e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: learning-management-systems

  • Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process

    I have volunteered to give my local community college some advice regarding some LMS migration decisions they have to make—if to migrate, when to migrate, how to migrate, and so on. In many ways, they’re a pretty typical school with some pretty typical problems, so I thought it might be worthwhile to write down some of this advice for others in similar situations. You might be one of those others if at least three of the following are true:

    • You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
    • You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
    • You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
    • Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
    • Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
    • Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
    • You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
    • You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.
    If so, then this advice is for you:

  • Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere

    Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required.

    As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with more on the way. Certainly, a critical mass of universities are recognizing the value of open standards and accepting that open source is a viable and important approach. Open access and open educational resources are coming on too, although they are much earlier in their adoption cycle. Further down the road, open governance and open business practices are looming on the horizon.

    (more…)

  • SIS to Facebook Direct. Introducing Schools on Facebook.

    tab_view.png
    Hi!  I’m Michael Staton and I’m a guest blogger.  What I say in no way represents Michael Feldstein or his ancestors.  Also, our screenshot here is of our app with Abilene Christian University, a school known for being a thought leader in instructional technology and mobile learning products. (They give their students iPhones.  No, really.  They do.)  I am also not representing ACU, its trustees, nor their ancestors.

    So, as I said yesterday, Oracle’s had a short few partners for this upgrade.  With the others included being mainstream LMS systems, you might wonder why Oracle would bother with an upstart like Inigral who hasn’t even invested in a good marketing site.  I hope to answer that question here.  If you read Michael’s blog often, this post will be of interest to you.

    We are introducing a product we’re calling “Schools on Facebook” (in private beta) that is a private, secure application (on Facebook) that can be skinned with a schools branding and connect with their current technology infrastructure.  It doesn’t compete with but complements CMS and LMS systems by focusing on socialization and relationship building; more on how below.

    It’s a cliche when a start up claims to revolutionize this or that.  So, at Inigral we try to stay realistic: we’re focusing on adding a social layer to what already exists.  We want to change the conversation about the internet in education from one of using the web to “manage courses” to one about using the web to facilitate the relationships that develop on campuses already.  After all, a real learning environment is one built on the mortar of person-to-person exchange.   Why not have an application that focuses on that?

    No software is a better example of this than Facebook, which took your campus by storm less than four years ago.  Students started engaging in high-frequency, (some might say mindless) contact that seemed to help students connect with their peers to build and maintain relationships throughout their campus experience.   And you never even paid for it.  Some of you[r colleagues] (not you, you’re too savvy for that) even talked about shutting it out.  But as time went on more of you (and you were early on this one) started to realize what Nicole Ellison documented in her research: that Facebook magnifies the “connectedness” that people feel to your school, one relationship at a time.

    Students use Facebook to represent their identity, and they fill out all sorts of information to that end.  Our product, Schools on Facebook, delivers course schedules, majors, organization memberships and other on campus affiliations to Facebook.  It also shows that “campus safe” identity to classmates and instructors, which helps to build conversations by introducing “primer” information,  i.e. “I see you’re a member of the economics club, are you planning on being an economist?”

    Students use facebook to talk about school all the time, our application just enables a students’ course information to be a part of those conversations.  It also enables contact between faculty and classmates who are not “friends” with a student on Facebook.  Faculty that have ventured on to Facebook have struggled with whether or not to be “friends,” and the safest bet with the least amount of line crossed is to not be friends.  Through our application, campus exchanges can stay out of the personal part of Facebook, and the personal part of facebook can stay out of campus exchanges.

    It has some other great features, too.  But I don’t want to take up any more of Feldstein’s blog with our pitch.

    This is the first public announcement that we are currently selecting two more schools to participate in our limited beta this fall.  We’re only taking three, and we’ve signed up one and have a big name other in the pipeline (huge name, actually).  We’re looking for the “right” school, one that’s going to be excited to see what the Oracle upgrade can enable, one that isn’t afraid to say “we think Facebook adds value to our campus,” and one that’s not afraid to talk about using cool technology openly to others in higher ed.
    Contact me at mpstaton a t inigral.com if you’re interested.

    As you know, the beginning of the school year is a hectic time for all of us!!  I will try to get to all emails as quickly as I can.

  • IMS Report on Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends

    The IMS has issued a new report with the somewhat imposing title, “IMS GLC Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends, North American Higher Education, 05 February 2007 Update.” You can get it here, but first you’ll have to register with the site (if you haven’t done so already). It’s important to read Section 2 of the report (and particularly the “Survey Approach and Disclaimers” subhead) carefully; it is very difficult to get definitive data for this kind of research, and the authors of the report were very careful to spell out the limitations of their methods.

    Nevertheless, there’s lots of interesting stuff here. Here are some of my own observations, in no particular order:
    (more…)