Here’s a video highlighting some of the features in Moodle 2.o, which is expected to be released some time in the next couple of months: You can see a video of Blackboard 9.1 highlights here. (Sorry, it’s not embeddable.) Note that neither of these videos are “official”; they are both made by adopters. It’s interesting […]
LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
Some Strengths of Sakai 2
I write a fair bit about Sakai 3 because I am excited about the possibilities for change that it represents. That said, there are a couple of points worth emphasizing. First, Sakai 3 doesn’t exist yet and won’t be adoptable as a full LMS for a while. (See Sakai 3: What It Is and When […]
Blackboard's iPad App and its implications
Ray Henderson has a post up about his sense of responsibility to customers regarding balancing innovation with mature products (careful refinements in features and support services to meet customer needs) versus innovation in new areas (bold thinking and experiments). It’s vintage Ray—thoughtful, balanced, and customer-focused. And while Ray is always the first person to admit […]
Understanding the Sakai Product Council
If you have never been involved with an open source project, one of the great sources of mystification (and anxiety) for you might be how a group of people spread out all over the world with a wide range of motivations can come together to work on a complex project and produce something coherent and […]
Sakai 3: The Benefits of 'Everything is Content'
One of the more radical departures that Sakai 3 makes from traditional LMS design is that everything in the system is treated as content. A traditional LMS is an aggregation of tools—discussion boards, grade books, test engines, wikis, assignment drop boxes, etc.—each of which has its own data model in a relational database. It’s really […]
Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine
Brian Moynihan has posted his Masters Thesis on University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s LMS evaluation, which eventually came down to a shootout between Blackboard and Unicon-supported Sakai. There’s a lot that’s of interest in this paper, particularly around the complexity of higher ed IT environments and the need for integration, but these two […]
Sakai 3: What It Is and When To Move To It
I have been getting a lot of questions from the Sakai-curious lately about the whole Sakai 2 vs. Sakai 3 question. When will Sakai 3 be “ready”? When is a good time to migrate? If I’m under pressure to migrate in the short term, what should I do? Should I go to Sakai 2 and […]