Octeto

Richard Poynder, Open and Shut, February 9, 2012. What's Elsevier's take on legilsating open access for government-funded research publications? "[W]e don’t believe that the government should tell authors and publishers what we can do with our publications." Well. Maybe government should say "we don't believe in letting Elsevier publish any work that we've funded." I wonder whether they would call that interference. Anyhow, read the rest of these eye-opening comments from Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise, who posted a defence of the company on the Liblicense mailing list.
[Link] [Comment]

Ben Showers, JISC, February 9, 2012. Summary of "a recent Usability workshop held by Ben Showers and Torsten Reimer as part of their work on the Usability and Adaptability of User-Interfaces." Themes covered include the impact on the product development culture, strategic buy-in and communication. The post is useful enough, however, I found that if I substituted any other word for "usability" it read pretty much the same. [Link] [Comment]

Tony Bates, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources, February 9, 2012. Tony Bates reviews a book that "provides comprehensive coverage of the practice and applications of quality assurance in distance education and some elements of e-learning around the world." He expresses disappointment because "the book does not touch on the greatest area of application of e-learning, which is in the traditional campus-based universities and two year colleges." I'm not really sure these fall properly under the heading of "distance education and e-learning." But Bates explains, "We don’t need to build a bureaucracy around this (quality in learning), but there does need to be some mechanism, some way of calling institutions when they fail to meet these standards. However, we should also do the same for campus-based teaching."
[Link] [Comment]

Michael Staton, M. P. Staton, February 9, 2012. Illustrated, a framework for unbunbling education. I've commented on the concept previously. This breaks down the task of learning along very different dimensions, describing "ten services, listed here in the order of they will be disrupted." [Link] [Comment]

Tim Bonnemann, Intellitics, Inc., February 9, 2012. Good summary of an article (itself unfortunately behind a paywall) on the design of online deliberation systems. These are systems that enable a group of people to debate and eventually reach a decision about some matter. The article reviews a number of such systems in an effort to draw out design principles. [Link] [Comment]

Steve Kolowich , Inside Higher Ed, February 9, 2012. The 377 responses posted in response to the White House's request for commentary on open access are a treasure trove of commentary and perspectives on the issue. This article focuses on one statement, from William E. Davis, III, on behalf of the American Anthropological Association, which asserts that "no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system." This created a revolt in the ranks of the AAA, as members had already pledged themselves to support open access. Jeremy Trombley, for example, writes, "I'm willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. [Link] [Comment]

By Michael Feldstein

I just wanted to drop a quick note to point out that the always interesting Rob Reynolds will be running a webinar on the future of the textbook on Friday. Here are the deets:

The Future of Digital Textbooks in U.S. Education (And What That Means for
You)

Date: Friday, February 10
Time: 1:00 CST
Open registration – http://bit.ly/x8EGIw

Textbooks will be predominantly digital by the end of the current decade
and that means big changes in both the publishing and education markets in
the U.S. In this webinar, Dr. Rob Reynolds will explore the current trends
in the textbook publishing industry, the continued evolution of digital
textbooks, and the rise of open textbook and OER content. His presentation
will feature research from his forthcoming book (The Future of Learning
Content: E-textbooks, Open Content, Apple and Beyond!), and is also based
on his professional experience as an educator, author, administrator,
educational technologist, and publishing executive. Specific topics
addressed in the webinar include:

Current and future trends in educational publishing
Top 10 obstacles faced by traditional textbook publishers
Market projections for print and digital textbooks through 2020
The impact of tablet devices on digital learning content and the
curriculum
The evolution of the open textbook and self-publishing markets in
education  (and their challenges)
The rise of low-cost, digital-first publishing in education
Trends in e-reader software platforms for e-textbooks
The real impact of Apple, Amazon, and Google on textbooks

Possibly related posts:

1. EduPatents Webinar Coming Up Stephen Downes and I will be guests on Cable Green’s...
2. Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of...
3. The Coming Digital Textbook Wave Xplana has published some interesting growth projections on digital textbooks...

