e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Mark-Oehlert

  • Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending

    From today’s press release:

    BbWorld Europe, Nice, France – February 26, 2007 – Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), a leading provider of enterprise technology to the education industry, today unveiled, at the Annual BbWorld Europe 2007 Users Conference in Nice, its latest and most significant product offering, the Blackboard Outcomes System™ in front of 400 European and International e-Learning leaders. The new solution facilitates the continuous improvement of academic and administrative processes with a focus on student learning, academic programs and co-curricular activities.
     
    The Blackboard Outcomes System is a comprehensive, flexible platform to guide institutional effectiveness across the entire higher education institution or system– from classrooms to the President’s Office. It was developed with guidance from national assessment experts and dozens of academic institutions including private teaching colleges, research universities, systems, and community colleges.  The Blackboard Outcomes System leverages the capabilities and familiar user experience of the Blackboard Academic Suite™ to help institutions make evidence-based decisions, streamline assessment processes, and engage students in their own learning.

    I think it’s interesting that Blackboard is calling Outcomes its “most significant” product offering. That gives you some sense of where they think their market is going and where they think the bulk of their business is going to be in the future.

    Note also that many of Blackboard’s recent patent applications (reported by Mark Oehlert) appear to be related to this new product.

  • EduPatent Alerts

    Via Stephen Downes, I see that Mark Oehlert posted a list of Blackboard’s pending patents, 8 of which were filed for in the last year (6 of which were filed in October and November of last year), and many of which are not covered in Blackboard’s patent pledge. This has prompted me to invest a little time in creating a more–dare I say it?–Web 2.0ish edupatent alert system.

    You’ll notice that there is a new tab on the top of this blog labeled “EduPatents.” On that page you will find an RSS feed aggregator that displays any blog posts on the web that have been tagged by their authors with the word “edupatents”, any posts that use the word “edupatents” in the body of their texts, and any web pages that have been tagged “edupatents” on del.icio.us. (I took the liberty of tagging Mark’s post, so it shows up in the aggregator even though he didn’t tag it himself.) You can subscribe to the feed directly or, if you prefer, you can also subscribe by email. Equally importantly, you can contribute to the contents of the feed in a variety of ways. If we all make use of this system, then you won’t have to rely on just a couple of bloggers (e.g., me) to be able to see everything that’s relevant and post about it.

    If you’re interested in learning more about how to make the most out of this new system and how I created it, then read on.

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  • Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS

    A while back, a blog conversation between Mark Oehlert and Lee Kraus regarding how to knit together lots of embedded, widget/gadget like learning applications into a coherent picture of what and how learners are doing. To begin with, the idea they’re toying with is very similar to the LMOS but focused on a corporate market and workflow learning. What really got me thinking, though, was when they started talking about a dashboard somewhat like Google Analytics to track learner progress. (Those corporate folks sure do love their dashboards.) Something about this really clicked with me, but I couldn’t quite articulate how I would want to see this work in an academic environment.

    That is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–“Web Stats in Video Game Format!”

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  • Widgets, Gadgets, and the LMOS

    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…)