Monday, May 05, 2003

Journals, News, and Discourse. Due to poor planning (ask me later) I’ve received a “new faculty grant” to start a free access, online, peer-reviewed, instructional technology “journal.” Of course, my inclination is to lean it toward learning objects / reusable media / online communities / blogs / open content / etc. for the topic or niche. But the point of the grant is to explore new publishing models, and there are a whole bunch of other exploratory things that could be done. [autounfocus] Route to David and Heidi. Illustrates my points this morning. David Wiley is important. 10:30:13 AM

Open Source Courseware. The cost of doing business is going up for colleges and universities, particularly when it comes to course management systems. Proprietary enterprise solutions for course management -- BlackBoard, WebCT, eCollege -- are beginning to cost the same as other enterprise solutions. Translation -- they're getting very expensive. This rise in cost, along with the traditionally closed architecture of such systems has lead some universities and organizations to develop in-house programs tailored to their specific pedagogical needs and development resources. Some of these home-grown solutions have been heavily influenced by the aggressive open source movement and have adopted both development and licensing strategies that allow other to adopt the software for free, or participate in the development process. The purpose of this paper is to outline the major open source courseware projects and to rate their usefulness. This is not intended as a definitive ranking but rather as a point of departure for those interested in investigating these systems and who are considering an open source courseware implementation. [Xplana] (comments added 5/5/03, after posting) I am looking for an active backlash aimed at "very expensive" enterprise solutions. In one sense this is already happening (just look at sales figures and stock prices for some of these companies). An "active backlash" would be in the form of more organizations going to open source solutions (and they do exist, you just don't hear about them) or to collaborative use of XML (e.g., Canada's eduSource). 8:04:22 AM