Michael Feldstein

I am gratified—and slightly surprised—to announce that the members of the Sakai community have elected me to serve on the Sakai Foundation’s Board of Directors. I deeply appreciate their faith in me. I also am grateful to my employer for not only enabling me to make the time commitment but also for actively supporting and encouraging my decision to run in the first place.

Congratulations to fellow new board members Ian Boston, Maggie Lynch, and Chuck Severance. The bios and platforms of all the nominees, including but not limited to those who got elected, are here.

Related posts:

1. The Sakai Product Council
2. Sakai Boston 2009: The State of the Union
3. Sakai 3 Vision Document

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Post tags: Sakai Foundation

Curtiss Barnes is Vice President of Industry Product Strategy for Education and Research at Oracle, and he’s also an all around smart guy. In his latest blog post, he has some more details on recent progress with LIS.

It’s well worth your time.

Related posts:

1. Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard
2. IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union
3. SunGard Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services

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Post tags: Curtiss Barnes, IMS, LIS, Oracle-Corporation

Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.

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Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Datatel, Desire2Learn, Inigral, Jenzabar, Kuali Student, LearningStudio, Moodle, Moodlerooms, MyLabs, Oracle-Corporation, Pearson, Peoplesoft Campus Solutions, rSmart, SAIP, Sakai, Sungard, Unicon

Pearson just announced that they will be supporting the IMS LIS standard (and with Oracle’s SAIP implementation of it) across a number of their products. First, they’ll support it in MyLabs, which are subject-focused learning environments (e.g., MyChemLab, MyMathLab, etc.)—sort of a fusion between an online textbook and a lightweight LMS. This kind of provisioning cuts out the middle man of the full LMS. (Up until now, the course roster information would typically be provisioned to the LMS, and the LMS would then provision it to MyLabs.)

Pearson will also be supporting LIS integration for their newly announced LearningStudio product, which is a fusion of their eCollege and Fronter acquisitions. I haven’t seen LearningStudio yet, but I have seen Fronter, and I was seriously impressed. It may just be the most powerful and flexible LMS on the market today. It has been focused on the K12 (European) market up until now, but I saw nothing that would prevent it from working well in higher education as well.

Related posts:

1. SunGard Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services
2. Wikis for Teaching and Learning

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Post tags: eCollege, eCollege and Fronter, IMS, LearningStudio, LIS, Oracle-Corporation, Pearson-PLC

In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included:

• Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links
• New Quicklink type to allow links to Tool Providers to be easily incorporated throughout Desire2Learn courses
• Links to external learning tools that can send user, organization, and course context information for a personalized experience in the tool; single-sign-on to learning tools is supported through an oAuth framework using a key/secret shared between the external learning tool and the configured link in Learning Environment
• Management tools to configure mapping from Desire2Learn roles to IMS roles, and from Desire2Learn org unit types to IMS context types

A couple of other platforms are following D2L on this road.

• Sakai has a pre-alpha version which is publicly available for testing, and which has been proposed for eventual inclusion in the next Sakai release (2.7).
• A prototype third-party building block is available for Blackboard through OSCELOT.

This is just the work that’s visible to the public. As is often the case with these things, (a) more work is going on behind the scenes, but (b) you should demand to see working code and a commitment to a supported release within a defined time frame before taking any statements of support by a vendor or project too seriously.

Kudos to Desire2Learn for taking the lead here.

Related posts:

1. Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard
2. SunGard Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services
3. IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Desire2Learn, IMS, LTI, Sakai

I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”

Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.

There are more LIS announcements to come, too.

Related posts:

1. SunGard Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services
2. IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union
3. Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: IMS, LIS, Oracle-Corporation, Peoplesoft Campus Solutions, SAIP, Sungard

This is a little geeky, but if you’ve ever wondered what “single sign-on” really means in the enterprise space, Unicon’s Andrew Petro has a great ten-minute YouTube video explaining the concepts, specifically as they are implemented in Jasig’s Central Authentication Service (CAS):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Uh…Wow
2. Wikis for Teaching and Learning

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Andrew Petro, Authentication, Central Authentication Service, Identity management systems, Jasig, Single sign-on, Unicon

I received the following email from George Kroner, a developer who works for Blackboard:

I wanted to point out one issue I take with your recent blog post. OSCELOT, the open source organization that you mention, is not maintained by Blackboard. Rather, OSCELOT is a separate, independent organization that was founded by a number of Blackboard clients and now hosts 300 developers who contribute to over 100 different open source educational tools. Specifically, their mission is to support the creation of interoperable learning tools that span multiple platforms. Yes, it is true that we sometimes sponsor their events – just like we sponsor the events of a number of other organizations. Yes, it is true that a lot of the tools they have to offer plug into Blackboard’s LMSs, but this is due to the history of the organization. Every organization has to start somewhere. You’ll notice some tools are actually webapps or binary executables that aren’t connected to Blackboard in any way.

