Blackboard has the lion’s share of the US higher education LMS market but how’s it faring in the UK? Further education colleges are switching to Moodle in droves as I noted recently. But changing your VLE can be a massive project for a large university, involving the migration of huge amounts of content and upskilling […]
In the heart of downtown post-industrial Manchester, currently basking in sweltering Mediterranean temperatures, Blackboard is hosting its European Conference, BbWorld Europe ‘08. Michael Feldstein has described the attack on Blackboard’s market share from Moodle. Whether this has anything to do with the negative publicity surrounding Blackboard’s patents, reported on extensively by Stephen Downes and Jim […]
Rob Englebright reports recently on the JISCmail VLE List about an unoffical wiki-based survey of VLE usage in UK colleges. Of 156 colleges it’s now Moodle 59%, Blackboard 28%. The detailed breakdown is: Moodle 93 including 4 using moodle in combination with Sharepoint (and in one instance Moodle, Sharepoint and Pebblepad) Blackboard 43 including 2 […]
Our latest incarnation of Moodle was released this morning. New functionality includes: Audio resources pages – enabling audio files traditionally distributed on CD/DVDs to be made available as mp3 files for download New blog module – we found the existing Moodle blog too restrictive so have had a new system developed – this allows the […]
A press release yesterday announces the selection of Elluminate for our synchronous desktop collaboration and communication requirements. This comes after a lengthy procurement process in which 14 vendors submitted tenders. Elluminate scored the highest on our educational and technical criteria. Our evaluation team think the product is particularly well-suited for distance education and includes features […]
Initial feedback on the new Moodle gradebook is promising. Tutors on the Open University course SDK125 “Introducing health sciences: a case study approach” reported: Gradebook seems very useful, as I now get to view a list of all of my students results, without having to go into each of their StudentHome pages. It was also […]
This is a major issue for universities. Back-end integration work is carried out so that details of which courses students are signed up to and which lecturers/teachers/tutors are assigned to them are generally passed from the central systems to the VLE. There are other types of integration too such as passing assessment results from the […]
Unless I’m missing something it’s not obvious from Blackboard’s website what their future development roadmap is but a recent posting to the Blackboard Midlands User Group, pointed out by A.J.Cann shows some of the things that are being talked about for the v9.0 release due in January 2009. What can users of other VLEs/LMSs learn […]
I’ve just been at a workshop organised by Joel Greenberg exploring the potential of bringing Moodle and SAKAI together. There were representatives from Cambridge, Nottingham and Michigan Universities, plus the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the OU. Chuck Severance, former brains behind SAKAI, kicked off with a fascinating talk about his current thinking on personal […]
I’ve just been attending sessions by Etienne Wenger and Yrjö Engeström organised by the Practice-based Professional Learning CETL at the Open University. One quote I particularly liked from Wenger, the communities of practice guru was: Communities of practice can be terrible things. It takes a community of practice to put a witch on a pyre. […]