This was reported in The Salt Lake Tribune and, more recently, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As I have mentioned here previously, startup LMS developer Instructure recently won an LMS bid for the 140,000-student Utah Education Network (UEN). Now, UEN, as a consortium of public schools, is bound by state laws regarding contract bidding. In their complaint, […]
edunomics
Duke Moving from Blackboard Enterprise to Sakai
As I wrote in an earlier post, defections of Blackboard Enterprise customers to other LMS platforms might be an indicator of a greater market share movement that we’ve seen in the past because, absent any forced migration, schools just don’t change LMSs very often. Well, Duke has announced that they are moving from Blackboard Enterprise […]
How Do You Choose Your Textbook?
This is a question for e-Literate readers who are teachers. I’m trying to understand how instructors in different disciplines choose their books for a class. My sense is that it varies widely by discipline. For example, my wife teaches a lot of English Composition, so the didactic manual isn’t as important as the anthology of […]
A Big Vista to Blackboard 9.1 Win
Following up on my two-part series on the changing LMS market, I am going to write short posts noting LMS evaluation decisions of Vista, Blackboard Enterprise, and select ANGEL customers (as well as any others that seem noteworthy) when I hear of them. Today, via Ray Henderson’s tweet, I note that the San Diego Community […]
Higher Education Recession: A new role for information technologists?
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Jim is Chairman of instructional media + magic. Monday, 11 October the Browne report, “Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education,” was released in the UK.1 If implemented there will be major cuts in funds available to U.K. universities and higher tuition for students. The combination of less […]
SunGard Delivers Sakai Support Through rSmart Partnership
This is pretty big news. SunGard will be providing Sakai support services to its customers. If you’re interested in Sakai, you can contract with SunGard to get help migrating, setting up integration, and training faculty, as well as ongoing hosting and support. They’ll be doing this, in part, through a partnership in which rSmart is […]
Xplana.com: Is This a PLE?
The title of this post is slightly tongue-in-cheek because I have my doubts about whether there is such a thing as PLEs that are distinct from existing software product categories. If there were, then after years of people talking about them, one would think there would have been an example by now that everybody could […]