The OSCELOT gang is a bunch of fun, bright individuals who have a true passion for advancing education with open source tools, apps, simulators, etc. Many of them are instructional designers, librarians, sysadmins, and individuals only tangentially connected to Blackboard who contribute their own non-work time to this organization. Personally, I think you are doing them a huge disservice by knocking their work in this way. Their vision is much bigger than being just a Blackboard development shop. As for me, I’m quite proud of what they do – just as you are proud of the work going on in the Sakai community. In fact, some of the contributors to OSCELOT also contribute to Sakai. Hopefully as everyone commits to and implements the open standards that we both believe in, we’ll see collaborative opportunities through organizations such as OSCELOT that will afford us the opportunity to more effectively move forward together.

It certainly was not my intention to denigrate the OSCELOT contributors in any way, and I appreciate George’s note to correct the record regarding the organization.

That said, none of this changes my main point about Blackboard, Inc.’s opportunistic touting of the value of open source when it is developed for their platform while simultaneously attacking it with falsehoods and poor argumentation when it competes with their offerings.

Related posts:

1. Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support
2. Three Tests for the ‘New’ Blackboard

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., OSCELOT

There was some good news out of last week’s IMS meeting. I’ll have more to say about the meeting in general in a future post, but for now I just want to applaud SunGard for publicly committing to support the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification in the upcoming 8.1 release of Banner Student (due out in the first quarter of next year, I think). Having the two biggest SIS vendors in the United States on board with the standard should drive adoption by LMSs (and other systems that need to know which people are in which courses).

Expect more LIS-related announcements soon.

Related posts:

1. Pearson Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services
2. Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard
3. IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

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Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS. It turns out that this was following on the heels of a similar study done by the North Carolina Community College system favorably comparing Moodle to Blackboard. The details were different but some of the underlying dynamics were the same: the open source system in each case was found to be functionally equivalent to Blackboard for all practical purposes, the open source platforms did roughly as well as Blackboard (in the Moodle evaluation) or better than Blackboard (in the Sakai case) in usability evaluations, and Blackboard was deemed to be expensive relative to the alternatives.

What’s interesting in the Moodle evaluation is that Blackboard wrote a response, which was published by the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS). And the heart of the response is a swipe at open source with many claims that are…factually and logically questionable.

Unfortunately, the PDF has some sort of copy protection on it that prevents copy/paste. (I thought Blackboard was on an openness kick….) So I have laboriously retyped the section of the response entitled “Top Five Risks to Consider When Evaluating Open Source” so that we can weigh the strengths of Blackboard’s arguments together. I apologize for any mistranscriptions.

Here we go:

(...)
Read the rest of Blackboard’s Response to Open Source: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (3,363 words)

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Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., learning-management-systems, Moodle, North Carolina Community College System, open source, University of North Carolina

An e-Literate reader comments on my post about Blackboard owing Desire2Learn money:

The amount [that Blackboard will have to pay Desire2Learn, including the original award plus interest] will probably be over $3.8M USD from my rough estimates which is higher than the expected writedown Blackboard took. This should result in additional expenses that will have to be recorded by BBBB.

What’s also interesting is that Blackboard’s top execs made record bonuses before this writedown, at the same time they took away any salary increases and the 401K plans for the regular staff. I think that is the bigger story.

Blackboard reported a $2.8 million net profit in 2008. The $3.3 million write down brings them to a $500,000 loss. An additional estimated write-down of another half a million would bring them to a $1 million loss for 2008. In the same year, Michael Chasen received $545,833 in salary, $663,039 in bonus, $1,833,560 in stock options, $80,466 in shares of restricted stock, and $14,911 in “other compensation”, for total compensation that was valued at $3,137,809. Matt Small received $370,833 in salary, $166,544 in bonus, $722,966 in stock options, $40,233 in shares of restricted stock, and $17,372 in “other compensation”, for a total compensation of $1,317,958. Coincidentally, if you add up the 2008 bonuses for the five Blackboard executives listed in the company’s proxy statement, the total is $1,074,127—almost exactly what the company’s final adjusted net loss for 2008 may turn out to be.

