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.
Category: LMS & Learning Platforms
Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.
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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 integratable, and pointed to Apple Dashboard as an example of a framework for integrating niche applications. Now I’d like dispense with the analogy and talk about the correct foundation for an LMOS integration framework: the portal. (more…)
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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 may just be roughly competitive with entry-level Blackboard or WebCT Campus Edition. That’s an impressive leap to make in 6 months. (more…)
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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 included as the ‘core tools’ will be made. The response I got from one board member was “I’d like to see Sakai include six discussion boards. The user can try them all and decide which they like best.” No other board member disagreed.
That’s been bugging me ever since. Even assuming that each school’s IT department will pick a default set of tools (a possibility mentioned by the board member), does it make sense to have Sakai include every tool built? Can there be no standards for inclusion? If I’m developing a new attendance-taking tool that I want to be able to post grades, what do I do if there are 6 gradebooks?
This isa problem, for sure. But it’s not one that I’d be looking to the Sakai community to solve for me. (more…)
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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 so you can kiss your independent sandpit / development goodbye�. why would you want it when the ‘One Great Solution’ can provide it for everyone.
I guess I see it a little differently. (more…)
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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, I strongly suspect that we’ll see fat(ter) LMS clients in the near future. There are some wonderful affordances that come with a more robust client-side component to the system. Up until now, those affordances have come with the relatively steep price of having to develop, install and maintain fairly heavy-duty (and often cross-platform) client-side software. But that’s changing. These days, the browser and the operating system themselves are increasingly able to function as client-side platforms for richer functionality. Add to this the blossoming of web services and the small, simple client-side tools that they enable, and we have the potential for what I would call “lean clients,” “plump clients” and “chubby clients.” (more…)
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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 other LMS providing in a meaningful way, which is providing a fundamental course organization structure (i.e., a user interface to the course) that focuses on the temporal sequence of learning activities rather than the more typical interface that simply organizes the course based on types of functionality and content resources (e.g., course notes, discussions, etc.). In previous posts, I have referred to this idea in terms of learning experience objects, but the folks at Macquarie University in Australia have built a system based on the same principles that they call a Learning Activity Management System (LAMS). (more…)