e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

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

  • Moodle 2.0 Versus Blackboard 9.0/9.1

    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 to note that the highlights list of the Moodle 2.0 release has a fair bit of overlap with the highlights of the Blackboard 9.0 and 9.1 releases:

    • Both tout improved usability
    • Specific improvements in test creation usability
    • Both now support searching for and embedding external media (e.g., YouTube videos, Creative Commons-licensed photographs, etc.) within their UIs.
    • Both now support mobile clients
    • Wikis (new in Blackboard 9.0, improved in Moodle 2.0)
    • Improved support for blogs

    Developing a good LMS is hard and I happen to think that both development teams have done some good work on improving their respective platforms. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of that frustration of the edupunks when looking at these highlights. For example, I have been able to search for and embed videos and images inside of WordPress for years now. There is a balance that needs to be struck between creating a coherent, supportable environment and getting out of the way of the unbelievable pace of innovation on the consumer web. We’re making some progress toward that balance, but we’re clearly not there yet.

  • Some Strengths of Sakai 2

    Image: University of North Carolina

    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 To Move To It for details.) Second, Sakai 2 is a very good current-generation LMS that is meeting the needs of many schools today.

    University of North Carolina, which has been piloting Sakai 2, has been putting out some excellent evaluation materials on it. (See UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results, for example.) Their Sakai pilot blog also contains some gems. For example, they have identified five “big ideas” that they believe represent some of Sakai’s strengths—particularly in comparison to Blackboard, their current LMS. Here is a video describing the first of those ideas:

    In addition to the school-wide evaluation, the UNC medical school has been looking at Sakai to meet their more specialized needs. (See Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine.) They have some niche requirements which are critical for them, foremost of which is a good calendaring system. Here’s a video of medical school faculty talking about how Sakai works for them:

  • 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 that words and deeds do not amount to the same thing, I suspect that Blackboard customers are going to be pleased to hear the company’s leadership talking this way.

    Ray also unwrapped a demo video of Blackboard’s new iPad application:

    Honestly, this looks like a promising app. If I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and had an iPad, I would want it. I would go further and say that if I were a student or faculty member heavily using Blackboard and thinking about buying an iPad, I might find this app to be an additional motivator to buy one. One common weakness of LMSs is that they don’t always make multitasking easy. Blackboard’s iPad app appears to help in that area. Of course, we don’t know just how much functionality is covered, which is critical. But conceptually speaking, I find the execution to be appealing. The LMS may not be your bag, but if you have to use one heavily, then this may not be a bad way to go.

    Let’s tease out a few additional implications:

  • 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 useful. Of course, we know that such things do happen. (For a beautiful illustration of it happening under conditions of extreme lack of visible coordination, watch Jon Udell’s classic analysis of the evolution of a Wikipedia page, Heavy Metal Umlaut.) We know that it can work. But, from the outside, it’s hard to understand how.

    The truth is that there is a wide range of governance structures that work for different open source projects, and none of them are particularly mysterious once you come to understand them better. Some projects, like Moodle and Linux, have structures that bear some superficial resemblance to normal management structures in that they have strong central managers who make a lot of final decisions. I say “superficial” resemblance because, in many cases, these managers are acting as part traffic cop and part adjudicator, rationalizing contributions and suggestions for direction from all corners of the community more than they are giving top-down commands.

    Other open source projects, like Sakai, take a more distributed approach to management. When they can, they tend to modularize the development so that small groups can work largely independently from each other and can reduce the coordination required to those areas in which their pieces have to work together, either from a technical perspective through integration or from a functional perspective through, for example, common user interface conventions. For those functions where cross-module decision-making has to happen, the community develops mechanisms that look a lot like a representative democracy. In some cases, community members will vote directly on an issue that needs to be resolved. In other cases, they will select representatives to work together in a small group to work through the issues. Just how much (and what kind) of coordination is required depends on a number of factors. Software that has a significant user interface generally requires more coordination than software that does not. Programs where the modules share a lot of technical integration interfaces or services also tend to require more coordination than those that do not. Projects that are in the beginning of their life cycle tend to require more coordination those that are mature.

    Over the years, the Sakai community has tried a number of different coordination structures. One of the most recent innovations (and experiments, really) is the Product Council (PC), of which I am a member. What follows here is my own personal meditation on how the PC came about, what function it is attempting to serve and how successful we’ve been at it so far.

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  • 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 a hodgepodge of separately designed tools that are knitted together through a user interface layer and a few common services. In contrast, Sakai 3 is being built on top of the Apache Jackrabbit reference implementation of the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard. Everything is treated as content, including grades, test questions and answers, discussion threads, syllabi, personal profiles, chat messages, and so on.

    This approach has some benefits in terms of shoring up common weaknesses in LMS designs. But, more profoundly, it also leads to some pretty fundamental changes in the way that learning environments can work, thanks in large part to the strong and growing adoption and maturation of useful content integration standards.

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  • 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 paragraphs particularly caught my eye as being relevant to the general LMS evaluation process of many schools:

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  • 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 migrate later? Or is that like trying to leap the Grand Canyon in two hops? These are tough questions, in large part because they depend a lot on the specifics of your institution. I’m going to do my best to provide some guidelines here and, in the process, provide some context about what Sakai 3 is as well as how the Sakai community is working together on it.

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