When I talk to Instructure competitors or critics, I usually hear two complaints about them: They “open wash” or are “fauxpen.” They have no vision. Having attended Instructurecon 2016 a couple of weeks ago, my answer to the first complaint is that the critics don’t understand what Instructure and their customers mean by “openness.” In […]
Canvas
MoodleMoot US 16: Playing small-ball
At the MoodleMoot in late June in Los Angeles, which serves as close to a users conference for the open source Moodle LMS community as any other event, there was a strong sense of continuity and general improvements. Rather than aggressive rearchitectures and product lineup changes, the Moodle roadmap is based on hitting singles and running […]
MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong
New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up. Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently […]
LMS Outage: Exclusive view of UC Davis contract with Scriba
When I first heard about the recent LMS outage at UC Davis – which left the school with no LMS access for a full week and without a fully functional LMS through the remainder of the spring term – it was quite clear that this was an unusual situation. There have been plenty of other LMS […]
SmartSite Goes Dumb: A student’s view of the UC Davis LMS outage
[ed. Cydney Jones is a junior at UC Davis, and she was kind enough to share information and insights during my coverage of the UC Davis LMS outage (their Sakai-based LMS is branded as SmartSite and hosted by Scriba). I asked her if she could write a post giving a student’s inside view of the situation. […]
Update on UC Davis LMS Fiasco: Finishing the term with two partial systems
After the LMS outage that started May 20th – covered here, here, and here at e-Literate – UC Davis has finished its spring academic term as of June 9th using two partial systems, one for faculty and one for students and neither of which is fully functional. In other words, UC Davis never fully recovered its […]
Sakai Is Probably Healthier Than You Think
These days, most people don’t hear much about Sakai, and when they do, it’s usually bad news. Most recently there was the horrible outage at UC Davis and some other Sakai schools using a support vendor called Scriba. Before that, the last thing you may have heard was the departure of Sakai founders such as Indiana […]