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Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support

e-Literate - Fri, 11/06/2009 - 11:39

In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included:

Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links
New Quicklink type to allow links to Tool Providers to be easily incorporated throughout Desire2Learn courses
Links to external learning tools that can send user, organization, and course context information for a personalized experience in the tool; single-sign-on to learning tools is supported through an oAuth framework using a key/secret shared between the external learning tool and the configured link in Learning Environment
Management tools to configure mapping from Desire2Learn roles to IMS roles, and from Desire2Learn org unit types to IMS context types

A couple of other platforms are following D2L on this road.

Sakai has a pre-alpha version which is publicly available for testing, and which has been proposed for eventual inclusion in the next Sakai release (2.7).
A prototype third-party building block is available for Blackboard through OSCELOT.

This is just the work that’s visible to the public. As is often the case with these things, (a) more work is going on behind the scenes, but (b) you should demand to see working code and a commitment to a supported release within a defined time frame before taking any statements of support by a vendor or project too seriously.

Kudos to Desire2Learn for taking the lead here.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Desire2Learn, IMS, LTI, Sakai

Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard

e-Literate - Wed, 11/04/2009 - 14:55

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 also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”

Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.

There are more LIS announcements to come, too.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: IMS, LIS, Oracle-Corporation, Peoplesoft Campus Solutions, SAIP, Sungard

Understanding Single Sign-On

e-Literate - Wed, 11/04/2009 - 06:48

This is a little geeky, but if you’ve ever wondered what “single sign-on” really means in the enterprise space, Unicon’s Andrew Petro has a great ten-minute YouTube video explaining the concepts, specifically as they are implemented in Jasig’s Central Authentication Service (CAS):

Click here to view the embedded video.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Andrew Petro, Authentication, Central Authentication Service, Identity management systems, Jasig, Single sign-on, Unicon

Learning Business Through Scenarios

eLearn Magazine - Tue, 11/03/2009 - 04:51

In his latest column, Roger Schank explains how a new series of soon-to-launch, story-based business courses came to be, and outlines the content and scenarios of the seven storylines that make up the curriculum. In future columns, after the course launches, he will comment on whether they are working as planned.

Fair Enough

e-Literate - Fri, 10/30/2009 - 11:39

I received the following email from George Kroner, a developer who works for Blackboard:

I wanted to point out one issue I take with your recent blog post. OSCELOT, the open source organization that you mention, is not maintained by Blackboard. Rather, OSCELOT is a separate, independent organization that was founded by a number of Blackboard clients and now hosts 300 developers who contribute to over 100 different open source educational tools. Specifically, their mission is to support the creation of interoperable learning tools that span multiple platforms. Yes, it is true that we sometimes sponsor their events – just like we sponsor the events of a number of other organizations. Yes, it is true that a lot of the tools they have to offer plug into Blackboard’s LMSs, but this is due to the history of the organization. Every organization has to start somewhere. You’ll notice some tools are actually webapps or binary executables that aren’t connected to Blackboard in any way.

The OSCELOT gang is a bunch of fun, bright individuals who have a true passion for advancing education with open source tools, apps, simulators, etc. Many of them are instructional designers, librarians, sysadmins, and individuals only tangentially connected to Blackboard who contribute their own non-work time to this organization. Personally, I think you are doing them a huge disservice by knocking their work in this way. Their vision is much bigger than being just a Blackboard development shop. As for me, I’m quite proud of what they do – just as you are proud of the work going on in the Sakai community. In fact, some of the contributors to OSCELOT also contribute to Sakai. Hopefully as everyone commits to and implements the open standards that we both believe in, we’ll see collaborative opportunities through organizations such as OSCELOT that will afford us the opportunity to more effectively move forward together.

It certainly was not my intention to denigrate the OSCELOT contributors in any way, and I appreciate George’s note to correct the record regarding the organization.