Webinar on Textbooks by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

David Kravets, Wired, February 8, 2012. A headline like that just makes you feel like property, doesn't it. The people who talk about the dehumanizing aspects do have a point, I think. [Link] [Comment]

Harold Jarche, Life in Perpetual Beta, February 8, 2012. I have long argued that a nation is not democratic if its institutions are not democratic. To date, however, we have managed to enact democracy in only a very few of our institutions, while the vast majority - companies and corporations, departments, schools and institutions - are governed by command, not deliberation. Harold Jarche writes, "David Korten in The Great Turning, described America, the Unfinished Project: Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all." [Link] [Comment]

Jim Farmer, Fortnightly Mailing, February 8, 2012. I think we ought to be really careful about where this is all going. What we have here is a set of cases where people around the world are being arrested and held on behalf of the United States for violating American law - even though they are not Americans, have never set foot in the U.S., and have done things that are not crimes where they live (and might not be in the U.S. either). The crimes, of course, have to do with copyright infringement - nothing else (save perhaps the crime of being Afghani) seems to be worthy of such worldwide prosecution. Moreover, the putative 'crimes' are things like 'linking to files in an index' and 'inducement to copyright infringement'. Like I say, the content industry should be very careful about what it wishes for. Because it's not a great leap from this to a future in which a film producer in Britain is held and extradited to Beijing for the crime of criticizing the central leadership. [Link] [Comment]

Scott Leslie, EdTechPost, February 8, 2012. This is Part Two of a series begin by Scott Leslie last week. Today he covers WordPress and the closely related PressBooks. Once again he experiences difficulties exporting content from an LMS into the system. Interestingly (and perhaps worryingly) the components that create PressBooks out of WordPress have not been open-sourced. [Link] [Comment]

Phil Hill, e-Literate, February 8, 2012. Phil Hill writes: "The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article:
- LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
- The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery."
My own view is that these are incremental changes, not game-changers. They are, however, worthy of note as they set the bar in a slightly new position.
[Link] [Comment]

Doug Belshaw, Weblog, February 8, 2012. Oh my, I think this is simplified to the point of trivialization. To make the point by analogy, the diagram (and the other version on Mozilla) is equivalent to covering the history and geography of the United States under the following headings: colonialism, the Star Spangled Banner, the Bronx, the Great Plains, St. Louis, the Hopi Indians, corn, Eli Manning, the San Francisco Earthquake. Seriously - how do you have a topic called "calling an API" in a context that includes no other programming methodologies or concepts? It boggles the mind. Boggles! [Link] [Comment]

Derek Morrison, The Auricle, February 8, 2012. Derek Morrison refers to and transcribes segments of a recent BBC report on the business of education. "The edition includes some pretty insightful perspectives about the advance of the private sector into all levels of education," he writes, "(it) also offers some thought provoking contributions particularly from people like Martin Bean, the UK OU VC." I think the main lesson here is that educators cannot remain complacent - there is an entire business community out there wanting to prove it can do a better job, and motivated by the business opportunities, now and in the future, the education industry affords. [Link] [Comment]

Moodlerooms has provided the community with Google Apps integration and now follows with Live@edu integration for it’s Moodlers worldwide.  This release was originally found at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9173391.htm.  More information about Moodlerooms and Live@edu can be found at http://www.moodlerooms.com/ and http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-email-accounts.aspx respectively.

Moodlerooms, Inc., has developed an integration connecting Microsoft’s Live@edu services and Moodle, the world’s most widely-used learning management system. With this integration, Moodlerooms will make select functionality of Live@edu directly accessible within the Moodle 2 and 1.9 environments via single sign-on, further enabling teachers and students to access the quality, enterprise-level tools they need to effectively teach and learn online.

Microsoft Live@edu makes hosted email, communications and collaboration services freely available to educational institutions. Now benefitting over 22 million people worldwide, Live@edu provides access to Microsoft Outlook Live (email), a series of Microsoft Office web applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint), and Windows Live SkyDrive (online storage).

Moodlerooms’ Microsoft Live@edu services plug-in for Moodle enables users to:

• Log into courses using their Windows Live ID and display select Live Services on a Moodle site.
• View and compose emails and calendar events within a Moodle site using Outlook® Live
• Access Windows Live Messenger chat and Bing™ search engine within a course.

