Janison, an Australian company that builds Learning Management Systems will be teaming up with the University of Woollongong on an ARC grant to “create strategies and tools to help university teachers design effective online learning experiences“. Based on the previous output of the University of Woolongong (eg multimedia and learning design work), I look forward to the outcomes and tools. Its great to see new Australian developments in this space and competition is always a good thing. Educational Institutions need to take an active role in the design and development of learning tools instead of the rather passive installation and release of systems that look like they are from 1996.

…. and the Edu Blog Winners are …..

Sadly I don’t subscribe to feeds from any of the winners, but that may change soon.

Educational concepts captured on video, uploaded and shared!!! Check out TeacherTube.

Some vids are quite creative eg Paper Trained Teachers in a Video Game World even challenges the concept of sitting still and watching it.

Adobe have announced that they wont be developing a new version of Authorware. I guess this means the end, unless Authorware is made open source. The only real way for Authorware to survive would have been for it to output to the Flash file format. I guess I feel sad having started my career building educational multimedia software.

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I’ve just been reading a post on Visio replacements. The market place for prototyping tools is growing. I’ve never been an advocate of using Visio for Wireframing (screen layout) and have always preferred to do actual HTML/CSS mockups by hand or in Dreamweaver. That said some of the Visio replacements eg iRise seem quite tempting with the inclusion of a simulation engine. An iRise type product for designing collaborative learning activities would be interesting. What about an iRise type product for creating Facebook social apps? What about an iRise type product for generating Blackboard building blocks or Moodle plugins. Possibilities, Possibilities, Possibilities! What about generating complete backend code (code generation) for any platform (Java, .NET, Rails, PHP). ….and then what about a lower price tag? In the end it just means more power to the designer.

I guess we’ll be seeing this more and more - Commercial LMS starting to package, support and enhance various open source products. In this case Angel has enhanced TiddlyWiki and released the enhancements back to the community. This is a step in a great direction and one that is at odds with edu patents. Blackboard already has Wiki and Blog support via the Learning Objects building blocks. I do feel that there is merit in integrating Blackboard with something like XWiki or Confluence - both of which have excellent plugin architectures. Confluence is commercial but is just too good to be ignored. Anyway more on plugin architectures later…

Oh — I just love the add content anywhere feature. Backpack could so be the best eportfolio or LMS or CMS ever.

Just been reading the new Confluence 2.6 release notes. The Social Bookmarking plugin is a great addition and could be particularly useful in for edu applications - ie let students share links without needing a del.icio.us login.

Stats on LMS satisfaction in organisations of varying size from an elearning Guild survey. Moodle, the open source alternative, scored exceedingly well. Blackboard, as expected hits that average mark with ease. Does being open source and free lend itself to a better satisfaction rating? I don’t think so because there are still elements of cost of ownership and support.

… and this quote is quite accurate: “the people who have to work with the LMS day-to-day give a much lower satisfaction number than the managers and directors”