The IMS has issued a new report with the somewhat imposing title, “IMS GLC Learning Technology Satisfaction and Trends, North American Higher Education, 05 February 2007 Update.” You can get it here, but first you’ll have to register with the site (if you haven’t done so already). It’s important to read Section 2 of the […]
Moodle
What the Sakai/Moodle/ATutor Re-Examination Request Really Means
By now you’ve probably seen that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a request to re-examine Blackboard’s patent with the USPTO on behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor. You may have also seen that D2L has filed a different kind of re-examination request with the USPTO. (SFLC’s request is what’s known as ex […]
The Blackboard Patent Crisis at Two and a Half Weeks
While marveling the events of the last several weeks, Jim Farmer suggested that it might be worthwhile to pause and reflect back on the sequence of events. I thought that was a good idea, so here it is. I don’t claim that it is any sense a definitive history. To the contrary, it’s just my […]
How to Grow Standards
Scott Wilson has a terrific response to my recent post calling for “more standards.” To begin with, he articulates one of the underlying issues that I think was bugging Scott Leslie as well. In the abstract, it’s hard to argue against standards. In practice, however, the particular Standards that are Issued from the Official Bodies […]
Survey Gives Proprietary AND Open Source VLE Developers Cause to Worry
IM+M (Jim Farmer’s company) has published some survey data on VLE adoption by higher ed institutions in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Interestingly, the data looks bad for almost everyone. There’s some limited good news for Moodle and Boddington, but as institutions are voting with their feet, the general sentiment seems to be “A […]
British Columbia Distance Learning Program Recommending Moodle
According to Robert Fitzgerald, BCcampus, which is an organization that supports distance learning for a number of schools in British Columbia, is recommending that they should support Moodle at an equal level as WebCT: We recommend that BCcampus support a provincial implementation of Moodle for all public educational institutions at the same level of support […]
Blackboard by the Numbers
Update: Welcome, Chronicle readers. Since it wasn’t made clear in the Chronicle’s reference, I’d like to point out that the paper I’m quoting was written by Jim Farmer, who is the Coordinator of Georgetown University’s new Interoperability Center, formerly the Sakai SEPP Community Liaison and project administrator for the uPortal project. Jim has pretty impressive […]