Slashdot Mirror

You meant Sakai?

It seems to have a grading feature:
http://www.sakaiproject.org/learning-management

If you are looking for the complete package, check out Sakai CLE and the gradebook feature in particular. http://www.sakaiproject.org/learning-management

Gradebook: Calculate, store and distribute grade information to students

My impression is that this says more about Blackboard's security than anything else.

Time to switch to one of the FOSS (and in many ways superior) alternatives:

Moodle and Sakai

Really, it's amazing Blackboard is still around with two full-featured FOSS competitors in existence. I guess it's just testament to the power of lock-in.

I can recommend Eben Moglen's keynote and the discussion with Matthew Small (2006 Sakai conference).
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small

I can recommend Eben Moglen's keynote and the discussion with Matthew Small (2006 Sakai conference).
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small

I think parent hit most of the things that I feel are missing as a university student. Good list

I will add one thing though. Some universities have tools for online collaboration (such as Sakai or other courseware tools) that allows students to create project sites and work with other students to share resources. If your university doesn't have something like this, I think it's something many students would embrace - especially students running other campus organizations.

Here in Cambridge we use http://sakaiproject.org/ for our document distribution and collaboration - and it works pretty damn nicely - all the lectures are shoved up in folders for courses that you can either join or be invited to. I don't know what other features Blackboard has, but we also have separate systems for grade reporting and exam signups.

Did you try this Sakai and Moodle? Though Sakai is developed by universities, it should be adoptable to schools. Likewise Moodle is also a maturing project with various features being builtin.

All the cool universities are switching to Sakai, an open source system. We're getting it next school year at Georgia Tech, but tons of other schools have already begun using it.

All the cool universities are switching to Sakai, an open source system. We're getting it next school year at Georgia Tech, but tons of other schools have already begun using it.

Thomson Learning will work closely with the Sakai team and other commercial affiliates, including Unicon, to continue the overall effort to keep the open source models vibrant. The commitment to provide ongoing contributions to the Sakai Foundation in a number of methods, including software contributions and open standards support, is essential to this partnership.

Thomson Learning will work closely with the Sakai team and other commercial affiliates, including Unicon, to continue the overall effort to keep the open source models vibrant. The commitment to provide ongoing contributions to the Sakai Foundation in a number of methods, including software contributions and open standards support, is essential to this partnership.

Blackboard to try to keep some face. The Blackboard product heavily utilizes "building blocks" (assuming you have the enterprise version), many of which are open source. If Blackboard is benefiting from open source, attacking open source products may kill or slow down the inovation that comes from the building blocks...

Additionally, I think this is an attempt to try to placate those who are shouting prior art and want to go after the patent and invalidate it... The reasoning might go like, "If they aren't going after sakai or moodle, i don't really care if they have the patent." That is how I see the real purpose of this move... It seems fairly shrewd. Hopefuly higher ed will continue to go after them and educause will keep the pressure up. BTW, there is a joint statement from educause and sakai (PDF) on educause's website. (Here is the statement on sakai's page.)

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.

"Hmm, that's more than Universities spend on tuition wavers and scholarships."

Thats right, ERP solutions will cost that much. They're expensive. One of the Michigan state schools had an ERP financials (dont remember which vendor) implementation that ran over $50M. Which is why there is a backlash in the community and projects like Sakai and Kuali have sprung up.

http://sakaiproject.org/

http://kuali.org/

But to be honest, I probably shouldnt have brought ERP stuff up, as it is slightly off topic from the discussion. But there's no question that proprietary ERP solutions cost big money. Mind you, the bulk of the cost is not vendor licenses, but in the consulting and customization for the implementation.

"And as for the purchase of CALs, does that include MSSQL, or Exchange?"

Depends on whether you need them or not. Most schools wont need global CAL coverage for MSSQL, and if they do, they can do per-processor licensing. But many schools use Exchange globally, as its a nice product for email, calendaring and PIM. From a strict CAL perspective, lets say a school has 20,000 employees that need exchange accounts. CALs cost ~$2.50 per user at the academic pricing (for staff), so that $50,000 that'll come up about every 3 years. Thats really not that much.

Granted, most schools wont do it that way, they'll do a Campus Agreement, and pay a smaller amount every year, and get global coverage for staff and students, and not have to manage licenses at all. They just 're-up' every year, with updated counts of staff and student FTE.

