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Bingo. This story looks like a company trying to put a positive spin on the fact that they're in the process of losing their patents due to a plethora of prior art. Their PR people won't, of course, mention this to educators, preferring to sow FUD so that they won't lose their de-facto monopoly over courseware at universities.

As our university is hurting for money and poorly endowed (ahem), I for one, am going to recommend Moodle when it comes to renewing our Blackboard license. Based on my experiences with Blackboard, Moodle looks to be more flexible.

As an LMS tech at a community college, I'm very hopeful that this will be reversed. I've evaluated several LMS's because we are currently near the end of our contract with our current one, and there's really nothing that Blackboard does that is very different than what everybody else offers. Right now, we're looking into Moodle and Sakai, as well as some commercial products.

How about Moodle?

~8 million students and teachers at almost 20,000 institutions, including some pretty large ones like the Open University, UK, UCLA, NZVLE, etc.

Compares quite well on features and usability with the market leaders in a >1 billion $ market.

One could mention that mediawiki thing, also:0).

Another alternative to BB is Moodle, http://moodle.org/

Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.

Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).

There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.

WTH are Moodle and Octave?

Seems to me the biggest loser here could be the most popular open source LMS -- Moodle. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for them given the discussions below that are less than a month old. If Blackboard is a "bad guy" here, how is Moodle any better?

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=48528/

and here:

http://groups.google.com.br/group/sf-uk-discuss/br owse_thread/thread/60b321aba956fcdd/c634155509923a cb?lnk=raot/

Yes...long live Moodle, so Moodle can create its monolopy. I fail to see the difference between what Blackboard is trying to do and what Moodle is already doing. See here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=48528/

and here:

http://groups.google.com.br/group/sf-uk-discuss/br owse_thread/thread/60b321aba956fcdd/c634155509923a cb?lnk=raot/

Why? It's not like there aren't already a lot of highly capable Open Source LMSs out there, some are even written in Java.

Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.

For the life of me, this is one of those patents that is so obvious and has so much prior art that is makes you think the patent office is a rubber stamp for industry. Oh wait.

TO: USPTO
FROM: Clue Stick
RE: Blackboard patent

Read this:

Online Learning Timeline

Here's Martin Dougiamas' comments on this topic... he's Mr. Moodle, it seems. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50597#23 1617 very clearly states there's no need to panic. Surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand have already allowed this patetnt, though!

http://phpxref.sourceforge.net/PHPXref is a great tool which builds an HTML-based outline of your source code. It's been an indespensible tool for working on a very large project, http://www.moodle.org/Moodle), especially when getting my hands dirty with a new section of code I haven't used yet as it makes following an execution path very easy to do.

From the site description:
        * Minimal requirements, minimal setup.
        * No web server required to view output.
        * Cross-references PHP classes, functions, variables, constants and require/include usage.
        * Extracts phpdoc style documentation from source files.
        * Javascript enhanced output provides:
                    o Mouse-over information for classes and functions in the source view.
                    o Hot-jump to the source of any class/function definition.
                    o Instant lookup of classes, functions, constants and tables by name.
                    o Search/lookup history.
        * Pretty-prints PHP files from the browser.
        * Stays crunchy in milk.

for students to help develop their own next generation virtual learning environment.

The project is very supportive of folks who would like to contribute, serveral programmers who started adding features to Moodle as students at Humboldt State University are now core developers, and have the experience of having tools they have developed be used, reviewed, and built upon by educators and educatees around the world.

Project ideas and discussion.

The OU's proposal is posted and discussed here:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=40484

Actually, it's less of a redo than a clearing up of a few areas. A good deal of debate has to do with figuring out the best way to do something (such as what exaclty should be put in the alt tag for a student's profile image, etc.).

And yes, it is very important to test the commercial and other open source systems, the statements that various commercial systems make about being compliant may not born out in actual testing.

Talking to Niall Sclater, Virtual Learning Environment Programme Director at The Open University on what they're having to do to Moodle to bring it up to scratch for their large community of blind users was very interesting. The OU have 100,000 students, 10,000 of them with a registered disability, basically they're have to completely redo the accessibility of Moodle.

There was, however, no suggestion that any of the alternatives, commerical or open source were any better.

cheers, thingie

If you're interested in hearing Niall speak on such issues, or have a pointed question to ask him, why not register for our up-coming Open Source and Sustainability 2006 conference

From Mark Aliers team. Gives you a wiki with access control, wysiwyg, and all that cool wiki stuff.

Actually there is a wysiwyg wiki in Moodle now, but the new one is better:-).

Get the beta here, (get 1.6 for the wiki) :

And tell Google to hire us all, I mean shouldn't google have an LMS too?

