Dear Commons Community,
I have been in San Jose since Tuesday attending the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium. There have been a number of fine presentations. The one I enjoyed the most was a panel discussion on The Future of Learning Management Systems. The panel included college faculty and representatives from industry (Blackboard, Desire2 Learn, BeehiveMind, and Moodle). For the most part the panelists were supportive of the future of LMSs mainly because they all foresee significant growth in the use of online technology in teaching and learning. One of the most provocative exchanges centered on whether open LMS software is really free and that the indirect/intangible costs can be quite significant. Below are the URLs for two previous posts on this blog related to the Blackboard CMS.
Tony
https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/11/24/65/
https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/11/25/to-blackboard-or-not-to-blackboard-part-ii/
Alex,
Very true. All of our teaching – student records, media, intellectual property – gets reduced to one vendor’s software product.
Tony
One thing in particular that I noticed and would mention here is that No area is sacred or safe from Blackboard’s reach. Course outlines, grades, office hours, practice tests, course readings — you name it. They’re there. It does not allow you a chance to come up with an excuse and say you couldn’t find the reference book or any other notes, as using blackboards they are posting all related notes and reading materials in digital format.
Sarah,
Thanks for the info.
Tony
I went to the Moodlerooms vendor booth at the AAEEBL/Campus Tech Conference a couple of days ago and was pretty impressed with what they have to offer as a LMS. It seems that they’ve added/tweaked a lot of features by teaming up with Joule — it looks promising. I was looking on their website and noticed that they had a one hour webinar on July 29, 2010 at 12pm if anyone is interested in learning a bit more.