Yes, yes, we’ve all heard the news by now. BlackCT Wednesday has hit. Will it be remembered as The Day the Music Died? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, it could be remembered as The Day the Music Was So Badly Wounded That It Became Barely Listenable for a Really Long Time.
You know. Kinda like the ’80’s. Except with software. (more…)
Not too long ago, I introduced the notion of a Learning Management Operating System, or LMOS. I’m going to be blogging about this concept quite a bit in the coming days and weeks, so I have created a theme heading for it on my blog. My first few posts on the topic will focus on the motivation behind the concept, starting with the need to address the long tail of teaching and learning applications. (more…)
An excerpt from Sakai’s press release regarding a demonstration of the IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) standard:
The demonstration included four LMS systems including BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle. The demonstration included three applications: Concept Tutor, Samigo(Sakai), and QuestionMark. All LMS/Application combinations worked and were demonstrated at the meeting which validates the interoperability of the IMS TI specification.
The demonstration was the culmination of nine months of significant co-design and engineering between all of the participants.
Now that the interoperability demonstration is complete, the standard is expected to be published Fall 2005. As long as the standard is finalized in time, we expect that this feature will be present in the Sakai 2.1 release in the Fall 2005.
Here’s a taste:
Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write – the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not. Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students.
Thank you, Laura Gibbs. It’s long past time for schools and other teaching institutions to stop counting bullet points in glossy brochures and start looking at which platforms have the features (and implementations of those features) to actually facilitate good teaching.
Here’s a nice informational post on the pitfalls of Blackboard as well as various Open Source and home-grown alternatives (including using blogs as an ad hoc course management system) from Kathleen Gilroy. The analogy I often make with Blackboard is to a classroom where all the seats are bolted to the floor. How the room is arranged matters. If students are going to be having a class discussion, maybe you put the chairs in a circle. If they will be doing groupwork, maybe you put them in groups. If they are doing lab work, you put them around lab tables. A good room set-up can’t make a class succeed by itself, but a bad room set-up can make it fail. If there’s a loud fan drowning out conversation or if the room is so hot that it’s hard to concentrate, you will lose students.
A good CMS allows for flexibility in classroom set-up. For example, when I used dotLRN for a project (ironically, while working for Kathleen’s company) I was able to meet with stakeholders and try different arrangements of the virtual chairs until we found one that they were comfortable with. The default set-up, which was optimised for on-campus students who took four or five courses at once and needed an aggregation portal, was completely unsuited for my audience, which was a group of full-time bond traders and other financial services people who were taking time out of their twelve-hour work days for one course. It wasn’t worth their time to learn the complex (cluttered?) interface that made sense for a full-time college student. So we streamlined. We turned off functionality that we didn’t need. We renamed pages to fit the students’ expectations. We re-arranged portlet windows on pages and page order on the interface. We did all of this in 15 minutes without any programming.
In Blackboard, you can’t do that. Sure, you can change the way the buttons look. And you can hide a button. But that’s it. It’s essentially only trivially configurable by the instructor. I strongly believe that this has a significant impact on distance learning drop-out rates.