That said, none of this changes my main point about Blackboard, Inc.’s opportunistic touting of the value of open source when it is developed for their platform while simultaneously attacking it with falsehoods and poor argumentation when it competes with their offerings.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., OSCELOT

SunGard Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services

e-Literate - Thu, 10/29/2009 - 17:17

There was some good news out of last week’s IMS meeting. I’ll have more to say about the meeting in general in a future post, but for now I just want to applaud SunGard for publicly committing to support the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification in the upcoming 8.1 release of Banner Student (due out in the first quarter of next year, I think). Having the two biggest SIS vendors in the United States on board with the standard should drive adoption by LMSs (and other systems that need to know which people are in which courses).

Expect more LIS-related announcements soon.

Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

e-Literate - Thu, 10/29/2009 - 13:36

Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.

What’s interesting in the Moodle evaluation is that Blackboard wrote a response, which was published by the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS). And the heart of the response is a swipe at open source with many claims that are…factually and logically questionable.

Unfortunately, the PDF has some sort of copy protection on it that prevents copy/paste. (I thought Blackboard was on an openness kick….) So I have laboriously retyped the section of the response entitled “Top Five Risks to Consider When Evaluating Open Source” so that we can weigh the strengths of Blackboard’s arguments together. I apologize for any mistranscriptions.

Here we go:

(...)
Read the rest of Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (3,363 words)

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., learning-management-systems, Moodle, North Carolina Community College System, open source, University of North Carolina

The State of Distance Education in Saudi Arabia

eLearn Magazine - Thu, 10/29/2009 - 04:43

In this exclusive report, Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa of King Saud University, Riyadh, explains how Saudi Arabia has begun adopting distance education as part of its educational and development strategies. Saudi Arabia has been slower than many nations to move into distance education. Bachelor degree programs have only been offered through traditional universities' distance education programs for about a decade, and policies for single-mode, distance, and virtual tertiary institutions are still under development for approval by the Ministry of Higher Education. Some public universities, such as King Abdulaziz University and Al-Imam Mohammad ibn Saud Islamic University, are dual-mode, while single-mode distance education is offered by the Arab Open University. Distance education is primarily applied where gender segregation is required in tertiary education, where male lecturers are only authorized to teach female students by means of closed-circuit television, one-way video and two-way audio and broadcast.

Rapid e-Learning Polarizes Opinion

eLearn Magazine - Tue, 10/27/2009 - 08:45

Rapid e-learning tools offer subject matter experts the opportunity to produce e-learning materials relatively quickly and cost-effectively, at least in the U.K. and U.S. But e-learning experts complain that rapid development tools only help amateurs turn out low-quality and poorly-designed materials that merely pay lip service to the ideals of instructional design. At a recent meeting of the eLearning Networkthe U.K.'s foremost professional association for users and developers of e-learningWilliam Ward, formerly of Cable & Wireless but now an independent consultant, examined the rise of rapid e-learning, which he dates to 2003, when tools such as Qarbon, Breeze, and ToolBook became available. Ward stated that these rapid application tools had changed not only buying patterns within the industry, but also ideas about why and where to use e-learning.

The Cost of the Blackboard Patent Suit (and Who Pays It)

e-Literate - Tue, 10/27/2009 - 07:12

An e-Literate reader comments on my post about Blackboard owing Desire2Learn money:

The amount [that Blackboard will have to pay Desire2Learn, including the original award plus interest] will probably be over $3.8M USD from my rough estimates which is higher than the expected writedown Blackboard took. This should result in additional expenses that will have to be recorded by BBBB.

What’s also interesting is that Blackboard’s top execs made record bonuses before this writedown, at the same time they took away any salary increases and the 401K plans for the regular staff. I think that is the bigger story.

