e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai OAE

  • The Death and Rebirth of Sakai OAE

    Last fall, when Indiana University, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and Charles Sturt University all pulled out of the Sakai OAE project, it looked like the end for the Sakai community’s next-generation platform effort. The vastly reduced project team, consisting mainly of Cambridge, Georgia Tech, and Marist College, went into quiet mode as they attempted to figure out what could be salvaged. Now, about nine months later, they have re-emerged with a late beta of a completely re-architected system, promising a 1.0 release in early July. They have also rebranded them project as Apereo OAE, named after the new organization that is the merger of the Sakai and Jasig Foundations, and signaling clearly that the project is not intended to be a successor to Sakai but instead is its own separate project with its own separate destiny.

    In retrospect, it turns out that the breakup of the grand coalition and resulting near-death experience may be the best thing that ever happened to the project.

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  • LMS Market Update: May and June News

    There have been a number of LMS and Learning Platform announcements over the past month or two that will help shape the market over the next year or more. One trend I’ve described is the transition from an LMS market to a Learning Platform market, which includes a broader scope of products. Below are some of the notable announcements. I expect that Michael and I will write separate posts in more detail on several of these updates.

    • LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact
    • Instructure, maker of Canvas LMS, raises $30M
    • Desire2Learn announces Student Success System as predictive analytics with new release
    • Sakai OAE recovers from loss of partners, rebrands as Apereo OAE
    • Coursera shifts strategy in partnering with schools, now overlaps with LMS market
    • edX finishes releasing platform code as open source
    • LMS conference season approaching

    LMS CEO panel discussion at Learning Impact

    In mid May, Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik hosted a panel discussion of the LMS CEOs at the Learning Impact conference. Blackboard’s new CEO, Jay Bhatt, was welcomed into the higher education community with the, ahem, liveliest panel discussion in recent memory. Given the all-star panel (John Baker, CEO, Desire2Learn; Jay Bhatt, CEO, Blackboard; Josh Coates, CEO Instructure; Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle; Manoj Kutty, CEO, LoudCloud Systems; Matt Leavy, CEO, Pearson eCollege), I’ve been surprised to see very little discussion after the event.

    But then I remembered:

    The First Rule of the LMS Panel is you do not talk about the LMS Panel

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  • Sakai OAE 1.0 Released

    I’m a little late reporting this, but the Sakai community has released the long-awaited 1.0 version of its Open Academic Environment platform (formerly known as Sakai 3). Here’s an overview:

    As you’ll see, it takes a very different approach from conventional LMSs. It doesn’t yet have some of the core features of an LMS either (e.g., grade book and test engine), but it clearly is useful today for certain kinds of academic collaboration needs and represents a promising direction. When you throw this in the mix with the new commercial entrants that Phil Hill blogged about recently, it adds up to really interesting times ahead in the LMS space.