Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eCampus News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

3 strategies to start reimagining the learning management system

I wrote several weeks ago that we need to deconstruct the learning management system (LMS) and then reimagine it from the ground up as a “learning” system, not a “management” system.

While there are exceptions, online learning, by and large, has become a vast, sterile wasteland of outdated content and pedagogy. Like many of our industrial legacy educational structures, the focus of the LMS on management over learning creates students that are merely widgets, not learners. It is time to fundamentally reimagine this space.

A number of years ago, I developed a framework called Ideaspaces to help me design an innovation center. It was and came out of a host of disconnected reading I was doing about what facilitated innovation and learning. I recognized that innovation and learning are basically the same thing. “Learning” is self-innovation; “innovation” is the scaling of learning to an organization and beyond. The underlying principles are the same and can be applied to all systems designed to facilitate and augment human intellect.…Read More

Cloud-based LMS challenges Blackboard to major security review

Blackboard said its security holes were 'common issues.'

A relatively new kid on the learning management system (LMS) block has jabbed Blackboard Inc. in the chest for three months, daring the commercial LMS behemoth to conduct a publicly available security audit of its popular platform. Blackboard, so far, has ignored the challenge.

Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, a cloud-based LMS that counts several large campuses among its customers, used a Jan. 24 blog post to challenge the heads of Blackboard, Blackboard Learn, and Desire2Learn to hire a third party to conduct a comprehensive security audit, fix the security shortcomings found in that audit, and publish the results for everyone to see.

Ninety days later, Coates has yet to receive a reply to his audit proposal, and eCampus News interview requests sent to Blackboard and Desire2Learn went unanswered.…Read More

Moodlerooms CEO: Blackboard acquisition will expand open-source movement

Blackboard's LMS market share has dropped in recent years.

Lou Pugliese, CEO of Moodlerooms, said Blackboard’s purchase of his company and another firm that hosts and supports the popular open-source learning management system (LMS) Moodle should be welcome news to educators who support the open-source movement over proprietary options because, finally, an open platform has the financial backing of a large company.

Blackboard, by far the largest LMS provider to U.S. colleges and universities, announced March 26 that the company had purchased two providers of the open-source Moodle LMS platform, Moodlerooms and Australia-based NetSpot.

In its entrance into the open LMS world, Blackboard secured the backing of respected open-source advocates like Pugliese and Charles Severance, who has held a number of positions with the Sakai Foundation, another open-source advocacy organization.…Read More

Realizing the power of ‘open’ to transform higher education

Are we really at a turning point in the creation of truly crowd-sourced knowledge?

As the concept of open source has evolved and expanded over the past two decades from difficult-to-manage productivity and organizational tools to a vast, friendly, and rapidly growing bank of interactive open content, the possibility for grassroots innovation that can transform higher education is more viable than ever.

Beyond the open-source learning management system (LMS), for instance, which has become a cornerstone for many higher-education institutions, open education resources (OER) are disrupting traditional teaching and learning processes by radically altering the “supply and demand” balance of courseware creation and deployment to place learners front and center in the process.

Read more about open source in higher education……Read More

Report: Mobile app use exploding on campus

The number of private universities deploying mobile apps rose to 50 percent from 42 percent in fall 2010.

Colleges and universities have made significant gains in deploying mobile applications over the past year, according to the 2011 Campus Computing Survey, the largest continuing study of higher-education technology use in the United States. But the survey also suggests that colleges have been slow to move key operational and research functions to cloud computing, and budget constraints continue to affect campus ed-tech services.

The 2011 survey shows big gains in the percentage of schools deploying mobile apps, and these gains appear across all types of institutions.

More than half (55 percent) of public universities have activated mobile apps or plan to do so in the coming year, compared to a third (33 percent) in fall 2010. Public four-year colleges also posted good gains (44 percent in 2011, up from 18 percent in fall 2010), while the numbers more than tripled among community colleges (41 percent this year vs. 12 percent last fall).…Read More

Vendors link e-textbook content with LMS software

CaféScribe eBooks are available online and on more than 850 college campuses
CaféScribe eBooks are available online and used on more than 850 college campuses.

As digital textbooks become more common on higher-ed campuses, providers are making it easy for professors to share textbook notes and resources with students through their class learning management system (LMS) software. The latest provider to do so is Follett Higher Education Group, which announced May 19 that a new standards-based system would integrate its eBook material with popular sites such as Moodle, Sakai, and Blackboard.

Educators who use textbooks supplied by Follett’s CaféScribe, which also brings students together through social networking to form online study groups, can take detailed notes in the web-based format, pointing out the most important lessons to students and fellow faculty.

Until recently, those notes couldn’t be shared on a college course’s LMS, where students go to see class assignments, chat with peers and faculty members, and watch class videos online.…Read More