And being used at a number of US institutions (San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, etc.) and worldwide, with large installations in New Zealand (NZVLE 45,000 students), a number of 10-20,000 student installations in Spain and France, the Open University of the UK is building out for 160,000 students next year, etc.

In fact the install base of Moodle rivals Blackboard/WebCT:
More http://www.moodle.org/stats

What people say about it

I work as support staff for my instituion's moodle http://www.moodle.org/ installation. While the software does have some bugs, it has generally served our purposes. Our other LMS that we are phasing out is a propritary system, and their management has us basically under mafia style control on our contract. They demand thousands for the simplest of fixes. Having a LMS that is community supported and open source has allowed us to not only fix many of our own problems, but taylor our system to our specific needs.

No. There have been billions of research dollars and millions of man-hours spent on trying to develop methods whereby non-programmers can become programmers. While some of them have had application-specific uses, not a single one has suceeded. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

There is also billions of dollars spent on re-inventing the wheel and patenting it. People look for ways to make non-programmers become programmers so they can write from scratch applications that already exist.

In this case the wheel is Moodle but the Not Invented Here syndrome is very common for any problem.

Use an existing environment, such as Moodle. You'll need to stick with the web browser and what the browser can present if you'd like to have people developing their own materials. True programming is probably out of the question for your users; they're interested in content development. I'd suggest Moodle version 1.5 (also integrates with Hot Potatoes, etc.)

Moodle has everything you are looking for. http://moodle.org/

Most of what makes Edubuntu different from *buntu isn't actually relevant for home use. To quote the Design Goals:

Centralized management of configuration, users, and processes, together with facilities for working collaboratively in a classroom setting.

...and the Application Selection criteria:

Target Market for applications - while applications for the learners are required, the main requirement now is for teacher tools, to enable teachers to create teaching content, worksheets, cross words, tests.

So if you ignore the child-friendly artwork (not that it's entirely insignificant), what you have (beyond standard *buntu) is:

1. An easy-install/control LDAP-based network environment
2. A Learning Management System
3. A bunch of pretty basic and standard educational applications - although the Timetabling app isn't to be sniffed at

Unless you're home-schooling (and ideally, homeschooling several families together), or your school is using Edubuntu and you want to standardise on it at home too, this isn't going to be much more helpful to you at home than any other *buntu.

These are books! Not paper books (...which I love...) but effective books: an entire dictionary, access to google, and even Wikipedia [snicker]

Your point is valid. I don't recall the storage capacity of these things but I'll bet (for example) they could hold a sizeable chunk of Project Gutenburg in them (among other educational materials). And, they will be able to expand the list of books if they can get access to USB CD/DVD drives. One $100 laptop with 1,000 books in it is going to go a lot further for a kid then $100 worth of dead tree editions...

Adding facility in each town to attach these to a Moodle server might also be beneficial, fwiw...

It's actually Sakai that has yet to prove it's scalability, 27k users on 27 servers as at UMich is not exactly 'scalable'.

Moodle is also much closer in features to WebCT/BB and goes well beyond them in several areas (such as the advanced eLearning development tool Lesson (demo at World Conservation Learning Network), soon to come Gallery2 integration, easy to set up LDAP integration (well it's beyond BB Enterprise here, you have to hire a BB programmer to help you set up LDAP, not sure about how easy it is with Vista).

Sakai 2, well it's back around Blackboard 5/Moodle 1.2 feature set, it requires a pretty bit step back to switch to it from Blackboard 6 or even 5.5, while Moodle 1.5.2 is much more comparable, in both features and scalability, to the commercial systems.

What features are available in Samigo that are not in the Moodle 1.5.2 quis and/orlesson modules?

now, Moodle is:-).

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
http://edutech.ch/lms/ev3/
http://www.karinvandenberg.nl/Thesis.pdf

all taken from http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=485

Also the price factor is here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28182

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
http://edutech.ch/lms/ev3/
http://www.karinvandenberg.nl/Thesis.pdf

all taken from http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=485

Also the price factor is here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28182

Moodle's UI is much cleaner and intuitive. I give my students (future K-12 teachers) less than 30 minutes of training and they're able to make it go. The fact that it's OSS means that, unlike Blackboard or WebCT, they'll be able to use it when they get to whereve they're working.

Just to make sure, I got the University to host Moodles for anyone in the state.

> Blackboard is one of the most hated companies in higher ed. Nobody likes doing business with them.

Did I hear somewhere, that the biggest stake of BlackBoard is in Microsoft?

