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.

  • Blackboard Contributing Code to Open Source Project

    According to Scott Rosenbaum, a business intelligence consultant, Blackboard has given him permission to contribute code back back to the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project (or, more accurately, they are contributing the code as separate open source projects that can be “used by the community”). The project that generated this contribution is not entirely clear from Scott’s blog post, but I infer that it’s reporting tools that are used in the Blackboard product itself. So, it looks like (a) Blackboard may be incorporating open source code into their product, and (b) they are contributing some of the modifications they made to that code back under an open source license. (Any clarification on any of these points by Scott or by Blackboard is welcome.)

    Nice!

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • On "Open" Proprietary Software

    There’s been a lot of buzz from various proprietary LMS and SIS vendors lately about how “open” their respective platforms are. I think it’s important that we have a sophisticated notion of openness that is more nuanced than all or nothing. At the same time, I also think it’s important that the word be grounded in reality and not reduced to meaningless marketing-speak. I don’t claim to have any definitive answers as to what should be labeled “open” under what circumstances, but I would like to explore the concept a bit further by reflecting on the ways and degrees to which Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions (CS), the SIS platform that I happen to work on, may be “open”. Note that, to my knowledge, Oracle hasn’t run any big marketing campaigns touting CS as “open” and I’m not making any grand claims about it either. It happens to be an example that I know relatively well and as good a place to start as any.

    So here’s a non-exhaustive list of ways in which proprietary software could be called “open”:

    (more…)

  • I've Been Elected to the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors

    I am gratified—and slightly surprised—to announce that the members of the Sakai community have elected me to serve on the Sakai Foundation’s Board of Directors. I deeply appreciate their faith in me. I also am grateful to my employer for not only enabling me to make the time commitment but also for actively supporting and encouraging my decision to run in the first place.

    Congratulations to fellow new board members Ian Boston, Maggie Lynch, and Chuck Severance. The bios and platforms of all the nominees, including but not limited to those who got elected, are here.

  • Curtiss Barnes on Learning Information Services

    Curtiss Barnes is Vice President of Industry Product Strategy for Education and Research at Oracle, and he’s also an all around smart guy. In his latest blog post, he has some more details on recent progress with LIS.

    It’s well worth your time.

  • IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

    Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.

    (more…)

  • Pearson Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services

    Pearson just announced that they will be supporting the IMS LIS standard (and with Oracle’s SAIP implementation of it) across a number of their products. First, they’ll support it in MyLabs, which are subject-focused learning environments (e.g., MyChemLab, MyMathLab, etc.)—sort of a fusion between an online textbook and a lightweight LMS. This kind of provisioning cuts out the middle man of the full LMS. (Up until now, the course roster information would typically be provisioned to the LMS, and the LMS would then provision it to MyLabs.)

    Pearson will also be supporting LIS integration for their newly announced LearningStudio product, which is a fusion of their eCollege and Fronter acquisitions. I haven’t seen LearningStudio yet, but I have seen Fronter, and I was seriously impressed. It may just be the most powerful and flexible LMS on the market today. It has been focused on the K12 (European) market up until now, but I saw nothing that would prevent it from working well in higher education as well.