Jim Farmer has posted a slide stack (in PDF format) on the economics of interoperability. There’s a lot of good general stuff here about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and interoperability issues from a business perspective, but 90%+ can also be read to apply directly to the LMOS concept.
Here are some highlights:
Campus Technology has strong backgrounder on Open Source that could be useful for educating your stakeholders. It covers the basics–and a few not-so-basics–in very clear, simple terms. In the latter case, I’d like to highlight just three of a handful of fine points that the article brings forward. First, one critical strategy to consider is “aggregating support costs across institutions so that ongoing costs of running the software can be shared.” In other words, the more organizations can collaborate on support, the better Open Source generally looks in terms of total cost of ownership. The economy of scale reduces the significance of any support cost differentials that may exist. Second, the future value of Open Source on campus is really going to be unlocked via loose coupling:
A typical workflow within a college eLearning environment today might look something like this: A faculty member creates a Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint document as the basis for a student assignment. The faculty member uploads the document into the Blackboard Content Repository and makes it available to her students through the Blackboard Course Management System. Students create their own Microsoft Word documents and submit them to the faculty member, still within the Blackboard environment. The student also saves a copy of the assignment and submits it to his LiveText ePortfolio system. All of these interactions may be accessed from a university portal application, or they may each require a separate entry and authentication scheme.
Now consider an alternate workflow. The faculty member uses OpenOffice to author the assignment and saves it to what appears to be a network drive on the faculty’s desktop. In reality, the network drive is the faculty’s space in a Fedora-driven content repository � providing functionality such as version control and collaborative access. The Fedora system also serves as a universal document repository from which content is drawn into the Sakai course management system. As the student completes the assignment and uploads it into Sakai, the student’s work is automatically added to the Fedora repository, where it can be referenced from OSP (the ePortfolio system integrated within Sakai), or through collaboration tools used in conjunction with other students.
This is very much the vision that inspires the LMOS.
And the final point I want to highlight is actually a reference to research by my colleague Patrick Masson. Pat was interested in making the point on the Sakai discussion lists that, if Sakai (or any particular Open Source project) wants to get broader adoption, they need to foster broad conversations about the value proposition of Open Source in general across various stakeholder communities within potential adopting institutions. He came up with a clever rough-cut metric of comparing the co-occurrence of the phrases “open source” and “information technology” on a university’s web site to that of peer institutions.
These are just the three points that resonated the most with me; there’s a lot more in the article.
I almost missed this post by Scott Leslie expressing his mixed feelings about the standards talk coming out of Alt-i-Labs. Lucky for me, Stephen picked it up in OLDaily. Scott writes:
Part of me really wants some of these developments to come true, to deliver the promised ‘plug and play’ elearning environments described herein, and in my rational moments I know that 10 years really isn’t that long for a field like this to coalesce around an open set of interoperability specs. And yet it would be hard to fault a newcomer looking at these presentations for wondering if this represents what is still to be done, how anyone manages to develop quality online learning experiences now (and how many PhDs will be required to operate the CMS of the future)?
The thing is, the newcomer would be correct to wonder. While a good teacher can cultivate quality learning experiences (online or otherwise) with a rock and a stick, the truth is that today’s online learning environments don’t really help them much. The majority of online courses basically use the LMS as a discussion board (a.k.a. “the rock”) and a file sharing system (a.k.a. “the stick”). There are several reasons why interoperability standards should help this situation a great deal. (more…)
Mark Oehlert has a great post up on the implications of the proliferation of tools like Apple Widgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Google Gadgets, and so on, for learning environment design. (Some of you may recall that Apple widgets figured prominently in one of my early LMOS posts.) Mark’s post is good enough to be worth quoting at length: (more…)
Phew. Enough with the Apple stuff. I actually still have one or two more posts on the topic that I want to return to at a later time, but I need a break from it. (I’m sure you do too.)
So here’s a slightly different angle. As regular e-Literate readers know, Patrick Masson and I published an article in eLearn Magazine in which we advocated for “an LMS for a mashup world.” Since then, there have been a lot of questions of what such a beast would look like. Can you build a system that has both the ease-of-use that comes from tight integration in traditional enterprise apps and the nimbleness that you get from mashups?
Update: Although you can’t copy and paste the podcatching URL from the iTunes client, it is apparently possible to expose the podcatching URL from the administration interface. I have no direct information about why this is so. However, it is consistent with Apple’s general approach to DRM. It may be that by making it easy for the producer to expose the URL but inconvenient for the consumer to do so without help from the producer, they are trying to strike a balance that gives iTunes U a “soft” DRM capability without resorting to encryption. But that’s just a guess.
This is part 6 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
As you can probably tell from my last few posts, I’m pretty jazzed about the potential of iTunes U. But that doesn’t mean that I think the first version is perfect by any means. Here’s what I’d like to see from Apple going forward: (more…)
There’s been a lot of buzz (some positive and some negative) about Apple’s iTunes University. I’m pleased to say that I will be traveling with a number of SUNY colleagues to 1 Infinite Loop the week after next, where we will hear more about the program. I promise to blog about what I learn. In the meantime, I’d like to sketch out an idea that Patrick Masson and I have been batting around about how iTunes U could fit into an LMOS. (more…)
