At this year’s Ellucian users’ conference #elive15, one of the two big stories has been that Ellucian acquired the Helix LMS, including taking on the development team. I have previously described the Helix LMS in “Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education” as well as the subsequent offer for sale in “Helix Education […]
Sungard
The Datatel-SunGard Higher Education Merger
This is a guest post from Jim Farmer, Chairman of Sigma Systems, Inc. [Editor’s note: I have had this post from Jim for a while now and am only now getting a chance to publish it. Apologies to Jim and to you.] On August 4th Hellman-Friedman LLC filed with the Security and Exchange Commission a […]
SunGard Delivers Sakai Support Through rSmart Partnership
This is pretty big news. SunGard will be providing Sakai support services to its customers. If you’re interested in Sakai, you can contract with SunGard to get help migrating, setting up integration, and training faculty, as well as ongoing hosting and support. They’ll be doing this, in part, through a partnership in which rSmart is […]
IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union
Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified […]
Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard
I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and […]
Openness: Finally, We're Getting Somewhere
Update: The Sannier vs. Wheeler smackdown is available on video here. Microsoft Silverlight is required. As I sit on the flight home from the EDUCAUSE conference thinking back on the themes of the week, it is clear to me that various flavors of openness have finally arrived in a big way in higher education, with […]