LMS in the News
From DoctorWiki
←Older revision | Newer revision→
2007/04/26 - ANGEL LMS Wins Best Postsecondary Course Management Solution Award
ANGEL LMS Wins Best Postsecondary Course Management Solution CODiE Award for Second Year in a Row http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/partners/showrelease.cfm?ReleaseID=2227
Indianapolis, Ind. April 26, 2007 ANGEL® Learning, announced that its ANGEL Learning Management Suite has won the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Award for Best Postsecondary Course or Content Management Solution for the second year in a row. The award observed" "ANGEL allows much manipulation of the teaching content as well as opportunities for various tools not found in other systems," and singled out these additional ANGEL strengths:
- Ease of use.
- A comprehensive assessment system for instructors to act on data that is either aggregated or detailed for specific criteria.
- Users are provided tasks to be completed from main home page.
- Users can join different collaborative groups in addition to courses and share information in various ways.
2007/04/25 - LMSs: The good, the bad, the ugly ... and the truth
The eLearning Guild Announces the Publication of a New 360 Degree Report: Learning Management Systems (LMS) The good, the bad, the ugly ... and the truth, April 3, 2007. http://sev.prnewswire.com/workforce-management/20070403/SFTU09103042007-1.html
For this report, we based market share ratings on data from over 2,300 respondent's and satisfaction ratings on data from over 1,200 respondents. In addition, the Guild surveyed over 930 e-Learning professionals representing 840 different organizations to definitively document the state of the LMS industry. The enormous size of this data pool enabled the Guild to reveal findings such as: The cost per learner to acquire, configure, and customize an LMS; the fact that 29.58% of respondents plan to upgrade their LMS in the next 12 months; that Moodle enjoys both the largest market share and the highest satisfaction in smaller corporations; and that 11% of respondents believe they have not received a return on their investment in an LMS.
2007/04/20 - Elgg - Schools adopt Myspace and Facebook approach
Robert Andrews, Don't Tell Your Parents: Schools Embrace MySpace, Wired News, 04.19.07 | 2:00 AM. http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/04/myspaceforschool
Elgg, open-source social networking software developed at the University of Brighton, has been designed specifically with academic uses in mind.Students, tutors and researchers each get a profile page, a blog, photo sharing and friends lists, and they can create and join on-site discussion communities. Some of these features might cause tutors to balk, but Elgg's creators say the collaborative, conversational exchanges in which today's students have become so fluent outside class are the best way to deliver learning inside it.
"The virtual learning environment model used by nearly all universities these days is based on the traditional tutor-led, course-structured mode of learning and doesn't easily allow for significant participation by students or for crossing course boundaries," said Stan Stanier, the school's learning technologies manager, who oversees a 33,000-member Elgg installation. "Higher education is meant to be an environment for student-centered and collaborative learning."
Broadly, Elgg represents a shift from aging, top-down classroom technologies like Blackboard to what e-learning practitioners call personal learning environments -- mashup spaces comprising del.icio.us feeds, blog posts, podcast widgets -- whatever resources students need to document, consume or communicate their learning across disciplines.
2007/04/19 - Edutools.Info – Decision support tools for LMS evaluation
The Edutools.Info site provides side by side product comparisons of CMS/LMS products. There are two sets of comparisons.
+ the old tools site – http://www.edutools.info/compare.jsp?pj=8&i=386 (which includes WebCT 4.1 and 60 other products)
+ the new tools site – http://www.edutools.info/item_list.jsp?pj=4 (20 products)
In addition to displaying reviews, the system also supports feature-by-feature evaluation and weighing.
