e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Moodle

  • Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle

    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 in this market segment.
    • Blackboard is losing market share rapidly
    • Moodle doubled it’s market share in the past 12 months and now has the highest market share after Blackboard/WebCT in this market segment.
    • ANGEL and D2L also grew their market share.
    • We have reason to expect more LMS churn in the near future, which is bad for Blackboard.
    • The top 5 areas of likely distance learning-related service growth in this segment are (1) online student organization web site and services, (2) online counseling and advising, (3) online plagiarism evaluation, (4) audio/video streaming, and (5) online textbook sales.

    As you can imagine, the LMS market share stuff is what interests me the most at the moment.

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  • 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 is just way cheaper than the alternatives. Particularly for schools that are just looking for a decent all-around LMS and don’t have very specific functional or integration needs, the Moodlerooms offering is tough to beat.

  • 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 can never leave.

    If Blackboard did that, there would be villagers marching in the streets with torches in hand. The Blackboard SCORM import/export stuff might not be perfect, but at least they try to let people move content out.

    With Moodle, it’s currently a vendor lock-in proposition. The only saving grace is that the vendor just happens to be an open source project. But it’s still lock-in.

    Now, I don’t know any of the specifics around Moodle’s export capabilities but, in general, universities should insist on support for some standard export capability in any platform they adopt. We all know that the cost (in time and/or dollars) of moving content from one system to another is one of the major barriers to universities who would otherwise be motivated to switch. So unless you plan on sticking with your next platform forever, make sure you press your vendor or open source community hard about supporting some sort of content exit strategy. Heck, even if your school loves Moodle (or whatever) and plans on staying with it as long as, say, John McCain wants the U.S. to stay in Iraq, individual teachers move from school to school and, depending on their contract, are usually entitled to take their course content with them. That is, if they can get it out of the LMS.

    To be fair, supporting a robust, standards-based export facility is a hard problem, in part because we keep adding tools to our learning environment and each tool needs an import/export format to work in the standard. Nevertheless, basic support for export (focusing maybe on a handful of widely used tools) is far better than none.

  • 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 System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

    Because their process was public, we have access to valuable details that are not often available for institutional decisions such as this one.

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  • 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 Martin Dougiamas or a Linus Torvalds), the process of fostering such a shared vision is a bit complicated. The most likely scenario is that capabilities first developed to meet local concerns of one or more of the members gets recognized by the community at large as addressing a common and reasonably deep need; it could then get picked up as part of Sakai’s identity.

    I’d like to suggest four capabilities existing in at least prototypical form within Sakai today that could lead us to a vision for Sakai as providing unique and valuable benefits to the teachers and students that use it. That word “unique” is important. While it is always tempting for the Sakai community to try to emulate the admirable success of the Moodle community, the fact is that Sakai is not now and never will be Moodle, just as it is not now and never will be Blackboard. The educational potential for Sakai has to come from its own DNA as a technology platform and, even more importantly, as a community. With that in mind, the four ideas I am suggesting today are all about taking advantage of the…um…Sakai-ness of Sakai.

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  • 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 SFLC on behalf of the Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor communities. I assume that the finding will be issued once this decision has been made.

    If anybody has any further analysis of the document, please remember to tag it “edupatents” so that it will be picked up by the EduPatent Alerts system.

  • 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 USPTO issue a preliminary ruling along with a re-exam order in an Inter Partes challenge. That means we should know shortly whether the government is upholding the patent, narrowing it, or invalidating it altogether.

    Stay tuned.

    There are a number of events that are likely to cascade from this ruling rather quickly. I will not always have time to blog now about every post and development that I see. However, I will, at the very least, tag items I see for inclusion in the Edupatent Alerts. (I hope that you will do the same.) If you want to follow these developments closely, I strongly suggest that you subscribe by email or RSS.