e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

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

  • LMOS Services and Service Brokers, Part I

    One of the most important concepts in the LMOS Project Vision and Mission Statements is the service broker. In fact, it may very well be the most important concept. But it can be a little abstract, especially for non-technologists (like me). In the next couple of posts, I’m going to do my best to explain what it is and why it could make a very big difference in the evolution of learning management systems.

    (more…)

  • All Hail the Mighty B-Rex

    Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the news by now. BlackCT Wednesday has hit. Will it be remembered as The Day the Music Died? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, it could be remembered as The Day the Music Was So Badly Wounded That It Became Barely Listenable for a Really Long Time.

    You know. Kinda like the ’80’s. Except with software. (more…)

  • Time, Ownership, and the VLE

    This is the first of several posts I’ll be making about stuff I learned at yesterday’s conference at FIT–which was excellent. It’s not often that I go to a conference where I find every single speaker to be interesting, but this was certainly the case here. (Raymond Yee apparently live-blogged…er…live-wiki’ed the first part of the day.)

    Anyway, keynote speaker Rachel Smith pointed out a great little project called Dracula Blogged. Basically, the author, noting that Dracula is written as a series of dated journal entries, decided it might be cool to republish the novel as a weblog, posting each entry on the same calendar day (e.g, October 6th) as the dated entry in the novel. I think the success of this experiment underlines a couple of attributes that we need to think about for next-generation VLE’s. (more…)

  • LMOS Integration and Specialization

    This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

    In my last few posts, I argued that a next-generation learning management platform should have the following characteristics:

    • It should provide a framework that makes it as easy as possible for programmers with different skill levels in different programming languages to build and integrate learning tools that will serve specialized teaching and learning needs.
    • Whenever possible, the technology standards implemented by the framework should be general rather than education-specific in order to encourage the re-use of relevant groupware applications that weren’t originally designed for e-learning purposes.
    • Part of what the framework should provide is a set of user interface primitives, thus reducing the usability challenge of mixing together applications that were designed by different groups of people. But those primitives should be inheritable by applications with as little specific programmer effort as possible, i.e., they should mostly come along automatically when the developer chooses to use the framework.
    • Another part of what the framework should provide is strong and flexible groups, roles, and permissions structures to be used by the various learning applications.
    • The roles, groups, and permissions framework should also provide the capability of a user-centric view in which users can get roll-up views of data in applications that they use across several different groups (e.g., the combined calendar dates in several courses plus club and campus events).

    I have claimed that all of these goals can be met by using a modern, JSR-168-compliant portal as an architectural basis.

    But two questions naturally arise. First, don’t we need any inter-application integration? Second, to the degree that we do need that integration, does it need to be done using specialized, e-learning-specific APIs? Depending on how the goals defined, I think the answer to both questions is “less so than you might expect.” (more…)

  • The Portal is the Platform, Part III

    This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

    I have argued in this series that the heart of an LMOS should be a portal. The main reason I have given so far is that a modern portal is well suited to handle the long tail of specialized learning applications. But portals have many other virtues as well. For a good overview of the benefits it offers to a higher education environment, check out this report [PDF] put out by The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. In the specific case of an LMOS, the second virtue that I want to highlight is flexible groups functionality. (more…)

  • The Portal is the Platform, Part II

    This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System.

    Ben Brophy raised an important point in his comment on my last post in this series regarding the different ways in which portals can be used with an application. As he points out, My Yahoo! just provides windows to external applications , while some other portals actually pull the entire applications into the portal itself. To be clear, I favor the latter approach over the former for LMOS designs. In other words, an LMOS should not just have a portal; it should essentially be a portal. There are a variety of technical, cultural, and usability reasons for this, some of which I won’t get into in this post, but the main one is related to the history of LMS design and why I think they generally have sucked so badly for so long. (more…)

  • What Platform Do You Use for (Pure) Distance Learning?

    I’m doing a little research and could use your help. I have a growing suspicion that the distribution of LMS platforms for programs that do large amounts of pure distance learning is different than the mix of LMS’s among institutions that mainly do web-enhanced (which is most of the higher ed market, frankly). If you are at college or university that has a substantial program of pure distance learning (i.e., the students never or almost never meet face-to-face), please add a comment to this post or {encode=”[email protected]” title=”email me”} with the following information:

    • The name of your institution
    • The approximate number of pure distance learning students you have in your program
    • The platform you use
    • The reasons why you chose that platform.

    Thanks in advance for the help. If I get a decent amount of data, I’ll report back the results here.