2007/04/18 - Course Management Systems - A Tipping Point
Susan D. Heid, Course Management Systems - A Tipping Point, Campus Technology, January 9, 2007 http://www.campustechnology.com/article.asp?id=19879
Long recognized as a magnet for new concepts and idea-sharing, the CMS as we’ve known it teeters on a precipice as institutions reassess need and warily eye the pitfalls that may lie ahead.As of 2008, every time students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s (MD) Schools of Engineering and Arts & Sciences log in to their WebCT systems, they’ll get a pop-up screen telling them they’re working on unlicensed software—unless the team at the school’s Center for Educational Resources (CER) succeeds in its mission of finding a replacement course management system. In fall 2005,
Found at : MSU – Learning Management Systems Evaluation Committee 2006-07, Resources, Reading, Links about Learning Management Systems, http://www.montana.edu/opa/coms/resources.html,
2007/04/12 - Blackboard launches free social-bookmarking service for academia
Blackboard recently announced the launch of Scholar, a free social- bookmarking web site aimed at connecting faculty and students, as well as enhancing teaching and learning, at higher-education institutions worldwide. Using this site, Blackboard users--including faculty, students, and administrators--can connect on a regular basis across institutions to share resources. Users can save and classify bookmarks and searches, share resources with other educators, update courses with content feeds, and enable student contributions to course collections. All users of the enterprise version of Blackboard's Learning System have access to a free Scholar account. The tool also is open to the public.Source, Blackboard launches free social-bookmarking service for academia, eSchool News, Site of the Week for Wednesday, April 11, 2007. http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/links/showLink.cfm?linkID=339
Notes:
Steve Cavrak 10:23, 12 April 2007 (EDT) Although the site is listed as open to the public, access seems to be available only through a Bb or WebCT powerlink which has not yet been installed here at UVM. Sigh.
2007/04/11 - Understand Your Learners—Use the ELI Net Gen Discovery Tool
The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) has announced a set of "Net Gen Discovery Tools" designed as an action-oriented, modifiable resource for faculty development and other instructional uses. The guide is modular; select those units that suit your needs. Each unit can be used as a stand-alone activity, lasting perhaps two hours, or all units can be combined for a multiday faculty development event. This tool is designed to help you understand learner experiences and expectations and balance those with academic requirements, faculty experience, and long-term goals. We have focused on the Net Generation because it serves as a starting point for many other discussions about active learning, emerging technologies, information fluency, learning space design, and assessment.ELI Discovery Tool: The Net Generation, http://www.educause.edu/NetGenTool
ELI Poll on Student Created Media
ELI Poll on Faculty Comfort Level with Emerging Technologies
2007/04/10 - Single standard for open-content licenses
The use of open, sharable course materials is transforming education worldwide: Educators across the globe are taking open digital content items and repurposing them for their own classrooms; universities in Vietnam have begun translating materials available through MIT's OpenCourseWare program; and in Japan, leading universities have come together and agreed to make much of their courseware open as well. (See "Web fuels 'democratization' of knowledge.")But this movement toward open course materials for education has created something of a problem. Although a vast number of repositories have been set up to allow users to download sharable content, many of these sites contain materials that use different licensing agreements. This poses a challenge for educators looking to combine material from different repositories into a single presentation or piece of work.
Justin Appel, Wanted: Single standard for open-content licenses. New effort aims to unite open educational resources (OERs) under a common framework for permissions, eSchool News, April 10, 2007. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/PFshowstory.cfm?ArticleID=7013
2007/04/10 - 40,000 ASU Students Leap to Google Apps; University Pays Zero
Last October, Arizona State University became the first large institution to deploy Google Apps, a comprehensive suite of productivity applications.Since the e-mail switch-over, Sannier has been rolling out additional applications including calendar (which users can now share online, a capability the old university system didn't have), IM, and search. Within the next two months he expects to offer personalized home pages as well as online word-processing documents and spreadsheets based on Google Apps.
2007/04/09 - Trends in Training College Faculty, Staff & Students in Computer Literacy
ISBN 1-57440-085-1 Price: $67.50 Publication Date: April 2, 2007This report looks closely at how nine institutions of higher education are approaching the question of training faculty, staff and students in the use of educationally oriented information technologies. The report helps answer questions such as: what is the most productive way to help faculty to master new information technologies? How much should be spent on such training? What are the best practices? How should distance learning instructors be trained? How formal, and how ad-hoc, should training efforts be? What should be comptuter literacy standards among students? How can subject specific computer literacy be integrated into cirriculums? Should colleges develop their own training methods, buy packaged solutions, find them on the web?
Organizations profiled include: Brooklyn Law School, Florida State University College of Medicine, Indiana University Southeast, Texas Christian University, Clemson University, the Teaching & Learning Technology Group, the Applalachian College Association, Tuskegee Institute and the University of West Georgia.
