EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
June 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
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on eduglu - part 1: background - D’Arcy Norman dot net
From D’Arcy Norman, something that fits in well with my LMS revisioning schema. Wonder how it relates to something like Profilactic?
tags: darcy, dnorman, eduglu, ple
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EduGlu is a concept that
came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 - almost exactly 2 years ago - as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple - a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard - how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?
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wpng-calendar from Google Code
Integrating Google Calendar into a WordPress blog
tags: google, calendar, g-cal, googlecal, wordpress, blog
March 31, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
An Outsourced Open Source LMS and a Pot of Gold? | EDUCAUSE CONNECT Annotated
tags: blackboard, lms, lms-project, moodle
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Like many WebCT campuses, SUNY Delhi must select a new LMS and complete migrating to the new system in the next year. The total cost of ownership comparison led us to adopt a remotely hosted open source solution. We’ll examine the facts, figures, and progress of moving from WebCT to Moodle and integrating with Banner.
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March 14, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Diigo Links
Allegheny LMS Blog
tags: lms, lms-project
April 3, 2007 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Twitter Log
- @elsua: Whoa, check out http://tweet-r.com/
It requires the new Adobe Apollo Runtime but it’s quick! #
- George Thoroughgood echoes my feelings right now - 1 bourbon, 1 scotch and 1 beer !!! #
- At portal content committee meeting discussing myPlymouth makeover #
- Back from portal content meeting #
- Wow, two 1000+ hit days for my blog. Love looking at Google Analytics anc seeing where folks are coming from. #
- @brlamb: Will you be in Boston this July? #
- @brlamb: How about integrating collaborative tech into a rigid LMS? #
- @brlamb - Bummer, was hoping to catch up with you. I put in a preso for using social bookmarking tools within a course through their RSS. #
- Heading home. Back online around 8 PM EST / 0100 GMT #
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January 26, 2007 at 4:38 pm · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
According to Groklaw and a press release from the Software Freedom Law Center, the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) ordered a re-examination of Blackboard’s patent on certain aspects of the e-learning environment.
The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC’s
request raises “a substantial new question of patentability” regarding
all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent….
A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to
complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a
patent narrowed or completely revoked.
This is very interesting news for those who have been following this issue since Blackboard’s announcement of their patent last summer and their subsequent lawsuit against their next strongest competitor (in terms of market share) Desire2Learn. While this may take up to two years, a patent rejection might well be the impetus that is needed to bring Blackboard back to reality. The corporate monolith mentality and disdain for their user community has not served them well in the past year.
[tags]blackboard, patent, software, freedom, lawsuit, desire2learn, lms, cms [/tags]
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January 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
Warning: This is a lengthy post as it contains the notes I was keeping over the course of today.
I am down in Southbridge, MA, a 3-hour drive from the mountains of NH, for a NERCOMP event which is bringing together current and hopeful Moodle users from the northeast region of the U.S. Today’s event is hosting five sessions:
- Moodle: Introduction & Highlights
- Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle
- Student Response to Moodle
- From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle
- Customizing Moodle
The weather made me a bit late so the first session, Moodle Intro & Highlights was already underway by the time I got here. The speaker was Ellen Murphy, Director of Technology Integration for The Sage Colleges. She used her own Moodle site as part of the demo which in essence was a fly-by of the typical features of Moodle. Unfortunately her talk was interrupted by technical issues and as a result the flow of the discussion was not as smooth as I think she might have liked. She emphasized taking advantage of the Moodle.org site for development and support.
Sidebar: It was interesting to hear the 60 or participants echoing their frustrations with Blackboard. I ran into my CIO down here who was facilitating a NERCOMP Project Management seminar in the same building. Turns out he was using our local efforts to examine our LMS strategy as the basis for the projects that his seminar participants were focusing on. The reactions to Blackboard in his room were almost as polarized!
The second session, Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle was for me an invaluable insight into what is important to faculty when it comes to the adoption of Moodle as the LMS platform in higher ed. Joanne CannonCarlson, Assistant Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College was accompanied by three of her faculty members. From the English department, Jefferson Hunter. Representing the Languages, Judith Keyler-Mayer and from the Psychology department, Beth Powell.
- When working with faculty - do so one on one
- IT folks don’t always make the best teachers - different areas of understanding and expertise makes for translation errors! Workshops don’t always take into account the wide range of skills being brought to the table. Often workshops cater to an assumed skill level which may not reflect the actual skills of the attendees.
- The glossary feature, when moderated or edited by the professor, helped to correct errors in classroom notations and improve student learning and retention.
- As a professor, gave up nothing moving from Blackboard to Moodle, but gained a better user interface.
