e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Moodle

  • Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for ANGEL

    This is another one I’ve been meaning to post for some time. Last year, I wrote a post called Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle that talked about changes in LMS market share among American community colleges according to a survey done by the Instructional Technology Council. The headline number was that Blackboard’s market share in this customer group was declining rapidly, with Moodle being the primary beneficiary and ANGEL being the secondary beneficiary.

    Blackboard’s downward trend continues. According to this year’s study, Blackboard’s market share among ITC’s constituents is 59%, down from 77% percent the previous year. There was a slight drop in market share for the Blackboard platform, but most of it was for WebCT. It looks like Blackboard is failing to hold on to the community colleges that are being forced to migrate off WebCT as it approaches its end of life. 

    This year is something of a mirror image of last year’s results in the race for the #2 spot. ANGEL zoomed to the top, more than doubling their market share to over 20%. (It’s hard to tell the exact number from the graph in the report.) This is the first time I’m aware of that any non-Blackboard LMS has achieved market share in any U.S. segment that pushed so far into the double digits. The third place, Moodle, is up to about 11%, making ANGEL the clear front runner as the replacement for WebCT, particularly Campus Edition, which has had a lot of market share in the community colleges. (It looks like something close to two thirds of community colleges in the survey who left WebCT in the last year moved to ANGEL.) All the other entrants are at 5% or below.

  • Moodlerooms Doing Great Standards-Based Integration Work

    I meant to get this up a while ago. Moodlerooms has been on a tear lately. First, they submitted a patch to Moodle to enhance integration with external systems for enrollment purposes. This isn’t standards-based integration in itself, but I’m told it aids with integration of things like LDAP and LIS. Next, they integrated Moodle with Google Apps using the SAML 2.0 and Oauth standards, so they can provision users to Google Apps from their Moodle accounts and then have them work with, for example, a Google doc within the Moodle environment without having to log in twice.

    And finally, in a move that is near and dear to my heart, they announced integration with Oracle’s SAIP via the IMS LIS standard. Moodlerooms’ Moodle is now the first LIS consumer to support real-time integration. 

    Yay standards! Yay Moodlerooms!

  • Social Constructivists and eLearning

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer

    On July 15th Luke Fernandez, Weber State University and frequent Sakai contributor, posted “Moodle and Social Constructionism: Looking for the Individual in the Community” on Academic Commons. Broadly interpreting his post about attending the San Francisco MoodleMoot US 2008, he identified two issues: (1) How does the choice of an instructional method impact the design, development, or choice and use of a learning system? (2) And implicitly from his response to this conference, what conferences and conference programs increase the adoption and use of education methodologies and technologies? Both have been topics of discussion since the San Francisco MoodleMoot; this post responds to those issues.

    (more…)

  • Moodle Developer Martin Dougiamas Honored at OSCON 2008

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

    Martin Dougiamas was named Best Education Enabler at last week’s OSCON (Open Source Conference) 2008 in Portland. The Google-O’Reilly Open Source award was made for his contribution to Moodle, an open source learning system. This is the first year anyone from education was nominated for the annual awards.

    Other awards this went to Chris Messina as Best Community Amplifier, Angela Byron, as Best Contributor (Drupal), Andrew Tridgell for Best Interoperator (Samba and Rsync), and Harald Welte, gplviolations.org, as Defender of Rights.

    Accepting the award for Dougiamas, Remote-Learner.net CEO Bryan Williams “Thanked Google and O’Reilly for the award and their support of Moodle, and expressed Martin’s regrets for not being able to attend the conference in person. He was honored by this award.”

    “Moodle has a vibrant community of teachers, professors and business trainers collaborating on ways to improve learning. Moodle.org has become a real community of practice over the years for the advancement of online instructional design and student management.”

    The Moodle Foundation is located in Perth, Australia. Remote-Learner.net is a Moodle Partner.

  • SpikeSource Supporting Moodle on the Microsoft Stack

    Jim Farmer has an interesting guest post over at Seb’s blog about SpikeSource supporting Moodle on Windows/IIS. Both the creation of supported softwares stack for higher education and the mixture of proprietary and open source software in at least some of those stacks strike me as natural steps. I expect that we’ll see more of this kind of thing.

  • Great Open Source Conference in Upstate New York

    Update: The dates of the conference are actually June 19-20. Sorry about that.

    (Patrick will never let me live this down.)

    My friend Patrick Masson has put together a two-day conference at Delhi, NY on May 23-24 that looks terrific. The first day, which is about open source in higher education in general, has tracks on quality, total cost of ownership, and external support. The second day is a Moodle Moot. I’ll be one of the speakers.

    Be there or be rectangular, as they say.

  • What the Sakai Announcement Means

    Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the Foundation’s position begins to make a lot more sense.

    (more…)