e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • 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.

  • Charles Severance’s “Sakai: Free as in Freedom:” A Review

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic inc. Jim has been Treasurer of the Sakai Foundation since December.

    When building a complex software system developers want to use the latest technology. Users want business processes and data presentations that serve them and their “customers.” Management focuses on the allocation of resources and schedules. Sakai is an enterprise open-source learning system developed in 2004-2005 by a team from Indiana and Stanford Universities, University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Other colleges and universities joined the follow-on Sakai Foundation development. All encountered conflicting priorities for functionality, schedule, and new features. Open source is even more difficult because there is no central control over the contributors.

    Author Charles Severance was Chief Architect of the project from 2004 through 2005. He became a Foundation Board member in January 2006 named Executive Director of the Foundation in May. He writes from the perspective of a technologist. Severence had differences with the project Advisory Board and the Foundation Board—strategy, allocation of resources, and priorities for development. As a “Retrospective Diary” both the technical choices and the differences with the Boards are described chronologically. This assists the reader to interpret the differences of perceived priorities, technology choices, and commitments. The Sakai project was committed to deliver a working system to Michigan and Indiana in fall 2005 to replace their then current systems and to satisfy the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant conditions. Then a new organization needed to be created to sustain the community that began separately and provided significant funding and contributions. There are few precedents though Severance acknowledges the earlier uPortal project—similarly funded by the Mellon Foundation—was successful with a different development approach and business plan.

    Other perspectives can be read in Severance’s writings or inferred from the information he provides.

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  • The Evolving LMS Market, Part II

    I have gotten a lot of very nice compliments in the last 24 hours about the first post in this two-part series. I do want to emphasize that a huge portion of the value in that post comes from the great survey work that Casey Green does. All I did was tease out a few implications and make a few new graphs (which, I admit, were very pretty). If you want to see analysis like this continue in future years, then support the Campus Computing Project.

    In this next part, we’re going to go “off-road” a little and see what we can figure out in areas where we don’t have quantitative data that is as solid as Casey’s. As I wrote in the previous post in this series, there are roughly 875 WebCT and ANGEL customers who will have to migrate to a new LMS in the next few years, in an environment of strong budget pressures. This creates an atmosphere in which more and different schools may be in play than has typically been the case. But evaluating options and choosing to move are two different things. What happens in the next few years is likely to shape the LMS landscape for years to come, at least in North America.

    Let’s see if we can read the tea leaves.

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  • The Evolving LMS Market, Part I

    As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a “market in transition.” In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what’s happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and “open source.” Has “open source” (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market?  If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts ((Sell-side analysts are financial analysts who work for major brokerage houses and provide stock analysis to retail investors. Comments by analysts that you read in business news articles are typically from sell-side analysts.)) are writing, you may see the claim that “open source” is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what’s happening in the market, so I’m going to try to explain what we know about what’s really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I’ll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate their options. In the second post, I’ll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break.

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  • Moodle and Sakai: A Trainer’s Perspective

    Here’s an interesting presentation from Mark Drechsler of NetSpot Pty, an Australian company that is both a Moodle partner and a Sakai Commercial Affiliate (and the first company to be both, as far as I know):

  • Interview With Casey Green

    The 2010 Campus Computing survey is out, and it’s chock full of interesting information. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Casey Green, the Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, and talk about some of the highlights and a few related topics. I apologize for the abrupt ending; my camera ran out of disk space in the middle of Casey’s last answer. In any event, there’s good stuff here about the transition happening in the LMS market, the challenges of getting good survey data, ((Many thanks to the ever-thoughtful Scott Siddall for suggesting this line of inquiry.)) and more.

    You should definitely also read the survey report. It covers a lot of topics that we didn’t even touch on in the interview.

  • The Sakai/Jasig Merger Proposal

    You may or may not have seen the recent press release with the headline, “Jasig and Sakai Foundations to Pursue Merger.” It’s a big deal. I am on the joint Sakai/Jasig committee that put this proposal together, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d like to fill you in on what the deal is and why, in my personal opinion, it’s a really good idea.

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