Session three, Student Response to Moodle, was a presentation by Paul Chapin, Academic Technology Specialist from Amherst College, on student usage of the former Blackboard solution and their perceptions of Moodle. The beginning of the presentation was an overview of current studies and surveys. He cited the following data sources (I’ve linked to the ones I could find):
The most used aspects of the LMS itemized below in order of highest to lowest usage (which I think he pulled from another recent study I will try to find and cite):
- Course content
- Announcements
- Discussions
- Grades
- E-mail
- Drop Box
- Group Functions
At Amherst, they tested Moodle with just a few pilot courses. No formal training in favor of just in time support. This went largely unused as their faculty weren’t interested in trying anything new. They also surveyed their students about their usage of Blackboard, their usage of Moodle and which they preferred (Moodle won by a large margin but few responses fell into the Highly Agree column. Students just wanted a decision to be made and did not want more than one environment to work in. They also mentioned that the value of either LMS was dependent solely upon the faculty member’s effective use of the technologies to further class objectives.
Session four, From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle was presented by Joanne CannonCarlson of Smith College. Their move to Moodle resulted from an inability to upgrade their system due to lack of financial support from their administration. College would pay for basic Bb license only, but faculty wanted the feature set in the Enterprise license. Deciding factor was the reality that there were now tools available that could do at least as much as their Bb product and in many areas could provide even more functionality at a potentially lower cost. The conversion process was not without pain - porting courses from Bb to Moodle involved a significant effort on the part of her staff of three student workers who did the work to port more than 200 courses over the summer. The worst part, Joanne noted, was the porting of quizzes as these all had to be manually recreated.
TCO focused on three areas: 1) Licensing fee (Bb Basic - $12k annually based on campus size and feature set), 2) Hardware and infrastructure requirements and 3) Support cost. Their experience was that supporting Moodle takes approximately 10% of her time compared to the 50% that Bb had required. Their first semester of use showed an increase in the total number of active courses taught, from 300 under Bb to 400 with Moodle. Moodle is also being used by departments and campus organizations for communication and management.
Most important lessons learned: only two faculty complaints about the new system and throughout summer they would port course and send out an invite to that faculty member which individualized the approach to retraining. The training focused just on those tools that they had already been using through Blackboard.
Smith factoid: 100 hours of training yielded 400+ courses in Moodle
this past fall. 2 complaints - 0.5% of total faculty population
Smith Documentation - some really high end items here, including Flash-based tutorials
Session five, Customizing Moodle, presented by Damon Blanchette of Smith College touched on hacking Moodle. Touted the resources already available through Moodle.org in the form of modules and plug-ins. He mentioned that Smith had incorporated Quickmail to facilitate communication. In my own state of New Hampshire, the Portfolio block is also a popular add-on. Gradebook+ from Humboldt State is another add-on they are using.
As Smith is a Banner school, they are looking to integrate their SIS with their LMS. This is something that bears watching for us as we are a Banner shop as well. Smith is using Moodle 1.7 which has a number of improvements, one of which is the institution of new roles in the environment which can specify with granularity what each role is capable of doing.
[tags] nercomp, moodle, lms, cms, course, management, system, learning [/tags]
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January 17, 2007 at 11:56 am · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
I’ve been kicking the tires on Moodle for a while now and it turns out that my institution, Plymouth State University, is interested in exploring this open-source learning management system as well. As the lead facilitator for this project, I’ve been asked to provide training and support for a number of our faculty who have been kind enough to volunteer to pilot a few courses to test its efficacy. As a result, I’ve been looking for documentation in the area of course development and pedagogy.
There are a number of online resources if you have the patience to search and sift through the flotsam and jetsam to find your answer. Of course, this approach assumes that you know your question. So I did a quick search for Moodle titles and came across two publications. One is a 2005 title published by O’Reilly and entitled “Using Moodle.” The other title is by a publisher I had never heard of, Packt Publishing. Written by William H. Rice, the book is entitled “Moodle - E-Learning Course Development.”
I asked for a complimentary copy to review and they were nice enough to accomodate me with the caveat that I write a review of the title. I’m in the process of tying the book to my faculty development and will publish the review here in about a week.
In the meantime, I’ll be attending the NERCOMP Moodle Interest Group this Friday at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. If you’re a reader and attending let me know and we’ll catch up F2F!
Turns out that a number of larger higher ed institutions in the United States are using or turning to Moodle as well. The list below is compiled from Moodle’s registered sites list. I was surprised to see so many University of California schools on the list considering their system-wide adoption of SAKAI. There was also a recent article on the Campus Technology website that mentioned UCLA was adopting Moodle as their campus LMS.
