Moodle

Changes in the Australian Higher Ed LMS landscape – a wave, or just a ripple?

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DSC_7098 This week, the University of Sydney announced that it was migrating from Blackboard Learn to Canvas, joining RMIT, UC and the University of Adelaide who have also announced similar moves in the last twelve months. No doubt this is sending one or two quivers through the camps of the ‘Big Three’ LMS platforms which until recently made up the entirety of the incumbent LMS landscape in Australian Higher Ed – Blackboard Learn (21 Universities), Moodle (15) and Brightspace by D2L (3)*.

But are we about to see a wave of change in the LMS landscape across Australia, or will it be more like a ripple?

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How I lost my faith in the LMS (or ‘my journey towards LMS nihilism’)

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It was a couple of weeks back now when I threw out a tweet asking what my next blog post should be, and as I should have predicted, it came back with the one that is probably the hardest for me to write.

Then, while all sorts of thoughts were rattling around in my head, Phil Hill’s post took quite a bit of wind out of my sails by articulating very neatly a lot of the stuff that I was mulling over. What Phil’s post also did however was to make me realise that my faith in edtech on the whole wasn’t the issue – it was far more my faith in the LMS.

What I did think was still worth doing in spite of Phil’s post was creating a bit more of a personal view of my own journey towards LMS nihilism, which is what I’m going to share here. First though, you’ll need to permit me to wander a little.

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Zen and the art of Learning Analytics

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I was fortunate this week to travel to Dunedin on the South island of New Zealand to attend the ascilite 2014 conference, and one of the notable aspects of the program for me this year was the number of papers relating to learning/learner analytics in some shape or form. While there have been papers relating to this field dating back as far as the 1999 ascilite conference, this year for me was the year that analytics really emerged as one of the dominant topics of conversation. The most encouraging thing for me though was that the analytics conversations appeared to be shifting away from the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of analytics to the ‘why’, which is where the real interest in analytics (and most other things) really lies.

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Blackboard Education Open Source Services – a personal view

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“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – JFK

Over the last four years I’ve been very lucky. Lucky enough to be part of a company which grew from 12 people when I started in 2008 to become one of the largest financial contributors to the Moodle project in the world in 2012. Lucky enough to become part of a global community of educators in an open source community that has grown to over sixty million users. Lucky enough to meet and work with so many awesome people as we’ve deployed Moodle in many Universities, TAFEs and other organisations around the country. And lucky enough to use Moodle through all of this, watch it grow as a product, watch the Moodle HQ team evolve in size and maturity, as has our own maturity in all aspects of using and supporting Moodle.

But, as always, the only constant in life is change, and now NetSpot, Moodlerooms, Blackboard and the Moodle project as a whole are about to enter a new era. You can read the official announcement here and here, but in this post I want to talk more about how I see this change from my own, more personal, perspective.

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Riding the Wave with Moodle

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Amidst much geeky fanfare Google recently unveiled its latest, greatest innovation – Google Wave. Without going into gory detail, and admitting freely that I’ve only gotten about two thirds of the way through the one-hour-twenty presentation video (but being otherwise filled in over dinner last night about the whole thing thanks to uber-geek Spud), Google Wave morphs instant messaging, email, document collaboration and a bunch of other tools into one more or less seamless platform, that just happens to be open source as well and lend itself brilliantly to integration with other applications thanks to a rich API. In theory anyway.

So what impact could this have on Moodle?

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