In yesterday’s post I described where I (and many others) see the LMS market heading in terms of interoperability. At the same time, the LMS does a very poor job at providing a lot of the learning technologies desired by faculty and students. There is no way that a monolithic LMS can keep up with […]
LTI
LMS and Open: The false binary is based on past, not future markets
D’Arcy Norman has an excellent blog post up titled “On the false binary of LMS vs. Open” that captures a false framing issue. We’re pushed into a false binary position – either you’re on the side of the evil LMS, working to destroy all that is beautiful and good, or you’re on the side of openness, […]
The IMS Is More Important Than You Think It Is
I have long argued that the development of technical interoperability standards for education are absolutely critical for enabling innovation and personalized learning environments. Note that I usually avoid those sorts of buzzwords—“innovation” and “personalized learning”—so when I use them here, I really mean them. If there are two fundamental lessons we have learned in the […]
Two-Year Anniversary of Blackboard Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot
Two years ago today, Blackboard made a dramatic change of course with a series of public announcements: Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers — Moodlerooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia (although they had different business models). Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which helps “institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems […]
Lots of News in the IMS Standards World
Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards. This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards: Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the […]
Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support
Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one […]
Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support
In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included: Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links New Quicklink type to […]