Spain’s The Universidad Nacional de Educaci�n a Distancia (UNED) is moving 200,000 students to dotLRN. As far as I know, this will be easily the biggest rollout of a FOSS LMS on the planet. Congrats to the dotLRN community.
LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
The Portal is the Platform, Part I
This post is part of a series on the concept of a Learning Management Operating System. In my last few posts, I argued that accommodating niche learning applications is an important part of the next wave of LMS design, pointed to Google Maps as an example of a niche application that’s designed to be easily […]
First Impression of Sakai 2.0: Better Than I Expected
Given that Sakai 1.5 was a feature-impoverished, unusable wreck, I fully expected 2.0 to be unusable as well. After spending half a day with it, I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong. While 2.0 is certainly not nearly as mature as other FOSS LMS’s such as dotLRN and Moodle, I think it […]
Is Sakai a Platform or a Product?
Ben Brophy, a UI designer at MIT, muses about whether Sakai is a platform or a product. His initial answer is that it should be both. But he worries about the implications of having it as platform: The conference ended with a Q&A session with the Sakai board members. I asked how decisions about what’s […]
WebCT and Open Source
James Farmer has a bee in his bonnet about the fact that WebCT is integrating Open Source components such as PHPWiki into the LMS. he writes, …[T]he essence is that WebCT, as far as I can tell, are now ‘integrating’ and are planning to integrate a huge swathe of open source tools essentially into WebCT […]
Lean Clients, Plump Clients, and Chubby Clients for Learning Management Systems
As I mentioned in a previous post the SUNY Learning Network currently uses a home-grown learning management system built on top of Lotus Notes. And while there is a web interface to the system, many of the current users are quite attached to their fat client. This may sound quaintly outdated at the moment. However, […]
Learning Activity Management Systems
SUNY has a home-grown Lotus-Notes-based learning management system that has some truly remarkable features. I’ll be posting about some of these innovations over the coming weeks as I get to know the system better. What I want to focus on in this post, though, is a feature that I have only ever heard of one […]