The new ILIAS version 3.8 offers a lot of interesting and useful Web 2.0 features like podcasts, RSS support, tagging with del.icio.us or Google Maps. All courses and groups may now have an own news feed to update their members about ongoing activities in the course or group. Every user can subscribe to a personal web feed with all news of items on the personal desktop and access these news with the client’s feed reader. User may create podcasts by uploading MP3 files to ILIAS and offering also to the outside. Google Maps have been integrated in the member lists of courses and groups. If a course or group member offers his or her personal position in the personal profile, ILIAS displays the position of the member on the map. All content items in ILIAS can be tagged and added to the personal del.icio.us site. Other Web 2.0 features will follow in the next versions. On the roadmap are a XML-based ILIAS wiki and tag clouds for content in ILIAS. For more information have a look in the «ILIAS Roadmap and Release» module.
July 2nd, 2007
In a recent podcast, Prof. Michael Kerres –director of the Duisburg Learning Lab – has commented on the success of the Moodle LMS. Kerres states that Moodle is about to dominate the market for Open Source LMS. In his view, this phenomenon cannot be traced back to the technical features of the Moodle LMS.
Experiences from the Duisburg Learning Lab – where several LMS are hosted in parallel and users are free to choose their favorite system – have shown that a majority of users prefer Moodle to other LMS. Why?
Kerres’ hypothesis: Moodle appears most appealing to all target groups within a virtual learning environment. System administrators are happy about the easy installation procedure and the standard set of third-party software (Webserver, PHP, MySQL). Authors and teachers are supported by the easy-to-use authoring tool and course environment which do not require extra training. And finally, learners take advantage from its intuitive graphical user interface supporting as well as its collaboration tools that foster the building of learning communities.
Concluding, Kerres argues that Moodle will win the competition with other Open Source LMS not only in the short term but also in the middle term perspective.
If one critically reviews Kerres’ argumentation, several concerns cross one’s mind:
- There is no reliable data about the German market share of Moodle in the field of Open Source LMS. There certainly is a dominance of Moodle in terms of media coverage but this does not necessarily reflect its actual deployment.
- At least for the UK, we have a more reliable data basis for the market share of Moodle in Further and Higher Education Institutions. According to the OSS Watch Survey 2006, 56% of Further Education Institutions (FE) and only 9% of Higher Education Institutions (HE) use Moodle as Virtual Learning Environment. But: Except for Moodle, the only OS LMS which has been taken into account in the survey is Bodington. Thus, these figures have to be regarded with caution.
- Setting up Moodle is easy and it does not require specialized third-party software to be installed by the administrator. But this is also true for many other LMS.
- Admittedly, Moodle’s technical features are not outstanding so indeed its attractiveness must be founded in Moodle’s usability.
Moodle - hype or not?
In his podcast, Prof. Kerres also states that moodle’s current high profile among the educational community contains some irrational traits. And indeed, it has often been observed in various economic sectors that market participants are not immune against irrational behaviour.
But at the time being, the question if we are currently experiencing a Moodle hype cannot be answered. It might be that we are currently undergoing the advent of a consolidation in the OS LMS market, with Moodle taking the lead role because of its usability. Exciting times ahead.
October 13th, 2006
One topic of this year’s International ILIAS Conference in Göttingen, Germany, will be the integration of the ILIAS LMS into bigger IT structures of universities and companies. The question of running a LMS all alone as a single service or integrating learning management systems into t general IT services like authentication, student’s management or mail service is a top issue at german universities at the moment.
In the first years of practising e-learning at universities, learning management systems were often installed for pilot projects and by teachers and institutes rather than by the computing service centers. This is why learning management systems have got a special status within an university. One reason for this was the teacher’s desire for a certain independency from the sometimes sluggish and over-evaluating IT experts at the computing centers. Most of the first used learning management systems were installed and maintained by faculties and institutes - not by the computing centers. Teachers and professors could test and evaluate those systems and run them quite independently. And because LMS are autonomous systems and usually offer all necessary features like an integrated user administration and authentication service, there was no need to connect them to other IT services provided by the computing centers themselves. This is why you find several LMS within one german university today - even if there is one general maintained LMS for the entire institution. And this is one reason why institutes have changed systems every two to three years without having big migration problems.
