Blackboard has been making acquisitions: Xythos, a content management system that already powers the Blackboard Content System and an Emergency-Notification system. I have a problem with an LMS needing to purchase a content system, because I thought an LMS was already a specialized content system. I’d really like the LMS world to evolve to include Activities as first class citizens. No more activities that sit in the Tools area, no more a single activity types (eg Forum, Chat room) for a whole course with weak links from content that break each time your course needs to rollover to the next semester. Lecturers and Students need to be empowered and the only way this can happen is with flexible content and activity authoring tools. It is not only the Lecturer that needs to add content to a course, why can’t we move to a more collaborative decentralized authoring system - Students should be given control of selected areas in an LMS. The question for Blackboard is whether the purchase of Xythos will make this happen?

In many ways Blackboard already has the key to re-usable Learning Objects. I’ve not struggled with the definition of a Learning Object. A Learning Object is a sequenced collection (linear or hierarchical) of content (text, media, etc) and embedded activities (forums, blogs, quizzes). A course withing Blackboard can contain both content and embedded activities to a certain extent. Some activity tools in Blackboard lend themselves better to being embedded within content in Blackboard. The activities/tools available from Learning Objects (the company) are all instance based as multiple tools can be embedded within a course - an example of a Building Block (extension/addon) being more flexible then the in-built tools. A course in Blackboard can be exported to an IMS-CP zip file, which can then be imported to another Blackboard course on either the same Blackboard server or another Blackboard server with the same Building Blocks installed. This is Learning Object sharing at a course level.

Blackboard could make this sharing much more fine grained by simply allowing any node (ie sub folder) in a content/activity hierarchy to be exported. The same goes for importing. At the moment content can only be imported at the Table of Content level. It should be allowed at any point in a content/activity hierarchy (ie any sub-folder level). In other words it would be quite easy for Blackboard to make reusable learning objects that incorporate both Content and Activities, by simply tweaking there current import/export code and establishing a repository to store and tag the IMS-CP zips.

I spent a good deal of time, migrating content with embedded activities from an in-house LMS to Blackboard. Migration was achieved via the IMS-CP Blackboard import/export format. Essentially I built a tool to export entire courses to the IMS-CP format, which then got imported into Blackboard. This in part proves that the theory of using the Blackboard IMS-CP zip as a re-usable learning object will work!

BTW - All my Blackboard knowledge and news comes from Micheal Feldstein’s Blog.