Here’s the list:
- Alaska Pacific University, AK - http://distance.alaskapacific.edu/
- Albertson College of Idaho, ID - http://moodle.albertson.edu/
- Alma College - http://courses.alma.edu/
- Anaheim University, CA - http://online.anaheim.edu/
- Antioch College, OH - http://gamma.antioch-college.edu/moodle/
- Athabaska University, CA - http://www.athabascau.ca/media/index.php?id=132
- Augustana College, IL - http://moodle.augustana.edu/
- Humboldt State University, CA - http://learn.humboldt.edu
- San Diego State University, CA – College of Education – http://coedata.sdsu.edu:16080/moodle/
- University of Florida - College of Education – http://online.coe.ufl.edu/
- Earlham College, IN - https://moodle.earlham.edu/
- Eastern Kentucky University, KY - http://www.modellabschool.com/online/
- Guilford College, NC - http://moodle.guilford.edu/
- Huntington University, IN - https://myclasses.huntington.edu/login/index.php
- Illinois College, IL - http://www.ic.edu/moodle/
- MIT, MA – Teacher Education Program – http://education.mit.edu/moodle/
- East Carolina University, NC - http://eagle.aos.ecu.edu/moodle/
- Kalamazoo College, MI - http://moodle.kzoo.edu/moodle/
- Colorado College, CO - https://prowl.coloradocollege.edu/
- Salem College, NC - http://moodle.salem.edu/college/
- SUNY, Oneonta, NY - https://aristotle.oneonta.edu/moodle/
- UCal Davis, CA - http://moodle.ucdavis.edu/
- UCal Irvine, CA – Distance Learning - http://learn.uci.edu/cms/
- UCal Santa Barbara, CA - http://www.moodle.cs.ucsb.edu/
- University of Hawaii, HI – Department of Educational Technology - http://etec.hawaii.edu/courses/
- University of Minnesota, MN - https://moodle.umn.edu/
- University of New Mexico, NM – College of Education - http://ssc-sf1.unm.edu/
- University of South Dakota, SD – Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) - http://moodle.usd.edu/
- UCLA, CA - http://www.oit.ucla.edu/ccle/
- University of Washington, Tacoma, WA – Pilot - http://moodle.tacoma.washington.edu/
- Bradley University, IL – Pilot - http://blackboard.bradley.edu/faculty/LMSreview.shtml
[tags]lms, cms, learning, course, management, system, moodle [/tags]
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November 27, 2006 at 10:37 pm · Filed under Higher Education, Learning Theory, TechTalk, Web 2.0
What would happen if we took everything we thought we knew about the virtual learning environment and threw it out the window? What would it look like if we treated the learning environment as if it belonged to the learner? What could learning look like if it weren’t treated as an administrative function? These were the questions I asked my colleague Casey Bisson as we travelled to and from a NERCOMP Social Software SIG.
This first post will set the stage for this re-visioning.
At Plymouth State University, we use SCT’s Luminis product as our campus portal. We are very proud of our true single sign-on methodologies as pretty much everything a student needs is tied to their portal account: email, calendar, groups, news, their e-coursework (via WebCT), library resources, the Student Information System (SIS), even their 200+ MB of network storage is web accessible. It is one of the most robust environments I have used when it comes to student services.
Yet there exists a disconnect. The portal does not speak the language of our students. It is based on technologies at least 5 years old and is not as interactive or responsive as the web tools available today. In Web 2.0 terms, it is more like Web 1.5 - more pull than push, more consumptive than contributive. In short, it is perceived to be an administrative tool rather than a learning resource. A necessary evil for doing the business of higher education.
And then there is our Learning Management System - WebCT (now Blackboard). Everything about the LMS screams academic administration tool. It provides all the requisite tools: syllabus tool, communications tools, assessment tools and learning content tools. But even with Blackboard’s burgeoning attempts at learner-centricity in the journaling, web link and media library contributions, peer review and blog tools available in their latest Application Pack, it is still a tool for teaching rather than learning. If you’ll pardon the melodrama, it lacks soul.
In part 2, we’ll throw out our current set-up and start from scratch.
[tags][/tags]
August 31, 2006 at 7:59 pm · Filed under Higher Education, TechTalk
My colleague, Dan Bramer at watersedge, beat me to the punch on this one. In our email today came this announcement from Blackboard which provided a link to the official renaming schema of WebCT to Blackboard Learning System. In our case, running WebCT Campus Edition 6, our new product name is Blackboard Learning System CE Enterprise Ltd License. Try saying that five times fast!
Our campus products will not see any naming change until we apply both Application Pack 1 and Service Pack 1 to the former WebCT application. But it is good to start getting used to the new name now as it is bound to cause some initial confusion among our faculty, staff and student body.
technorati tags:webct, blackboard, lms, cms, higher_ed, education, college, university, learning, system
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