors election. His bio and platform are available here.

    First off, I’d like to thank Michael Feldstein for his generous offer to the Sakai board candidates to present their perspectives in this forum as well as offer thanks to the many readers of e-Literate for their patience in wading through a discussion of board responsibilities, Sakai product directions, and open/community source approaches.

    I won’t repeat my background and basic platform, which are available here; and will try my best to answer Michael’s call to articulate what I see as the Sakai community’s challenges and opportunities, where I see both Sakai products and community in three years, and what steps we must take to get there.

    Challenges and Opportunities: that we face as a community and as part of the larger global education community over the next three years

    The larger global education community is living in interesting times: communication is increasingly instantaneous; technological capabilities leapfrog each other daily; social, economic, marketplace, and political changes are constantly upon us. And so the need for individuals to learn, connect, and be contributing members of intellectual as well as social communities grows ever more important. And the ability of our institutions to create an environment to enhance the success of students and scholars alike becomes ever more critical.

    The Sakai community is built upon the core values of

    • Higher education meeting its own needs
    • Our institutions maintaining control of their own destinies, and
    • Sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    The opportunity for Sakai is to build on its current success of the Sakai 2 Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) and meet the future head-on, providing global vision and leadership for how technology can be integral to the success of the core academic mission.

    In my view, the biggest challenges for the Sakai community are to:

    1. Continue to build and evolve a shared vision for the future and maintain core values
    2. Deliver on commitments to always provide high performing and scalable products friendly to both users and developers, and
    3. Accomplish this with a lightweight yet strong Sakai Foundation that champions the most valuable contributions and the most successful self-organizing behaviors in the community.

    Sakai in Three Years: A vision for what Sakai (both products and community) should look like three years from now to respond to those challenges and opportunities

    Sakai Products

    A version 1.0 of a comprehensive vision for Sakai products has been recently articulated, at least from a teaching and learning perspective, with the Sakai Learning Capabilities Design Lenses. Michael Feldstein has previously written a  post about this work and invited me to write a post on the brainstorming and other community activities that led up to the version 1.0 document. It was very exciting to be a part of this highly collaborative work in the community and to continue to champion it in a variety of venues.

    I think it’s accurate to say the document is presented as a comprehensive product vision for both the Sakai CLE as well as the newly announced project called the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE). Building on considerable advanced work on both the concepts and architecture for Sakai OAE, along with a hybrid approach to working together with Sakai CLE, the two projects are well positioned to deliver on the promise outlined by the Sakai Learning Capabilities.

    LMS vendors are always marketing their latest or refreshed versions developed in secret and pursuing technologies and/or market share by acquiring other companies or suing in the courts. Even the open source Moodle is poised for major change as it is now beginning to strategize and brainstorm for a total rewriting/refactoring of its platform (e.g., see this).

    The Sakai consortial values and governance affords us all a much deeper level of influence through a variety of tangible contributions to governance, direction, and products that uniquely meet the needs of higher education. In the next three years, Sakai is well positioned to provide an ecosystem of products, integrations, standards (e.g., LTI), and support that together can fulfill the Learning Capabilities vision.

    Sakai Community

    Simply put, my vision for the Sakai community is a house with all the lights turned on, occupied by multiple groups who are self-organized and board-recognized, and united broadly by common purpose and values. A lot of Sakai community accomplishments over time have occurred somewhat in isolation, pursued by a single institution, and difficult to find up-to-date information on.

    This seems to be evolving already. Both the Sakai OAE managed project and the Sakai 2 Technical Coordination Committee (as well as the teaching and learning community efforts on the Learning Capabilities Design Lenses) have been prime examples of highly visible, self-organized efforts within the community, each with multiple participating institutions.

    In three years, my vision is for a broader and more diverse Sakai community with a successful merger of Jasig and Sakai, more multiple-institution supported efforts, more higher ed institutions and commercial affiliates as members, and better outreach and communication of community initiatives overall.

    Steps We Must Take: specific actions that must be undertaken to fulfill that vision

    There are scores of actions and contributions the community would need to take to fulfill the vision I’ve outlined above. But let me focus on specific actions the Sakai Foundation Board needs to take.

    For Community Vision

    For the Foundation itself, I see several critical areas for thoughtful leadership by the directors through a dialogue with the whole of the Sakai community:

    1) Partners. Make mergers and partnerships with other community source groups an opportunity for both organizational efficiency and technical and functional collaborations. The growing open source ecosystem in higher education supported by partner commercial affiliates affords us all a strategic approach to continue meeting our own needs while maintaining control of our own destinies and sharing the burden among like-minded partners.

    2) Outreach. Implement an effective Sakai Foundation outreach strategy to a) institutions exploring learning management, portfolio, collaboration, and academic networking applications, b) potential commercial affiliates with services and application integrations that would benefit higher education, and c) other open and community source projects which together with us could create a rich platform for innovation.

    3) New Voices. Increase engagement with the newest members of the community, many of which are struggling to find their way among the myriad of projects, sources of information, dense lists of email, and potential ways to contribute. There might be a variety of ways to help with this; one idea would be to create a ‘new members council’ for new institutions and commercial affiliates. A new member would have a representative on the council for twelve months; the council would meet regularly with the executive director and other community resources he brings to bear to an agenda built by the new council membership. New members, no matter their size, should feel they have an established and direct line of communication.

