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iandolphin24: LHR clear of #uksnow so far. hope it stays that way until six ...

iandolphin24: @rossmackenzie I wasn't buying ... I was looking ;)

iandolphin24: I have just seen an £11,000.00 bottle of Bowmore. Gosh.

iandolphin24: @rossmackenzie We're moving from Concorde to First ;)

iandolphin24: @simonhodson99 Cheers ... Will do.

RT @facultyfocus: Social Media in Higher Ed report, plus Week in Review (PDF) http://t.co/fOp1qH8n #highered #edtech

Tags: highered edtech twitter

iandolphin24: Lunch in the Concorde Room at LHR T5

This is an abstract I prepared for the 2012 Blackboard Developer Conference – BbDevCon. We shall see if it gets accepted. IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 now has very broad market adoption and has been in Blackboard since Release 9.1SP4. Blackboard has added LTI support to building blocks, making it very simple to add LTI to a building block. Developers can plug externally hosted learning tools into Blackboard and the rest of the marketplace with a few lines of PHP. Now that the low-level LTI “plumbing” is in place, what will we do with it. This talk looks at the tools that are available in the marketplace that support IMS LTI and show them plugged into Blackboard. We will introduce and describe IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.1 that includes support for returning grades from external tools back to the grade book and demonstrate this. This talk also looks at ways to quickly build and host tools that function as LTI Providers and plug those tools into Blackboard. This talk also looks at the next release of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 that includes even simpler provisioning and installation of tools, expanded grade/outcome services, and improved ability to import and export classes with links to dynamic content and services hosted on the web.

This is an abstract I prepared for the 2012 Blackboard Developer Conference – BbDevCon. We shall see if it gets accepted.

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 now has very broad market adoption and has been in Blackboard since Release 9.1SP4. Blackboard has added LTI support to building blocks, making it very simple to add LTI to a building block. Developers can plug externally hosted learning tools into Blackboard and the rest of the marketplace with a few lines of PHP. Now that the low-level LTI “plumbing” is in place, what will we do with it. This talk looks at the tools that are available in the marketplace that support IMS LTI and show them plugged into Blackboard. We will introduce and describe IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.1 that includes support for returning grades from external tools back to the grade book and demonstrate this. This talk also looks at ways to quickly build and host tools that function as LTI Providers and plug those tools into Blackboard. This talk also looks at the next release of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 that includes even simpler provisioning and installation of tools, expanded grade/outcome services, and improved ability to import and export classes with links to dynamic content and services hosted on the web.

Tags: logos community

iandolphin24: @iamcreative Siri really doesn't understand my accent, so I've given up.

iandolphin24: RT @UXYoda: Not just from the design team creativity must flow, if great products you are to build.

iandolphin24: @bethwhitney Great ... I'd heard unseasonal weather and was hoping for the best

iandolphin24: New York tomorrow - Indian food tonight.

iandolphin24: @jfarnhill The 35mm Leica Summilux lens I have on the M9-P is a very nice piece of glass …

iandolphin24: @jfarnhill M9-P. Very nice indeed...

iandolphin24: Deep and Humber http://t.co/4n4Q8ccK

None off off

In November and December last year, several stakeholders in the Sakai OAE Managed Project, including Indiana University, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley and New York University committed to a substantially increased collective investment in the project. Others recommitted, and the first Sakai Commercial Affiliate to join the project, rSmart, committed to make a contribution to development, beginning between March and July 2012. This is the first such commitment to OAE from a Sakai Commercial Affiliate. The financial commitment to Sakai OAE is now greater than the original Mellon Foundation grant to the initial Sakai Project.        

This is all great news for the Project, and great news for the Sakai Community. It is also a testament to the work of the first year of the project in realizing the OAE vision.

What does this change? Firstly, and most obviously, it gives the project access to additional development resource. As the project ramps up, this translates into more rapid and richer development. This will not be instant; it takes time to bring new resource on board and up to speed. It will, however, be noticeable after March, when the ramping up process will be substantially effected. Secondly, there have been some adjustments to the governance structures of the project. A new Project Council will oversee a further OAE investment drive, and  act to ensure the Project is resourced effectively. The Steering Group, with rSmart as a new member, continues to provide Project direction, the User Reference Group ensures that the project remains design and mission led, and the Technical Reference Group provides a vital conduit to institutional technology perspectives.

The Open Academic Environment Project team continues to work hard on the next release - 1.2 - which is due on or before 24th February 2012. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, and let you try out the environment, an OAE community instance is available at

https://oae-community.sakaiproject.org/

This will soon be joined by the OAE Widget Library. Watch out for news of the launch.

