I am pleased to announce that our report on BRR and LMSs for the Observatory on Borderless higher education has been published. Here’s the description: Apples to Apples: Guidelines for Comparative Evaluation of Proprietary and Open Educational Technology Systems Ken Udas and Michael Feldstein, SUNY Learning Network at the State University of New York, USA […]
OpenBRR
A Conversation About BRR and LMSs
I’ve been meaning to write this up for a couple of weeks now. Ken Udas and I recently had a great conversation with folks from OpenBRR and Edutools/WCET about creating a community and framework to evaluate both Open Source and proprietary LMSs, drawing on the knowledge and resources of both OpenBRR and Edutools. In attendance […]
Presenting at EDUCAUSE
Ken Udas and I had our half-day workshop proposal accepted for EDUCAUSE 2006. The workshop is called A Level Playing Field: How to Evaluate Open and Proprietary LMSs Using the Same Criteria, and it will be drawing heavily on the BRR framework. Here’s the description of the workshop: When selecting a Learning Management System, decisions […]
Microsoft Takes the Lead on Openness (?!)
Microsoft recently announced that they are making the issue register (i.e., bug tracker) for Internet Explorer public. Yes, there are a few hoops you need to jump through in order to see it, but basically anyone can now see the open bugs around IE. This is a big deal. As Washington Post technology security columnist […]
More Corroborating Info on Cost of Sales
Mark Carden makes an interesting observation that supports Jim Farmer’s calculations regarding Blackboard’s cost of sales: I know something about the cost of sales issue, having sold library automation software for most of the past ten years (at Innovative and Dynix). I have long said that it costs the major ILS/LMS vendors an average of […]
More Thoughts About Blackboard: "The fault, dear Brutus…"
Jim Farmer’s financial analysis of Blackboard certainly has gotten a lot of attention–and for good reason. To start with, that ~$250K cost per sale is a truly eye-popping number. But upon further reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the most important part of the story that Jim tells. Here is the most […]