For more information about the report, see http://www.primaryresearch.com/publications-Higher-Education-Reports.html
2007/04/04 - New Breed of Digital Tutors Yielding Learning Gains
Such artificial-intelligence-based programs now are on the market or in development for teaching chemistry, physics, foreign languages, reading, and computer science, among other subjects, and for grading essays.“What distinguishes intelligent tutors from integrated learning systems or skill-building software is that the tutors sort of both scaffold and support more complex cognitive processes,” said Margaret Honey, the director of the New York City-based Center for Children and Technology. “Well-designed tutors are smart enough to know there’s not a single way to solve a problem, and that’s what makes them ‘intelligent.’ ”
Source: Debra Viadero, New Breed of Digital Tutors Yielding Learning Gains, Education Week, April 2, 2007. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/04/02/31intelligent.h26.html
Steve Cavrak 15:42, 4 April 2007 (EDT)
2007/04/03 - Google debuts desktop search for Macintosh
The focus of Google desktop is search -- local indexing your harddrive, your idrive, a single Gmail account, incouding a Google Domain. There's some nice twists here. If you delete a file, for instance, the Google software can retrieve a cached version so you don't have to recreate it from scratch.Source: http://yourtech.typepad.com/main/2007/04/google_debuts_d.html
Download: http://desktop.google.com/mac/
Posted by: Steve Cavrak 09:02, 4 April 2007 (EDT)sjc
2007/04/03 - Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox: Bad News For Flock
Mozilla's Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you).Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below).
- Comment by : Hope Greenberg, 09:31
This makes me wonder if it would be better to look at LMS products that have fewer features, or rather, those that concentrate on features designed to keep things "in group/course." Then rely on general web 2.0 development to fill in the social networking features we are looking for--flow with the tide, as it were. As long as, of course, our training efforts included both.
- Comment by : Ines Berrizbeitia, 10:23
Hope - in a sense, that's what were already doing now. Using WebCT as the group base, faculty have supplemented with - and created assignments that use - blogs, wikis, Twango for sharing video/audio/static images/text, etc., etc.
What isn't so great are all the different and disjointed interfaces to learn, log in to, and do assessment from. Content is scattered and out of our control (what if Twango - or much less likely, Flickr - shuts down?)
It's probably wildly unrealistic to think we could find the LMS product that would do everything we "visioned" for Utopia, but someday.... who knows?
- Comment by : Steve Cavak
I think this is one of the reasons for focusing on a "course management system" rather than a "learning management system." From the student's perspective, the "browser" is the learning management system.
There is at least one LMS system that takes the broader view ... ELGG ... and the larger view is probably a longer term view.
It would be interesting to configure an LMS out of two parts - a "content management system" (lectures, powerpoints, discussions?, presentations - sort of the MIT model) and a "course management system" (grades, assignments, communications?) ... e.g. OmniUpdate.Com : The Case for CRM and CMS :
... Many of today’s leading institutions are now implementing technologies including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions and Web Content Management Systems (CMS) to help keep pace with student needs
2007/03/30 - Blackboard Problems Leave Vista on Double-Secret Probation
Some campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere using Blackboard are discovering that the software and some of its functionality is being hindered as students and teachers begin to update their systems with Microsoft Vista... In particular, the Visual Text Box Editor --which offers controls for entering and formatting text, equations, and multimedia files -- in the Discussion Board and other areas of Blackboard does not work properly for those with Vista and IE7 in some cases. Many academic IT departments are suggesting that students and teachers either use an alternative browser such as FireFox or Opera, or disable the feature altogether.Source : Bryan Gardiner, Blackboard Problems Leave Vista on Double-Secret Probation, PC Magazine, 03.29.07, http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=204304,00.asp
2007/03/28 - eSchool news, Web fuels 'democratization' of knowledge
More schools are posting course materials online, free of charge, eSchool News staff and wire service reports, March 28, 2007. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/pfshowStory.cfm?ArticleID=6958Following the lead of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other highly competitive schools, more institutions are posting online everything from lecture notes to sample tests, and even making audio and video files of actual lectures publicly available. The sites attract anywhere from thousands to more than one million unique visitors each month.