Blackboard reported a $2.8 million net profit in 2008. The $3.3 million write down brings them to a $500,000 loss. An additional estimated write-down of another half a million would bring them to a $1 million loss for 2008. In the same year, Michael Chasen received $545,833 in salary, $663,039 in bonus, $1,833,560 in stock options, $80,466 in shares of restricted stock, and $14,911 in “other compensation”, for total compensation that was valued at $3,137,809. Matt Small received $370,833 in salary, $166,544 in bonus, $722,966 in stock options, $40,233 in shares of restricted stock, and $17,372 in “other compensation”, for a total compensation of $1,317,958. Coincidentally, if you add up the 2008 bonuses for the five Blackboard executives listed in the company’s proxy statement, the total is $1,074,127—almost exactly what the company’s final adjusted net loss for 2008 may turn out to be.

Moving forward, Blackboard is apparently going to incur the additional expense of an attempt to appeal their failed patent suit to the Supreme Court, even though Matt Small is on record saying that it is highly unlikely they will succeed.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Corporate finance, edunomics, edupatents, Executive compensation, Matt Small, Michael-Chasen, Supreme Court

Publish or Perish

eLearn Magazine - Fri, 10/23/2009 - 07:17

It's not news that we're experiencing increasing change. The quantity of information available is growing astronomically, new offerings are increasingly quick to be copied, businesses are under pressure to do more with less, and the internet is a disruptive force, threatening all manner of content industries. Organizations have to become more nimble, more agile. Optimal execution is only the cost of entry, and organizations have to be tapping into continual innovation. Publishers are not exempt from this. There are major pressures coming in a variety of guises. Yet, surprisingly, we're seeing little innovation in products, services, or business models.

lrnchat

eLearn Magazine - Tue, 10/20/2009 - 09:39

#lrnchat (or "Learn Chat") is an open online meeting about learning that takes place weekly on Twitter. eLearn Magazine asked two recent participants to share their thoughts about #lrnchat, describe how it works, and explain the benefits of participating. According to Dave Ferguson, Twitter chats are no different than the business conference cocktail houra prime time for networking. And Christy Pettit has explored business opportunities thanks to her involvement in #lrnchat. So instead of must-see TV, tune into #lrnchat on Thursday nights, 8:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern time.

“A Lousy Way to Learn a Subject”

As much by writing. - Sun, 10/18/2009 - 13:24

Over the summer SUNY Delhi’s Edward Stammel, Adjunct Instructor, Business & Hospitality Division, contacted his department dean and CIS to discuss creating a new section for CITA 110, Introduction to Software Applications. Professor Stammel wrote: The nature of Information Technology is undergoing a major revolution. The old way of doing things with corporate controlled networks running standardized [...]

Blackboard Owes Desire2Learn Over Three Million Dollars

e-Literate - Sun, 10/18/2009 - 08:12

(cc) photo credit: zolierdos

I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.

This does not mean that the litigation is over. Blackboard is still suing D2L in Canada for infringement of the original patent, and the company has been granted continuation patents (basically revised versions of the original patents) that they could assert.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Desire2Learn, edunomics, edupatents

Book Review of Make Money Teaching Online

eLearn Magazine - Fri, 10/16/2009 - 09:42

Mark Welch reviews the book Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary by Dr. Danielle Babb and Dr. Jim Mirabella, published by Wiley Press (2007).

UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results

e-Literate - Thu, 10/15/2009 - 18:09

The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:

The ﬁndings of the pilot are positive, leading the Sakai Action Group to recommend ITS continue to fund Sakai for the 2009-2010 academic year, implement student information system (SIS) integration, when possible, expand the number of participants using Sakai, and research a possible future migration path.