So a big fish swallows a smaller, an even bigger fish swallowed the big fish :-(

Hope MD will keep his word: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32114#14 9536

Moodle (http://www.moodle.org/) is a great alternative to Blackboard and has almost all of the same features with new functionality being added daily. We are currently migrating all our Blackboard courses to Moodle since we have found Blackboard 6 to be buggy and unstable. We have 10 machines dedicated to providing Blackboard to our students and it can barely handle 500 concurrent connections without some part of it crashing. Moodle easily handles 50 or more on 1/10 of what we throw at blackboard.

A.

Look at systems like Moodle, the guy who once was a Web CT system Admin and got nuts and started writing up this program which is widely used in high Schools all aorund the world.

I had a communication with the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project as he conducted an interview with the guy and the guy's apparently in for the money now. Well who isn't? This darn socienty is based on money and trade. I think Sakai too when it's mature will generate *some* revenue as well. And that I think is OK, *making money* mindset will have sales force on an overdrive and developers disgruntled(look at MS lately). I think the whole idea of developing software is to actually NOT be able to reach a consensus. Because it never can be like that.

Maybe Google might wanna consider getting into the Education business, you never know. But seriously the Sakai initiative has a lot of potential!

Moodle and Sakai simply don't do the same things on the same scale as WebCT

Totally incorrect. Other than that, great point!

Moodle is several orders of magnitude easier to use than WebCT, especially for non-techie teachers. And it scales quite well, thanks.

It's even pluggable. It's relatively easy to write multiple authentication/session modules.

Moodle uses pluggable authentication modules (PAM) and can be used with just about any authentication scheme under the sun.

WebCT Vista is a thoroughly engineered modern product.

Sure it is. 8-/

competition generally drives innovation

Educational software such as Blackboard is too specialized to have much competition in the first place. It's because of this specialization that they can get away with terrible technology and interfaces. It solves a problem that a small population faces, and even though the solution is ugly and painful, institutions snap it up, desperate for anything.

Here's to Moodle taking all of Blackboard's marketshare.

Several people have mentioned Moodle, a PHP-scripted system, but there is also Boddington, which is Java (no, I don't know whether it's J2EE). Oxford University has a Boddington instance that allows guest access. It's a totally different paradigm to the WebCT / Blackboard 'corse' one. Let's hope that both of these open source options grow and provide real competition for the single commercial product.

actually http://moodle.org/ is the place to go if you want more info on Moodle. Moodle is a phenomenal Open Source casestudy. It has grown logarithmically over the past couple of years to accomodate almost every feature available from the proprietary offerings and more. The user/developer community of Moodle is one of the strongest of any open source project I have ever seen. Moodle is also designed from a particular pedagogical standpoint, which is I think one of it's strenghts and is incredibly simple for users (particularly teachers) to understand and use. brent. ---- eXe: http://exelearning.org/ ----

Although it is designed for online coursework, Moodle can easily be setup as a generic website. There are 66 different languages available, and you select the language you want with a drop-down in the upper right corner.

I'm a highschool math / science teacher and for a while I've been playing around with moodle (http://moodle.org/). Though it may take a little to setup (PHP and MySQL are needed), it is a good system. Just make sure you have the power to use it.

All in all, it will allow you to make quizzes and lessons online that students can access. Questions can be auto sorted and even short answer questions with different possible answers. Its a beautiful system with the only flaw of facilitating a computer for each student to use. (I'm in an independant school so our kids have laptops at the ready, something we don't all have.)

The only other geek-oriented possiblity would be using scantrons or small LCD based devices, but from what I've seen nothing fits the bill. Possibly the best action might be changing how you grade and what work your students do (ie projects instead of tests and the similar). It works with a little imagination and there's alot less grading!

I do not think the future of education is a computer on every child's desk, but I think that computers can be used to create tremendous resources to help further education.

        For example, with something like this : http://www.moodle.org/
there is the potential to create independent 'schools' of various types... imagine a community of parents who home school their children organizing with such a tool to diversify the experience.

        With such education portal systems becoming more available, they can find more uses in high schools... where being at home sick may not mean a day missed, where community colleges can better support classes not bound to an in-person schedule.

        Schools can better facilitate summer and evening classes, distance learning. To give an example more relevant to this particular venue, a *nix user's group could set up a 'school' to teach people how to use and understands the various *nix and Posix based operating systems. Teach hobbyists how to program in new languages, and generally leverage these tools to increase the practical education of the open source movement itself.

          I think the problem with the question is that people apply it automatically to Junior having a computer in front of him in the classroom, when there are so many other ways computers can be used to enhance education... and that education doesn't stop when you graduate and doesn't have to come from a school charging tuition.