Today running a LMS as stand-alone system becomes more and more problematical. For a lot of universities in Germany e-learning is no longer a scientific research or pilot project but a basic service for improving teaching and learning. With the upcoming BA and MA degrees (Bologna process) a general reorganisation of the teaching takes place and e-learning is more and more important to handle the teacher’s higher workload for tutoring and assessment within these new study paths. This produces new requirements to a LMS like importing users from student directories, remote course creation from university management system or exporting user information to the university’s examination office. Another increasing requirement is the integration of a LMS into the university’s web portal.
The change from stand-alone LMS to an integrated system is mainly an organisational problem. Getting data from examination offices or student’s enrolement is a very difficult and highly political process. But even the technical realisation is not that trivial. An integrated LMS needs interfaces for connecting services and exchanging data. For some services standards are already existing - but not for all. And some of these administration systems used at universities are not standard compliant but highly proprietary.
Initialised by Novell a webservice interface has been developed for ILIAS since 2004. This SOAP interface has been extended in the last ILIAS versions and offers now a variety of services like remote user creation in ILIAS, course creation or remote role assignment. This SOAP interface has already been used to import users from the worldwide Novell user e-directory to their ILIAS training courses or for coupling the university administration system StudIP with ILIAS offering single-sign-on and single-look. At the time being the ILIAS open source team is participating in a project for developing a multi-system interface to a system called HIS-LSF used by a lot of german universities for administrating their lectures and life-courses. This interface will allow to connect HIS-LSF to a certain number of different LMS and support the remote creation of a course from HIS-LSF in ILIAS for example. A first version of this interface will be available end of the year.
This loose coupling of different systems will become essential for realising and supporting integrated e-learning services. Only those LMS will survive the next years that offers those interfaces and can be integrated in a broader IT architecture of an university. But we can think even one step beyond. Will there still be learning management systems in five year that can be seen as autonomous running applications? Or will the current systems migrate to something like “learning management services” that can be part of an administration system offering only those features and services that are need for realising e-learning? The advantages of such a concept are evident. Different from today where every LMS is a bit of an all-round software every service would focus on what it is made for - and this perfectly. LMS developers would no longer need to re-implement functionalies that are already existing in other tools (like mail or user administration).
But unfortunately learning management systems would become more or less invisible thus only the functionality is left on the user’s frontend. And the cost of re-designing the current systems would be high. This might not be a problem for Blackboard but maybe for open source tools like Moodle and ILIAS - and also for a lot of commercial systems as well. And therefore such a trend would be dangerous for the variety of LMS products on the market because only big players might have the resources for such a development and a further concentration of vendors would take place.
This process of full-integration is only a vision. But facing other changes in software development of the last decades it is not absurd. If this happens or not, it mainly depends from the user’s requirements for in e-learning. And this means, we all have a certain influence in this process.
September 15th, 2006
Via Edufilter and reproduced with permission.
Here is an interview with Brad Wheeler; a co-founder of Sakai and current serving Vice Chair of the Sakai Foundation Board.
What was the driving force behind setting up the Sakai project?
Rational economics and strategy for the future. In 2002, IU assessed continuing to advance our very popular home grown “Oncourse” system or to buy from the commercial marketplace. The public report is available - A Course Management System Strategy for Indiana University. Neither was a great option. Our economics were very favorable with great control of destiny in our homegrown system, but as an island, I knew we would struggle to keep pace with the very best innovation for teaching and learning. Michigan had reached all the same conclusions. We agreed to share code in 2002 and that ultimately led to what became the Sakai Project concept (with others) in late 2003.
What has the uptake rate been like? Is it meeting your expectations?
For the eight campuses of Indiana University, Sakai is already our default Course Management System. We’ve had over 90,000 unique logins and auto-load it with over 26,000 courses each semester. Some faculty moved last year and others are moving this year as we prepare to retire our old system.
Beyond IU, the uptake has been at the right pace. I’m delighted with the breadth of engagement from five continents. The project is only now 2.5 years old and has put out five releases. I think the 2.2 release really puts Sakai into full consideration for those that were waiting for a little more maturity in the software. Changing a CMS is a three year venture for most institutions, so many are now in the pilot evaluation year.
