e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Online Education Initiative

  • Webinars: California OEI on institutional view of LMS decisions, Ray Henderson on vendor view

    We have now had 2 of our 3 webinars (or colloquiums) with NobleStream organized around “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”. In our first webinar, Howard Weiner from NobleStream interviewed Michael and me about the work we do as consultants and market analysts. Video available here. In the second webinar, we had Pat James, executive director of OEI, and Anna Stirling, director of @ONE training and professional development. OEI is the Online Education Initiative from the California Community Colleges, and @ONE is providing key elements of OEI’s faculty and student support services. This Wednesday (Nov 16th), we have Ray Henderson to discuss the vendor perspective, but more on that at the bottom of this post.

    This was a fun discussion with Pat and Anna, as we discussed the LMS decision in context of overall academic strategy, using OEI as a case study. We seemed to end on the metaphor of the LMS as plumbing that needs to be in place to build the house you need. For OEI, the house is the course exchange as well as a shared set of services to help faculty develop online courses throughout the system. Resources, quality rubrics and design support, professional development, support students, etc.

    Coming next: we have Ray Henderson as our guest on Wednesday, Nov 16th, at 2pm EST to discuss the vendor perspective. Ray has a long history on the vendor side, working with eCollege, ANGEL, and Blackboard as a top executive, and he current sits on the board of several ed tech companies. This should be a great discussion. Sign up here for the third webinar.

  • Webinars: When Cockroaches and the LMS Rule the Earth

    Thanks to the good folks at NobleStream, Michael and I are participating in a series of three colloquiums (or colloquia or webinars, you choose) hosted by Howard Weiner. This past Wednesday, the three of us discussed the vision that Michael and I have for e-Literate and our consulting practice with a focus on learning platforms. In fact, the title of the series is “The Modern Learning Platform: Not Your Mother’s Old LMS”.

    At one point Howard asked us about why the LMS is so important and why we started our subscription service around the LMS, to which Michael responded in Feldstein fashion (question starting at 39:00):

    Depending on how you define it, I have a feeling that, for better or for worse, long after humanity is dead and gone, cockroaches will still be using the LMS. It’s just this durable category. People talk about it dying or disappearing or morphing, and what happens is that it slowly evolves. It’s become this critical piece of infrastructure.

    (more…)

  • A Retrospective on Implementing Common Course Management Systems

    At e-Literate we mostly avoid blogging about our consulting work through MindWires Consulting, but we have an opportunity with our work for California’s Online Education Initiative (OEI) to share information with the higher education community on a topic of growing importance. The OEI is California Community College System’s approach to help individual colleges collaborate with their online courses and programs, including a OEI Course Exchange to be launched this Fall in pilot mode that will “allow students to register for online courses across participating colleges without requiring students to complete separate application and matriculation processes”.

    Last year we at MindWires helped OEI select a Common Course Management System (yes, they use the CMS language instead of LMS) by providing market analysis and facilitating the group decision-making process. This year they asked us to review similar efforts at other consortia in the US and Canada. The point of a CCMS is not the technology platform itself but rather what the common e-learning infrastructure could allow a consortium to do – address issues such as course redesign, professional development, student support, etc. Even though the OEI was based on selecting a common system from the beginning and has experienced significant adoption already, there is still a great deal of value in learning from others that have gone before. We are releasing the result of this work with the report – “A Retrospective on Implementing Course Management Systems: Motivations, Benefits, Drawbacks and Recommendations“. (more…)

  • California Community College OEI Selects LMS Vendor

    The Online Education Initiative (OEI) for California’s Community College System has just announced its vendor selection for a Common Course Management System (CCMS) ((Note that this is an Intent to Award, not yet a contract.)). For various reasons I cannot provide any commentary on this process, so I would prefer to simply direct people to the OEI blog site. Update: To answer some questions, the reason I cannot comment is that CCC is a MindWires client, and I facilitated the meetings. Based on this relationship we have a non-disclosure agreement with OEI.

    Here is the full announcement.

    The California Community Colleges (CCC) Online Education Initiative (OEI) announced its intent to award Instructure Inc. the contract to provide an online course management system and related services to community colleges statewide.

    Support for Instructure’s Canvas system was nearly unanimous among the OEI’s Common Course Management System (CCMS) Committee members, with overwhelming support from student participants, officials said. Canvas is a course management platform that is currently being used by more than 1,000 colleges, universities and school districts across the country.

    “Both the students and faculty members involved believed that students would be most successful using the Canvas system,” said OEI Statewide Program Director Steve Klein. “The student success element was a consistent focus throughout.”

    The announcement includes some information on the process as well. (more…)