The whole report is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights from my perspective:

There are relatively few comments from faculty or students about functionality gaps in one direction or the other. To the contrary, the platforms were seen by many as being functionally equivalent. LMS’s have reached that “good enough” stage where they are starting to commoditize.
There were two exceptions to the “equivalent functionality” rule. First, a number of users seemed to appreciate Sakai’s more flexible permissions structure. I have written about the under-appreciated importance of groups and permissions on many occasions. The second was the ability to use Sakai for non-course work groups, projects, communities, etc. Blackboard has this capability, but you have to pay extra and license it separately. Frankly, I don’t know how they get away with it. No other LMS that I know of charges you twice for what is 95% the same functionality.
There were lots of comments on usability, and almost all of them broke in Sakai’s favor. First of all, this confirms the point that I’ve made a few times here that usability is often more important than functionality. From UNC’s data, it looks like faculty and students were able to do more with Sakai while making fewer calls to the help desk. Which brings me to the other part of this. Three years ago, Sakai’s usability was bad to the point of being embarrassing. But it absolutely kicked Blackboard’s butt in UNC’s review. This is strong affirmation of the huge strides the Sakai community has made in usability.

Good stuff.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Sakai, University of North Carolina

Moodle, Wave, and Widgets (Oh my!)

e-Literate - Thu, 10/15/2009 - 13:12

Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

Anyway, it’s a very good piece, well worth reading. A couple of points jumped out at me. First:

Rather than just being a like-for-like replacement, the Widgets update in real-time without any page refresh, and this affects user behavior. Rather than clicking links to launch tools or to view content, the Widgets encourage more of a “monitoring” mode of operation, with users navigating to a course page, then leaving it open in the background, occasionally bringing it into focus to see if any new conversations were happening in the chat widget, or the voting results had changed.

If this finding bears out with further research, it could be a fairly big deal. For one thing, it has the potential of making the learning environment a lot stickier and more Facebook-like (in a good way). At the same time, it should force some pretty substantial refactoring of core LMS tools, which simply aren’t designed for monitoring. The two models are likely to clash.

Here’s another interesting—and problematic—bit:

Another consequence of Widgets is that far less tracking information is available at a micro-level, as interactions with Widgets are not made available to the VLE. This implies that a new model for tracking will need to be developed for such systems; this may be a useful opportunity to reconsider tracking in more sophisticated terms than page views and hits. For example, it may be useful to separate out measures of attention, using something like APML[12], and measures of user effort, using something like User Labor Markup Language (ULML[13]).

The thing is, we’re just now beginning to develop models where we can identify at-risk students and, more importantly, help them self-identify and self-remediate based on the data from the learning environment. The fact that this trend is in direct tension with the whole Web-2.0-in-the-learning-environment trend is underappreciated. We need to solve this problem.

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: academic-analytics, Apache Wookie, Google Wave, Moodle, Scott-Wilson

Work and Learning

eLearn Magazine - Wed, 10/14/2009 - 07:23

The days of orchestrating corporate learning through special "events," such as classroom training and seminars, have given way to learning on-the-job. Indeed, working and learning are becoming so tightly integrated that it's often difficult to differentiate between them. Motorola University, and indeed corporate universities and training departments in general, have undergone or are undergoing quite a transition in the wake of Web 2.0 technologies. System work tools and learning tools are becoming synonymous.

How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education

eLearn Magazine - Wed, 10/14/2009 - 07:20

How effective are Flip cameras and other mini-camcorders as learning tools? Where are video-in-the-classroom assignment s taking education? Jake Dunagan, one of the tech prognosticators from the Institute for the Future, helps explain where video in the classroom will be going in coming years. Additionally, three intrepid instructors, who have been experimenting with mini-camcorders in their curricula, explain how they are using the technology and what their students are learning. These folks believe that using camcorders as a medium is affecting not only the message but the student communicators and their learning process.

E-Learning Tools for STEM

eLearn Magazine - Tue, 10/06/2009 - 10:22

You'd think that instructors who teach math and hard sciences (or STEM fields) would be quick to pick up new technologies and be early adopters of e-learning. But in many of my interactions with administrators, what I actually hear is this: "Faculty from almost every discipline are interested in using new technologies and teaching online, except the people in math, science, and engineering." It's not that these faculty members don't want to teach online; it's that they can't see how to do it in their discipline. Here are six tools that are absolute necessities to get a math or hard sciences instructor teaching online successfully.