The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it: Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly […]
Moodle
Case Study on Moving from WebCT to Moodle
EDUCAUSE has posted a presentation by SUNY Delhi’s Clark Shah-Nelson on their transition from WebCT CE to Moodlerooms-hosted Moodle. It’s quite good. By all accounts (including the presentation), it has been a pretty smooth transition for Delhi. But the biggest deal is the cost comparison, which Clark lays out in his slides. The total cost […]
On Open Source, Open Standards, and Lock-in
I’ve been meaning to comment on D’Arcy Norman’s frustrations with not being able to export Moodle courses to a common standard. He makes a very important point: Moodle happily ingests those formats, acting to absorb content into what then becomes an inescapable pit of quicksand. It’s a one-way trip. Content can check in, but it […]
Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc. UPDATE: With his permission, we have appended an email response by LSU CIO Brian D. Voss in the comments section of this post. On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning […]
Four Ideas for the Future of Sakai
One of the emerging themes from the Sakai Amsterdam conference was a strong desire in the community to develop a coherent vision for Sakai’s developing educational value proposition. Now, because of Sakai’s heritage as a project grown out of an alliance of strong, independent institutions rather than led by a single, charismatic leader (like a […]
Blackboard Inter Partes Determination Published
You can find the documentation here. The USPTO found 13 of Desire2Learn’s 14 claims to raise substantial new questions of patentability. However, the government did not a preliminary finding, as is usual with an Inter Partes challenge, because they are considering whether this challenge should be merged with the Ex Parte challenge filed by the […]
USPTO Orders Blackboard Patent Re-examined–Again
We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post to bring you this breaking news: Based on Desire2Learn’s Inter Partes request, the USPTO has ordered that the Blackboard patent be re-examined. This is a separate ruling from the one in response to the Ex Parte Sakai/ATutor/Moodle filing. As I have previously noted, the law requires that the […]