    For Product Success

    For the Sakai software, I also see several critical areas of importance for the Foundation working with the community:

    1) Build and support a coherent product strategy. The Sakai CLE and the Sakai OAE (along with other community source projects) together provide the full range of capabilities needed in the demanding arena of higher ed online, hybrid and face-to-face teaching, learning, collaboration, and academic networking and community building.

    2) Turn the lights on. Formally recognize self-organized efforts within the community where multiple institutions are co-sponsoring and co-supporting specific, well-documented initiatives.

    3) Support and advocate standards. Adopting integration and interoperability standards would enable bringing together the best content, processes, and tools to support the academic mission of our institutions. As Feldstein has pointed out elsewhere, we need to integrate both the rest of the academic enterprise as well as the long tail of learning tools.

    Final Note

    As a board director, I believe I would bring a unique perspective:

    • The experience of having supported large and small campuses through an early migration to Sakai from a legacy system;
    • Substantial work with users as well as with development teams in continuing to move Sakai 2 CLE forward;
    • Early championing and participation in the Learning Capabilities visioning;
    • Involvement from the beginning in the Sakai OAE managed project;
    • Being a frequent conversant with institutions considering Sakai — some already leaning, others rather skeptical;
    • Understanding of how an institution can implement community source as a strategic direction; and
    • Leadership experience with sizable responsibilities for both teams and budgets.

    The opportunity to serve the Sakai community through a board position would indeed be a rare honor and privilege.

  • Interview With Casey Green

    The 2010 Campus Computing survey is out, and it’s chock full of interesting information. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Casey Green, the Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, and talk about some of the highlights and a few related topics. I apologize for the abrupt ending; my camera ran out of disk space in the middle of Casey’s last answer. In any event, there’s good stuff here about the transition happening in the LMS market, the challenges of getting good survey data, ((Many thanks to the ever-thoughtful Scott Siddall for suggesting this line of inquiry.)) and more.

    You should definitely also read the survey report. It covers a lot of topics that we didn’t even touch on in the interview.

  • Migrating to Sakai

    When I speak to people from schools that are currently involved in an LMS selection process, I very often hear the following assumptions and line of reasoning:

    • Sakai 2 hasn’t set the world on fire, and anyway, it’s going to be replaced by Sakai 3 soon.
    • But Sakai 3 isn’t ready yet, and we aren’t sure exactly when it will be ready or how to go about evaluating it now.
    • Since we have to make a decision soon, we are going to have to forget Sakai as a candidate.

    This is a reasonable and understandable train of thought, but it is built upon mistaken beliefs about Sakai 2, Sakai 3, and the relationship between the two projects. The Sakai community has a vision and a plan that ensures both Sakai 2 and Sakai 3 will remain healthy and under active development for some time to come. In fact, far from being merely an awkwardly timed product transition, the two-product approach the community is taking actually provides what I believe is a unique strategy in the LMS space for supporting schools’ present needs, fulfilling their vision for their future, and providing a path from one to the other. Rather than being a reason to dismiss Sakai from consideration, the Sakai 2/Sakai 3 dichotomy is actually reason to look at the Sakai community and family of software especially closely.

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  • The Future of the LMS

    Here’s the ninety-minute video and slides from a presentation I made to UMassOnline ((For other presentations in the UMassOnline speaker series, as well as a list of upcoming speakers, see https://confluence.umassonline.net/display/OBS/Speaker+Series.)) last month called W(h)ither the LMS?

    It’s a fairly institution- and enterprise-centric vision, but it has the potential to cohabitate rather nicely with more distributed, informal personal learning networks. Formal and informal educational paths should co-exist and cross each other in a seamless ecosystem, rather than being walled off from each other.

    It’s a shame that the video doesn’t capture the technology demo. I’ll try to get a screencast up at some point.

  • How to Sell a Migration to Moodle

    The folks at Wesleyan University have a blog up that is a stellar example of how to evangelize for an LMS platform to faculty when you’re facing the front end of a migration. ((Another great example is UNC’s Sakai pilot blog.)) For starters, their FAQ is rich with information, including analysis by peer schools.

    Here’s a sample:

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  • Social Network Analysis and the LMS

    Many thanks to George Siemens for pointing out SNAPP: Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice. This is something I’ve been urging various LMS communities to  build for seven or eight years (since I was involved with dotLRN). SNAPP extracts information from the discussion boards in your LMS course and provides social graphs that help you to visualize interactivity.

    Example layout of discussion forum posts and replies in a learning management system, and the same discussion as a network diagram using SNAPP
    Example layout of discussion forum posts and replies in a learning management system, and the same discussion as a network diagram using SNAPP

    It works with Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, and Moodle (but not Sakai). The mechanism by which it works isn’t entirely clear from the project site, but it looks like you use a bookmarklet to call a web service hosted elsewhere while browsing the discussion forum you want to analyze.

    There’s quite a bit that you can do with a tool like this. Here are some applications that the SNAPP site suggests:

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  • Xplana.com: Is This a PLE?

    The title of this post is slightly tongue-in-cheek because I have my doubts about whether there is such a thing as PLEs that are distinct from existing software product categories. If there were, then after years of people talking about them, one would think there would have been an example by now that everybody could point to and say, “Yes, we all agree that is a Personal Learning Environment and not a Learning Management System, a Virtual Learning Environment, an ePortfolio, an RSS reader, a personal portal, or whatever.” Then again, maybe the PLE is an idea whose time has finally come. I believe that learning environment developers are embracing many of the articulated values behind the PLE and experimenting with different ways to embody those values. Xplana.com, which launched this week, is one example.

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