By releasing the Live@edu integration to the 55-million user open-source Moodle community, Moodlerooms is enhancing the Moodle teaching and learning experience while extending the global reach of sustainable education solutions.

“The interoperability between Moodle 2 and Microsoft’s Live@edu services is important to Moodle users on a global basis,” says Phill Miller, Moodlerooms Vice President of Product Strategy, “By having this available in Moodle, Microsoft and Moodle users worldwide will be able to use the most recent releases of both products in a seamless fashion.”

Moodlerooms will be releasing the Moodle and Microsoft Live Services plug-in code to Moodle’s Open Source Community under GPL Licensing, allowing teachers and institutions to download the plug-in under the same widely used open-source license agreement as Moodle. The plug-in will be freely available to download from the moodle.org plug-in directory on Thursday February 23, 2012.

About Moodlerooms
Moodlerooms is an e-Learning company committed to supporting the goals of education across the globe. With turnkey, Software-as-a-Service solutions, Moodlerooms makes it easy and affordable for educational, corporate, and governmental institutions to manage and deliver their courses and content online. Founded in 2005, Moodlerooms is headquartered in Baltimore, MD, with associates based throughout North America and Europe.

By Phil Hill

One of the trends that I’ve been tracking in the LMS market is a move away from the monolithic, all-things-to-everyone enterprise LMS solution. There are several different approaches challenging this model, but the general theme is that the ed tech market needs more flexible, targeted approaches to directly support teaching and learning needs.

The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article. In this announcement, LoudCloud promises what they describe as the “first fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management Systems for Higher Education and K12″. While I cannot judge yet how successful this vendor will be with their strategy, I think the announcement is significant for the LMS market for two reasons.

• LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
• The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery.

Disclaimer:  I do not endorse any one company over another and am not doing so here. My point here is to describe the general product release and to describe how this announcement further changes the LMS market.

LoudCloud is a two-year-old company based on a team formerly at Tata Interactive Systems, a provider of corporate LMS solutions. This team, led by CEO Manoj Kutty, started LoudCloud in 2010, and in 2011 had some significant wins in the for-profit sector of the higher ed market (Grand Canyon University with an enrollment of 40,000 students, and Career Education Corporation with an enrollment of 116,000 students) as well as the K-12 market (Jefferson County, the largest K-12 school district in Colorado with 84,000 students).

Last September I wrote about some early news for LoudCloud here and here.

… During my phone call and online demonstration, they mentioned that Career Education Corporation is migrating to the LoudCloud LMS from their homegrown LMS, tool by tool. This is significant – LoudCloud has designed their system as a suite of web services, where each tool is designed to use role-based authentication and to be available on its own merits – architectural disaggregation. Furthermore, LoudCloud Systems has been designed for personalized learning environment driven by analytics. As the system tracks the students usage and a demographic profile from the Student Information System, the LMS will serve up specific content that appears to fit that students learning preferences and learning style.

At the time of the previous posts, LoudCloud was working on projects with these early customers, but it was not clear if they would develop a business strategy to support this approach for other customers. It now appears that they are fully releasing the products and marketing to the broader higher education and K-12 markets.

Disaggregated LMS

LoudCloud is betting on a vision of each customer configuring the system they need, based on choosing learning tools in a best-of-breed approach – using IMS standards and having each tool with its own API. The idea is if you already have a working LMS ecosystem but mostly need to change a discussion board or adaptive reader, for example, why should you have to change the whole system? In addition to this vision, I’m sure that they would be happy to sell the entire LMS as well.

This concept of a disaggregated LMS is not new, and in fact goes back at least to the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) effort from 2005 that would have leveraged open source components and built a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). As described in a SLN2 whitepaper:

After considerable research, SLN has identified the best solution to be a component strategy, as no single-platform LMS solution exists today to meet our needs. This powerful component strategy would integrate several carefully chosen Open Source projects, each with strong technical compatibility, resulting in a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Collectively, the component technologies provide the requisite compatibility through standards compliance, complementary function, and strong alignment between their supporting communities.

Unfortunately this vision was not realized at the time, partially due to organizational resistance, but there has been progress in terms of the standards such as IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). From the open source world, Sakai 3 is also offering portions of a component approach.