The OAE Project is on a solid footing, and is making significant strides forward. There is still room for additional investment and collaboration to expand and enrich the project further. If your institution is interested, please contact Ian Dolphin or David Goodrum at the addresses below.

Contact the Open Academic Environment Project:

• Steering Group Chair - David Goodrum, Indiana University -goodrum@indiana.edu
• Sakai Foundation - Ian Dolphin, Executive Director -iandolphin@sakaifoundation.org
• Project Co-Leads - Anthony Whyte - arwhyte@sakaifoundation.org & Nico Matthijs - nicolaas@sakaifoundation.org
• User Reference Group Chair - Lucy Appert, New York University - lga2@nyu.edu
• Technical Reference Group Chair - Owen McGrath, UC Berkeley - owen@media.berkeley.edu

By Phil HillAlong with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market. What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS). The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months. CourseKit was released as a free learning platform targeted at faculty adoption. Apple’s iTunesU app was announced alongside the iBooks / Author textbook offering, extending iTunesU as an iPad-based learning platform. Facebook made a move within its higher education roots, starting a pilot program with Groups for Universities. In my post from last summer, I characterized the changes we were starting to see, but with all of the recent changes, I think it would be useful to extend the first two trends mentioned. The question is, what will the LMS market that is emerging from these changes look like?  No one can know for sure what will happen over the next 3 – 5 years, but I do think there are some key trends that are worth understanding. The market is more competitive, with more options, than it has been for years.  Instructure is a real player that has shown that it can win against established LMS vendors with big wins in Utah and at Auburn.  LoudCloud has new clients at CEC, Grand Canyon U and an unreported win at a public state university.  BrainHoney won at BYU.  Pearson LearningStudio has major wins at Arizona State and Columbia online programs.  Desire2Learn has roughly doubled in size in the past year.  Moodle and Sakai, including through providers such as MoodleRooms and rSmart and Unicon, continue their impressive wins in the market. In terms of market competitiveness, we are seeing even more offerings than mentioned in August, including a new class of “free”. Pearson’s OpenClass, Blackboard’s CourseSites, CourseKit, Apple’s iTunesU app, and Facebook’s Groups all join NIXTY as free learning platforms. We have not had the time to see the market share changes based on these new offerings, but if nothing else, there are even more choices now. Related to the above, there is a trend towards software as a service (SaaS) models for new LMS solutions.  The SaaS model offers some compelling advantages in terms of deployment time and ability to mine and report transactional data that might not be possible with other approaches.  SaaS is not a panacea, but this is a growing trend in the LMS market. The trend towards SaaS could perhaps more accurately be described as the default model now for new offerings. In the LMS market from just short two years ago, the default model was enterprise LMS. The only exception was Pearson’s LearningStudio (the artist formerly known as eCollege.com). Today, every single new offering mentioned above is SaaS-based. Apple’s iTunesU app is a mobile app, but the content is served from a behind-the-scenes SaaS platform. Perhaps more significantly – there has not been a new enterprise LMS created since around 2004. Yes, each legacy LMS provider has major new releases available, but the one exception you could argue is that Sakai 3 is a new LMS and not just an upgrade from Sakai 2. Other than this exception, every new LMS solution to enter the market in the past two years has been based on a learning platform. I doubt we will see any more enterprise LMS solutions created given the cost-benefits of creating SaaS offerings. Another trend that is becoming apparent is that many of the new offerings are not attempting to fully replace the legacy LMS, at least all at once. Rather than competing with all of the possible features that are typical in enterprise LMS solutions, the new platforms appear to target specific institutional problems and offer only the features needed. Perhaps inspired by Apple’s success in offering elegant solutions at the expense of offering all the features, or perhaps inspired by Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation model, the new learning platform providers are perfectly willing to say ‘no – we just don’t offer this feature or that feature’. My colleague Jim Ritchey has written about the changes that SaaS models are starting to have in the higher education ERP market, put in context of the Datatel+SGHE merger. His key point: Therefore the challenge for the vendors is how to get the ERP, with its slow development and implementation cycles, to provide the solutions to the new needs of the institution. In the LMS market, the new answer to this question – how to adapt and respond to new institutional needs – appears to be based on learning platforms. Possibly related posts: What Platform Do You Use for (Pure) Distance Learning? I’m doing a little research and could use your help.... Oracle's New Academic Enterprise White Paper The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions,... Zimbra: What a Mashup-Enabled Enterprise App Looks Like Phew. Enough with the Apple stuff. I actually still have... Enterprise vs. Internet World Views in Educational Tool Design There’s an excellent (albeit necessarily technical) conversation about implementing OKI... Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Vision for the Technology I am honored to announce that I have been nominated... Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform by %%AUTHORINK%% on e-Literate