Moving forward, Blackboard is apparently going to incur the additional expense of an attempt to appeal their failed patent suit to the Supreme Court, even though Matt Small is on record saying that it is highly unlikely they will succeed.

Related posts:

1. Blackboard Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Desire2Learn in Canada
2. Blackboard Wastes Money on Worthless Patent
3. Blackboard Owes Desire2Learn Over Three Million Dollars

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Corporate finance, edunomics, edupatents, Executive compensation, Matt Small, Michael-Chasen, Supreme Court

(cc) photo credit: zolierdos

I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.

This does not mean that the litigation is over. Blackboard is still suing D2L in Canada for infringement of the original patent, and the company has been granted continuation patents (basically revised versions of the original patents) that they could assert.

Related posts:

1. Trying To Follow Blackboard v Desire2Learn
2. Blackboard Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Desire2Learn in Canada
3. Blackboard Now Suing USPTO

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Desire2Learn, edunomics, edupatents

The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:

The findings of the pilot are positive, leading the Sakai Action Group to recommend ITS continue to fund Sakai for the 2009-2010 academic year, implement student information system (SIS) integration, when possible, expand the number of participants using Sakai, and research a possible future migration path.

The whole report is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights from my perspective:

• There are relatively few comments from faculty or students about functionality gaps in one direction or the other. To the contrary, the platforms were seen by many as being functionally equivalent. LMS’s have reached that “good enough” stage where they are starting to commoditize.
• There were two exceptions to the “equivalent functionality” rule. First, a number of users seemed to appreciate Sakai’s more flexible permissions structure. I have written about the under-appreciated importance of groups and permissions on many occasions. The second was the ability to use Sakai for non-course work groups, projects, communities, etc. Blackboard has this capability, but you have to pay extra and license it separately. Frankly, I don’t know how they get away with it. No other LMS that I know of charges you twice for what is 95% the same functionality.
• There were lots of comments on usability, and almost all of them broke in Sakai’s favor. First of all, this confirms the point that I’ve made a few times here that usability is often more important than functionality. From UNC’s data, it looks like faculty and students were able to do more with Sakai while making fewer calls to the help desk. Which brings me to the other part of this. Three years ago, Sakai’s usability was bad to the point of being embarrassing. But it absolutely kicked Blackboard’s butt in UNC’s review. This is strong affirmation of the huge strides the Sakai community has made in usability.

Good stuff.

Related posts:

1. List of LMS Evaluation Projects
2. The Sakai Product Council
3. Sakai 3 Vision Document

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., Sakai, University of North Carolina

Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

Anyway, it’s a very good piece, well worth reading. A couple of points jumped out at me. First:

Rather than just being a like-for-like replacement, the Widgets update in real-time without any page refresh, and this affects user behavior. Rather than clicking links to launch tools or to view content, the Widgets encourage more of a “monitoring” mode of operation, with users navigating to a course page, then leaving it open in the background, occasionally bringing it into focus to see if any new conversations were happening in the chat widget, or the voting results had changed.

If this finding bears out with further research, it could be a fairly big deal. For one thing, it has the potential of making the learning environment a lot stickier and more Facebook-like (in a good way). At the same time, it should force some pretty substantial refactoring of core LMS tools, which simply aren’t designed for monitoring. The two models are likely to clash.

Here’s another interesting—and problematic—bit:

Another consequence of Widgets is that far less tracking information is available at a micro-level, as interactions with Widgets are not made available to the VLE. This implies that a new model for tracking will need to be developed for such systems; this may be a useful opportunity to reconsider tracking in more sophisticated terms than page views and hits. For example, it may be useful to separate out measures of attention, using something like APML[12], and measures of user effort, using something like User Labor Markup Language (ULML[13]).

