e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS

    This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative, follow on Twitter  @PhilOnEdTech or his blog

    It’s been a busy week for LMS announcements, and I expect more announcements leading up to EDUCAUSE.  First, the Hawaii Virtual Learning Network (for K-12) is moving from Moodle to Blackboard, which as Michael Feldstein points out, is a new development to watch.  Then Brown University announced they are moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas as their LMS.  This morning, Jefferson County school district, the largest district in Colorado, announced that they have chosen a module from  LoudCloud Systems’ LMS as the basis for their Instructional Improvement System.

    That’s right – they purchased a module from the overall LMS.  Normally I cover higher ed more than K-12, but this announcement is worth watching since it shows how the New Mentality in LMS Market is or will be changing our expectations on what an LMS can provide.

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  • Brown University moving from Blackboard to Instructure’s Canvas LMS

    This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative, follow on Twitter  @PhilOnEdTech or his blog

    Brown University announced today that they will be moving from MyCourses, which is their branded version of Blackboard Campus Edition (formerly WebCT), to Instructure’s Canvas LMS.  They have already been piloting the Instructure system, and plan to fully move into the new system by Spring 2013.  The Computing and Information Services (CIS), aided by the Academic Technology Steering Committee, started the move to replace MyCourses after Blackboard announced it would end support for Campus Edition by October 2012.  Brown University had been on the WebCT / Blackboard system since 2002.

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  • When Ed-Tech Startups Fail

    This is a guest post by Audrey Watters, an education-journalist who writes for KQED MindShift, Edutopia, and O’Reilly Radar.  You can also find her work on her own blog Hack Education.

    I received the email from Knack for Teachers on Wednesday that the classroom data tracking and visualization tool would be shutting down. There’s also a blog post on the site to that effect. The servers will remain in operation for the next 3 months, the blog post explains, a time frame that “should be enough for all users to archive data and/or find another online gradebook solution.”

    The app developer, Jarrod Drysdale, has written a longer piece on his personal blog about his work on the project. Knack for Teachers was, as he describes it, “a labor of love” — one that he dumped about $2000 of his own money into, but that almost no teacher used (and even fewer paid for).

    Drysdale’s post is, not surprisingly, pretty bitter about the failure of Knack for Teachers, and while he chronicles the efforts he made in order to promote the product and to change it to help woo new customers, his conclusion to the whole affair is that teachers are “lousy customers.”

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  • Yummy, Yummy Data

    EDUCAUSE is just a few weeks away, which means that the release of the annual Campus Computing survey is also just a few weeks away. It’s pretty much the only decent source of data we have on LMS trends (among many other things) in higher education. Since we are arguably midway through a four-year LMS market transition as WebCT and ANGEL get end-of-lifed, I look forward to this year’s survey results with great anticipation. And, of course, we’ll analyze the implications of it here on e-Literate.

    In the meantime, if you are one of the people responsible for filling out the survey at your institution, make sure you get it done!

  • Hawaii Dept. of Education Moving from Moodle to Blackboard

    Blackboard just put out a press release announcing that the Hawaii Department of Education is moving their Hawaii Virtual Learning Network (HVLN) from an open source LMS to Blackboard. The press release doesn’t name the platform, but HVLN is currently running Moodle. This is notable because it’s the first move I have heard of away from open source to Blackboard in the United States and one of a very few that I’ve heard of globally. One data point does not make a trend, but this does bear watching.

  • Role of Educational Technology in Enabling Higher Ed Change

    This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative, follow on Twitter  @PhilOnEdTech or his blog

    Over the weekend, and over the big pond, Music for Deckchairs had two interesting posts that called me out for perhaps being too optimistic on the transformation of LMS markets.  The two posts referenced my recent posts on New Mentality Entering LMS Market and 3 Surprising LMS Market Observations, although I suspect they might indirectly reference Michael Feldstein’s posts support the same proposition – namely that the LMS market specifically, and ed tech market generally, is changing in significant ways that are going to have a big impact on higher education.  Both posts from Music for Deckchairs are important reads. (more…)

  • Sakai OAE 1.0 Released

    I’m a little late reporting this, but the Sakai community has released the long-awaited 1.0 version of its Open Academic Environment platform (formerly known as Sakai 3). Here’s an overview:

    As you’ll see, it takes a very different approach from conventional LMSs. It doesn’t yet have some of the core features of an LMS either (e.g., grade book and test engine), but it clearly is useful today for certain kinds of academic collaboration needs and represents a promising direction. When you throw this in the mix with the new commercial entrants that Phil Hill blogged about recently, it adds up to really interesting times ahead in the LMS space.