I’ve been told by two sources that the UC Davis LMS outage I described in this post may be over, and the SmartSite LMS is back online (SmartSite is UC Davis’ implementation of Sakai, hosted by Scriba). I would like to update what we know about the overall situation while we wait for additional confirmation. The […]
Scriba Disaster: Sakai-based LMS for UC Davis is down with no plans for recovery
In what might shape up as one of the worst LMS outages in recent history, UC Davis has been working without an LMS for the past week and does not expect their vendor to fix the problems before the end of the term. UC Davis uses a version of Sakai hosted by the LMS remnants of […]
No, Blackboard Report Did Not Conclude That Online Classes Are “A Poorer Experience”
I’m seeing a lot of chatter online about the recently-released Blackboard report and this slide in particular: Foundational Insights When students take a class online, they make a tacit agreement to a poorer experience which undermines their educational self worth. Students perceive online classes as a loophole they can exploit that also shortcuts the “real” college experience. […]
Comparing Fully-Online vs Mixed-Course Enrollment Data
Mike Caulfield wrote a post yesterday about a new Blackboard report on design findings regarding online students. The focus of Mike’s post was that people often assume that the norm for an “online” student is taking all courses online, when in fact it is more common for students to take some courses online and some […]
Previous LMS For Schools Moving to Canvas in US and Canada
During the most recent quarterly earnings call for Instructure, an analyst asked an interesting question (despite starting off from the Chris Farley Show format). Corey Greendale (First Analysis Securities Corporation): Awesome. A couple of other things on the, primarily on the Higher Ed space but I guess on education space, there’s a whole lot of couple […]
What Homework and Adaptive Platforms Are (and Aren’t) Good For
I was delighted that we are able to publish Mike Caulfield’s post on how ed tech gets personalization backwards, partly because Mike is such a unique and inventive thinker, but also because he provided such a great example of how “personalized learning” teaching techniques are different than adaptive content and other product capabilities. The heart of his post […]
Our LMS Subscription is Available Today
Today we are pleased to announce that our LMS subscription service is available for purchase. As promised, we have kept the promotion on the blog to a minimum, providing details instead to people who specifically sign up for the mailing list. But since today is the big unveiling, it seems appropriate to tell you all […]