The thing is, we’re  just now beginning to develop models where we can identify at-risk students and, more importantly, help them self-identify and self-remediate based on the data from the learning environment. The fact that this trend is in direct tension with the whole Web-2.0-in-the-learning-environment trend is underappreciated. We need to solve this problem.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Wave Mean the End of the LMS?
2. What Intrigues Me About Google Wave
3. Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment

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Post tags: academic-analytics, Apache Wookie, Google Wave, Moodle, Scott-Wilson

Mark Smithers has a post up listing all the public LMS evaluation projects by universities he knows of. This is a great service to the community; if you know of any others, please let Mark know.

Related posts:

1. UNC’s Sakai Evaluation Results
2. The State of the LMS: An Institutional Perspective
3. Does Google Wave Mean the End of the LMS?

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

This post is a bit of a tease. Our special issue of the On the Horizon (OTH) has been published. OTH is neither open access nor Creative Commons licensed, but they do have a very liberal policy about authors retaining copyright. I intend to find a venue in which all the issue articles can be published under some sort of Creative Commons license, authors permitting. (Suggestions for that venue are welcome; right now I’m leaning toward Connexions.) In the meantime, I’m republishing my introductory editorial for the issue, which really just provides a synopsis of the articles and tries to highlight the common threads. Many thanks, by the way, to journal editor Tom Abeles and to Emerald publishing.

Here goes:

(...)
Read the rest of Introduction to the Special Issue on Distributed Learning Environments (3,995 words)

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Post tags: Connexions, distributed learning environments, OTH, Tom Abeles

A while back, I wrote a post giving advice to small schools about selecting a new LMS. That post turned out to be reasonably popular. Today somebody sent me a link to a study done by the North Carolina Community College System comparing Blackboard to Moodle and, in particular, talking about the experience of some small colleges that had migrated from the former to the latter. The results are pretty consistent with the advice I gave.

Here are the highlights, along with their correlations to my earlier points:(...)
Read the rest of Blackboard vs. Moodle: North Carolina Community Colleges Assessment (346 words)

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blackboard-Inc., edunomics, Moodle, North Carolina Community College System, small school LMS selection

photo credit: michelle.irish

You may recall that Blackboard purchased a patent in what appeared to be a fruitless attempt to countersue TechRadium, the company that sued them for patent infringement over their emergency warning system and that now is suing Twitter. It turns out that the purchase was not quite fruitless after all, because Blackboard used it to get some sort of cross-licensing agreement with TechRadium (with undisclosed terms) in return for TechRadium dropping the suit.

Well, that apparently freed up some bandwidth on Blackboard’s legal team, and you know what they say about idle hands. Blackboard is now pre-emptively suing the individuals from whom they purchased the patent. Washington Business Journal has the scoop:

(...)
Read the rest of Blackboard Files Yet Another Lawsuit (348 words)

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alert-notification technology, Blackboard-Inc., Daniel Davis, edupatents, Steven Zimmers, TechRadium Inc.

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while. I promised Michael Korcuska that I would review the new Sakai book that he co-wrote with Alan Berg. This is a particularly important milestone for the Sakai community because it is the first one published about the LMS. When you have only one book on a system, it needs to cover a lot of ground to satisfy the different audiences. In contrast, because there are at least ten books written about Moodle, it is possible to have one written just about using it to teach 7- to 14-year-olds. Can the new Sakai book be all things to all audiences? Does it meet the challenge? The short answer is “mostly”.

(...)
Read the rest of Review: Sakai Courseware Management (696 words)

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Alan Berg, Michael-Korcuska, Packt, Sakai

The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This is not one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It’s just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia. To begin with, you have to love any presentation that includes a graphic like this one:

It is incredibly dense with information yet completely readable. Even better is the narrative that the presenter (Phil Hill, at this point in the presentation) weaves around it:

• Virtually all of these LMSs were started at universities.
• Innovation has all but flatlined (my word, not his) since 2004.
• At the same time, prices have gone up anywhere from 250% to 1,000% in the last decade.

Really good stuff. There are some good (if painful) lessons in the presentation about scaling for large systems too. The whole thing is well worth a watch. Thanks to Phil Hill of Delta and Kathy Fernandes of CSU for inviting me to attend.

You can see the slides here and the WebEx archive (which is worth watching) here.

Related posts:

1. Sakai Boston 2009: The State of the Union
2. List of LMS Evaluation Projects
3. Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process

© michael.feldstein for e-Literate, 2009. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CSU, Delta Initiative, Kathy Fernandes, Phil Hill