e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Moodle Mobile vs. Blackboard Mobile Learn: Web App vs. Native

    I was incorrect when I wrote that Moodle Mobile would have an Android-native client. Carlos Kiyan, a member of the Moodle Mobile team, clarified for me over Twitter that Moodle Mobile is a web app which has, for the moment, focused on WebKit-based browsers. (Both the iPhone and Android have default browsers that are WebKit-based.) Sorry for missing that; I should have looked at those videos more closely. Meanwhile, Kayvon Beykpour of the Blackboard Mobile Learn team has written a blog post that talks about their decision to go with native clients.

    As you might expect, each team thinks their approach is better. The Moodle Mobile team thinks that the web-based approach is more portable and will allow them to reach more smart phones. They think that the main gap between web-based and native apps is working offline, and they have developed offline caching for their app using a third-party product. (HTML 5, which both Google and Apple are promoting, will support offline capabilities, but it is not clear when this will be practically available in mobile browsers.) The Blackboard Mobile Learn team claims that native apps will allow them to provide a better user experience. To be honest, I don’t know much about mobile app development and have no intuitions about who is right. I have been impressed with the quality of Google’s Buzz mobile web app, but I don’t assume that the approach will work for everything that you’d want to do in an app. We’ll have to see once the Blackboard Mobile Learn team has their app out whether they are doing interesting things that a web app can’t do.

    Regarding portability, there’s a long term and a short term issue. In the short term, Blackboard will have a Blackberry app while Moodle won’t. I suspect that the market share for Blackberries among college students is pretty low, even in the United States. On the other hand, it’s not always about numbers. If, for example, you have an important executive education program offered by your business school, then Blackberry support will matter a lot. In the long term, I suspect that the web app approach will be more portable and allow the developers to keep up on more platforms with fewer resources. But we’ll see. This is a very young market.

    Update: It appears that Blackberry plans to have a WebKit-based browser in the near future.

    Later Update: Carlos Kiyan pointed me in the direction of this article, which outlines the pros and cons of both native and web app approaches.

  • Moodle Mobile Now Developing an Android Native Client

    Well, I guess it’s mLearning Week here at e-Literate. Just a day after I noted that the main difference we are aware of between the Moodle mobile clients and the forthcoming Blackboard Mobile Learn client is that Blackboard plans to have native apps for Android and Blackberry, the Moodle folks announce progress on a native Android app. Let the arms race begin!

    Update: I have just been informed by a member of the Moodle mobile development team that both the iPhone app and the Android app are, in fact, web apps and not platform-native apps. That wasn’t obvious to me at all on casual viewing (especially with the iPhone, where I have no first-hand experience and didn’t recognize the browser chrome). It will be interesting to see how much of a difference that makes in terms of user experience, particularly with Google and Apple both pushing HTML 5.  Anyway, the mobile web app has been tested for Android, but is not Android-native.

    By the way, the helpful people at Blackboard’s P.R. firm referred me to this study at Ball State University showing that, as of about six months ago, 38.5% of their students own smart phones, and 18% (or roughly half of the students with smart phones) owned iPhones. No word on the Blackberry/Android breakdown, which probably has changed in the past six months anyway due to the new Android phones on the market. I am quite sure that there is a lot of variability from school to school, based on demographic, socio-economic, and geographic factors.

    There’s actually some interesting mobile work being done by University of Cape Town in South Africa, but it focuses on text messages rather than whizzy smart phone apps. (I strongly suspect that UCT has a lower percentage of smart phone users with unlimited data plans than Ball State does.) I’m looking into the possibility of getting a guest post on this topic at some point. (That’s a hint, Stephen.)

  • Moodle Mobile vs. Blackboard Mobile Learn

    Blackboard just announced the planned availability (in June) of Blackboard Mobile Learn:

    Blackboard Inc. (Nasdaq: BBBB) today announced plans for Blackboard Mobile Learn(TM), an application that will bring two-way teaching and learning to mobile devices, creating an interactive mobile learning experience for students and teachers on the go.Blackboard’s existing Blackboard Mobile Central(TM) application already delivers a mobile campus experience that includes news, events, maps and sports among a range of student life and service options.

    Blackboard Mobile Learn will take the next step by bringing the classroom experience and learning content to the mobile environment, arming campuses with a high quality option to quickly meet the growing demand from students who want to do more with their smart phones and other Web-enabled devices.

    From what we know so far, the main difference between this and the Moodle mobile offerings is that Blackboard plans to have native clients for Android and Blackberry while Moodle so far only provides a Java-based client for non-iPhone mobile phones. (Does anybody have market share data on smart phones for the college aged demographic?) We won’t know if there are actual functional differences until Blackboard releases more details.

  • Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support

    Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one that’s still under development. Something to look for is regular public demonstrations of progress within the context of the standards body. The work Blackboard unveiled this week bodes well. The CC demo (import only at this point) was developed by Blackboard itself, while the BLTI demo was implemented as a building block by Steven Vickers at the University of Edinburgh (and released under the GPL open source license). Ray promises an update on the progress at the BbWorld conference in July.

    Good stuff.

  • Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine

    Brian Moynihan has posted his Masters Thesis on University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s LMS evaluation, which eventually came down to a shootout between Blackboard and Unicon-supported Sakai. There’s a lot that’s of interest in this paper, particularly around the complexity of higher ed IT environments and the need for integration, but these two paragraphs particularly caught my eye as being relevant to the general LMS evaluation process of many schools:

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  • Blackboard v. Desire2Learn Is Over

    All lawsuits have been dropped by both sides. The companies will cross-license each others’ patent portfolios under undisclosed terms, which gives both companies an opportunity to save face. After three and a half years, higher education can move on. Left unresolved is the larger question of the role of patents in higher education, but that is at least as much a question for the universities as it is for the vendors.

    For now, though, I’m just happy it’s over.

  • 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!