What is different about Sakai when compared to other OSS CMS systems such as Moodle or Drupal? Why do you think people should choose Sakai?
Since I’ve not taught with Moodle or Drupal, I can’t speak to relative strengths. I can say that Sakai was conceived as a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for enterprise-scale use. It is being used for eScience, scholarly portals, university committees, and all forms of collaboration in addition to supporting residential and distributed education. We saw this as a way to move to a Faculty Workbench concept where many of the tools they need for their teaching, research, and service roles are all there together. Likewise, students can use it for their teams and committees beyond courses too. One of our faculty recently told others on a call with a National Science Foundation project that “we do everything in Sakai for our collaboration.” A slight exaggeration, but its use beyond courses is accelerating quickly.
The broad community is also very important. The Sakai Conferences are now really about everything it takes to succeed – training, support, system administration, etc. The explosion of sharing among the Sakai community at the institutional level has been a remarkable development during the project’s second year.
Sakai is open source - can anyone contribute to the code base or become a member of the project?
Absolutely. Sakai has a very active Developer community and many improvements have come from individuals as well as developers who work in universities. There are a set of committers and review processes just like many other open source projects. The technical community works on a meritocracy.
Can you give us a scoop on some new features/initiatives Sakai users can look forward to in the near future?
I’m very excited about the Sakaibrary work to further integrate licensed library content into Sakai. See Integrating Licensed Library Resources with Sakai. There are some very cool synchronous tools for audio/video/whiteboard being developed in the UK. The GradTools work from Michigan is also a good one to help grad students through their degree programs. Sakai is laboring hard with IMS on the Tool Interoperability and Common Cartridge work. The 2.2. release also has full integration with the Open Source Portfolio. This helps mainstream courses, portfolios, collaboration, and more into a common, open platform. Faculty and students can then readily invoke the tools that serve their needs. I knew we were on the right path when an academic department called me recently seeking for us to deploy a Sakai tool built at another university that they had seen at their professional conference.
How do you see the recent Blackboard patent award effecting Sakai development?
It is difficult to see how these attempts to assert patent rights are in the interest of students, faculty, and tax payers. IU’s deployment of these enterprise-class concepts for educational software date to 1997 and 1998 as documented in the WikiPedia entry, thus we’ve made no changes in our plans nor am I aware of changes from others who are working together through open source sharing. The Sakai Foundation has retained the Software Freedom Law Center and Eben Moglen to advise us on these matters as assess the veracity of the patent claim and other efforts to limit the free sharing of educational software that has long been a value of higher ed institutions. Our announcement.
With the emergence of companies such as RSmart it seems to me the often heralded argument that OSS does not have the same support as commercial tools is no longer valid. What do you think about the whole OSS vs Commercial CMS argument?
Is someone really still talking about that? With 13 Sakai Commercial Affiliates and competitive bidding on support and implementation services around open intellectual property, I’d say “argued, answered…dismissed.” Our commercial affiliates have no IP claims on the work of the Sakai Project, and yet they are choosing to be great contributors in many ways. In a field of sixteen candidates with .edu’s having about 85 votes and .com’s having about 11 last year, Members of the Sakai Foundation elected Chris Coppola of rSmart to the board. Why? Because rSmart had been working in the discussion groups and helping the community. Markets work. Other affiliates are doing likewise too.
What are the technologies behind Sakai?
Enterprise Java is the core, but we’ve got connectors for tools in other programming languages as well. We are database agnostic. We use web services, Spring, and Hibernate.
And let me add one more…..
Sakai has shown colleges and universities how to invest together and develop software using open source practices. We are repeating that with the Kuali Financial System that will have its first release in early October, and a Research Administration System announcement is forthcoming. These projects, more than anything, represent a new Coordination Model for higher ed to pool and leverage its resources. It is working because it is held together by incentives rather than contract. Everyone has walk away rights to the code at any time. The value of the community entices them to participate.
August 31st, 2006
For those interested in Moodle, here are some resources worth checking out.
You can watch the keynote and track 2 sessions from the recent MoodleMoot 2006:
http://moodlemoot.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=99
There are plenty of notes on the MoodleMoot site.
Miles Berry has been blogging his thoughts on the conference.
July 28th, 2006