Adaptive Content Through Analytics

The second part of LoudCloud’s bet is that analytics are the key to allowing a personalized learning experience that is adaptable to each student. The analytics engine in the LoudCloud LMS appears to take data from three primary sources – assessment results, demographics, and student engagement. According to Kutty,

We also believe that to deliver a better educational experience, a high quality educational platform must capture, profile, statistically analyze, and help improve content, student learning, and instructional engagement.

Most other LMS providers are also investing heavily in analytics, particularly in the ability to visualize and report assessment data. What appears to be new with LoudCloud is that their analytics engine can adapt the end-user experience for both instructors and students. According to the Campus Technology article:

Adaptive Reader Technology is a retention tool that captures and statistically analyzes more than 300 variables from student demographics, course engagement, and assessment data to deliver preferred learning resources, remedial instruction, tutoring support, and personalized feedback based on each learner’s individual profile.

What to Watch

For this strategy to work and LoudCloud to succeed, I see two big issues that need to be addressed.

• Market Acceptance – This announcement is significant, but the real judgement will come from the LMS market and whether LoudCloud can pick up new clients. There are a lot of changes to the market with new approaches, not to mention that the incumbent LMS solutions are not standing still. Will LoudCloud be able to expand beyond the for-profit sector and sell to public online programs and even to traditional higher ed? I would have expected to see more progress in terms of signing up new clients by now – the higher education market relies strongly on word-of-mouth, so sales success and momentum is important for this business strategy to succeed.
• Interoperability with Other Systems – While the IMS LTI standards are making tool interoperability easier and richer in end-user experience, early system integrations will most likely arise where the institutions control the product. Note that CEC was one of the first customers to implement components of the system, and they have a home-grown system. I suspect that clients with either a homegrown solution, or using Moodle and Sakai will be in the best position to take advantage of LoudCloud’s best-of-breed solutions.

Possibly related posts:

1. Breaking Up the LMS: K-12 District Selects Part of LoudCloud Systems’ LMS This is a guest post by Phil Hill from Delta Initiative,...
2. LMOS Project First Release Goals I’ve created a new wiki page for release goals on...
3. Teaching Faculty About Wikipedia (and Social Software in General) I just discovered Jon Udell’s wonderfully archeological screencast about the...
4. Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending From today’s press release: BbWorld Europe, Nice, France – February...
5. Course Management Systems and Pedagogical Models By way of edTechPost, we find this article at Dublin...

LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate

Looking to add another book to your library?  Consider commenting at the Synergy Learning blog for your chance to win Moodle 2 Administration by Alex Buchner available from Packt Publishing.

The book is an update to the popular original Moodle Administration book (from 2008) and features all of the enhancements, changes and additional features present in Moodle 2.x.  Enter simply by answering this question in the comments on the site by 2/20/12 to be entered: Why would you buy the “Moodle 2 Administration” book?

http://www.synergy-learning.com/blog/synergy-news/win-a-copy-of-moodle-2-administration/

Los próximos 9 y 10 de Febrero de 2012 tendrá lugar en Barcelona el VI Encuentro de Cátedras UNESCO de España, que en esta edición tiene por lema:

“La doble función de las Cátedras UNESCO: centros de reflexión y enlace academia-sociedad. Presente y futuro”

El encuentro ofrecerá diversas ponencias, un foro abierto de discusión y sesiones simultáneas de trabajo conjunto para fomentar el diálogo, el debate, la colaboración y el intercambio de experiencias entre cátedras afines. Las temáticas generales de las sesiones de trabajo serán:

• Sensibilidad y Medio Ambiente

• Educación y Ciudadanía

• Diversidad Linguística y Cultural: Contextos Locales en un Orden Global

• Ciencia, Tecnología y Desarrollo

• Derechos Humanos, Igualdad de Género y Cultura de la Paz

Lugar: Sala Master, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). C/ Jordi Girona 1 (08034), Barcelona.

Mas información:

Página web del VI Encuentro de Cátedras UNESCO de España >>

Programa (PDF, 46 KB)

Lugar de celebración | Mapa de ubicación de las sesiones (PDF, 33 KB)