        With all this focus on Open Source programming, writing, music, videos, and other sorts of content... why not be equally passionate about 'open source education'?

we're using at a couple campuses in the Cal State System, San Francisco and Humboldt. Solid, stable, easy to install runs on a range of systems from shared hosts to dedicated clusters, pretty easy to use, more features than BBBlackboard, SSL ready and LDAP built in (they actually charge extra for SSL 'support' in Blackboard Basic!).

Great user community too, helpful, inventive, worldwide.

And it has more cowbell than any of it's competitors.

We've also been able to do far more in-house than we'd have been able to with MS stuff, I have a strong sense of ownership, and of kinda understanding how everything fits together. This last year we've been exploring web-based technology, such as the incredibly brilliant Moodle virtual learning environment.

Anyhow, we're now interested in the notion of Linux on the desktop, and I too have been impressed by how easy ubuntu is to set up and use. Spent the weekend at the edubuntu summit, chatting about the idea of a ubuntu based, easy to install and use, distribution aimed at schools, including those in developing countries where internet access isn't all it could be. This is a tremendously exciting project, and given how easy the unbuntu experience is, could well be the way to get linux onto school desktops. The first release is due in October.

Moodle LMS

It has equivalent features, it scales, and students like it: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm

See the Comparisons and Advocacy: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=2784 forum at Moodle.org (click the login as guest button to read) for discussions of folks who have or are making the switch.

Try Moodle instead.

Try moodle http://moodle.org/ about which i hear good things or possibly boddington http://bodington.org/

Sakai http://www.sakaiproject.org/ has come up on my radar recently and looks like it will certainly be the one for the future though i've no idea if it is good enough now.

For heavens sake try your hardest to avoid blackboard and webCT
They are expensive, crash all the time into non recoverable states, severly limit how you can deliver courses. Overall blackboard is the worst most expensive web software packages i have seen in a 5 year web application deployment career, i haven't seen webCT but everyone i talk to says if anything it is worse than blackboard. Having no VLE is almost better than having either of those 2.

Tips for educating yourself google for VLE (Virtual learning environment) MLE (managed learning environment) if your not up on the terminology.

We're currently using it, and it's working great. One of it's best points is that it was designed with educational pedagogy in mind, which helps the teaching/learning process.

I don't know the full capabilities of Blackboard but I would look into moodle as an alternative.

with the Moodle LMS, as opposed to commercial Learning Management Systems's.

With Moodle, the free support has been very much better than the support that comes with a paid Blackboard or WebCT license.

And another nice thing is if you need it you can get paid support from a variety of partners, so if you don't like the paid support from one partner, you can choose another without having to switch LMSs--with the closed source systems there is only one source of support--the license provider. If they cut support to boost quarterly profits, you're SOL.

Since switching LMSs is a huge deal for a school, being able to choose from a range of support services is a pretty nice feature.

But you have to choose the right product--look for one with a vibrant, open, active community where the core developers participate often. With some open source products, the support is no better than Microsoft--they tend to be the ones where the developers don't participate in open discussion, where the community is asking alot more questions than are getting answered, etc.

Other great features are scaling clusters without added license costs, being able to test new versions extensively before putting into production, being able to run multiple versions without having to pay multiple fees, and of course bugs are fixed much more rapidly and generally just by changing the code directly without having to apply a 'patch' or shut down the system.

students who feel 'out of place' in a class due to their religious or political beleifs tend to interact more via email or discussion boards.

discussion boards can enable more thoughtful responses than time pressured in-class discussions, and allow teachers to see just who has been participating and directly evaluate a student's quantity and quality of participation.

students in one part of the world can also interact directly with students in another part of the world, via email, discussion boards, chat, and now things like skype (VOIP). A couple of examples from the literature are language classes and suburban teacher candidates interacting with inner city teachers.

Of course, schools may pay too much for technology and have insufficient resources left for support, fortunatly the open source world can help here, for instance Moodle is a very powerful open source learning management system, aviable alternative to very expensive systems like Blackboard and WebCT that leaves $$$ left over to support teachers and students in using it and also to develop courses with properly designed (for elearning/online learning) pedagogy.

Another place to look for answers is the work of Dr. Richard Mayer, who has done a number of very well designed studies showing how to use multimedia technology effectively, as well as demonstrating that when used appropriatly it can be more effective than traditional methods of teaching (and how when used improperly it can be a hindrence to learning:-).

PS, Cliff Stoll is a good writer and certainly knows a bit about technology, but he has little experience or training in education. His claiming "computers don't belong in schools" should be taken with about the same weight as if Mayer claimed astronomy was better without telescopes.

require registration, click the big "login as guest" button and read away (not sure why the article just sends you to the main page, but you can click the "Using Moodle" link and search for skype to find the discussions).

You can do that as a guest, too:-).

For example: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/search.php?search=skyp e&id=5

Remember, click the 'login as guest' button.