"How about 700 non-academic licenses for Office?"

Why would you buy non-academic licenses for Office at a higher-ed institution?

"Or 700 "upgrades" to Vista? How many Vista installations do you manage? Will you have to buy new computers to run it on? "

You wouldnt do it that way. You'd keep buying machines as normal, but buy them with Vista licenses, and image XP Pro onto them. Then when you're ready, you make the move. Or not, and keep using XP for years. Up to you.

"If not, what can you do with the XP licenses you've already paid for?"

Umm, use them for XP? Or am I misunderstanding your question? You seem to think that there's some pressing need to move your entire organization to Vista as soon as it comes out. But thats not how sane organizations work. You do it when its right for your organization, and thats usually when the value of the improvements or new features outweigh the cost. Each group has to decide that for themselves.

From a consumer perspective, the Vista upgrade is interesting but not compelling. But some things are nearly compelling from a corporate IT shop advantage, particularly the imaging scenarios.

"You're approaching a MILLION DOLLARS and haven't even broken a sweat. You think that's good business?"

Explain to me how you've come up with anything even close to $1M. I dont see it. And is that supposed $1M each year, or over 2 years, or 10, or what?

"Oh, and that bit of horseshit that spyware and malware is "not really an issue on well managed machines." --is that why the Department of Defense has banned the use of Outlook? I guess that is the definition of a well managed microsoft application -- don't use it at all."

They didnt ban the use of Outlook. You should have read the news articles closer.

http://www.fcw.com/article97178-12-22-06-Web

They banned HTML email in all forms, and banned OWA (Outlook Web Access), which is the webmail front end for Exchange server. This means that they're still using Outlook against Exchange (I presume, as they have OWA in the first place), they're just either:

1. Having their mail gateways strip HTML sections of emails coming in, or
2. Using group policy to force Outlook to operate in Text-Only mode, or
3. Both of the above.

And that wa

Moglen also spoke recently at the Sakai conference in Atlanta. He is representing the Sakai Foundation in their fight against Blackboard's software patent.

He gave a keynote Wednesday morning and then appeared during lunch for a debate of sorts with Matthew Small, VP and General Counsel for Blackboard, Inc. It's quite entertaining, IMHO, especially if you have strong feelings about software patents.

You can listen to the podcasts here (look at the Wednesday schedule, day 2 for download links):
Conference Schedule

(Sakai is an initiative supported by several higher educational institutions to build an Open Source learning management system.)

Moglen also spoke recently at the Sakai conference in Atlanta. He is representing the Sakai Foundation in their fight against Blackboard's software patent.

He gave a keynote Wednesday morning and then appeared during lunch for a debate of sorts with Matthew Small, VP and General Counsel for Blackboard, Inc. It's quite entertaining, IMHO, especially if you have strong feelings about software patents.

You can listen to the podcasts here (look at the Wednesday schedule, day 2 for download links):
Conference Schedule

(Sakai is an initiative supported by several higher educational institutions to build an Open Source learning management system.)

SAKAI is a CMS for classrooms and academic workgroups. It's Java. If that's what you need, take a look.

Having said that, I agree with the posters who say that it's easier to program web apps in PHP (or any scripting language), and that Java isn't well-supported by webhosts.

Try using BlackBoard as an instructor. The layout is cluttered and terrible, and some key functionality is buried. Tech-saavy instructors don't have a problem with probing and clicking until they find the right control, but this is used by all sorts of people, many of whom may already have difficulties with seemingly basic online navigation. My issue with the BlackBoard patent is that this is a bloated system which could use improvement (and the ideas are definitely being improved upon, just look at Moodle and Sakai), but if they're going to chase down anyone who's improvements are too effective, then we're stuck with 1999 technology and a "figure it out yourself" approach to human-computer interaction. Moodle and Sakai certainly don't have the resources to combat a lawsuit, so more power to Desire2Learn, whatever power they might have. As for your "humorous" experience, an online course requires more planning from instructors than an in-person course. When that effort isn't put forth, it's often obvious. Additionally, there can be more required of students, as they may need to go to extra efforts to make forum postings or focus on the format of assignments. I'm not assuming that you're blaming the medium, but I hope that others reading your impressions don't come away with that notion. I have taken many online courses which were far more immersive and robust than most of the in-person courses I've had. -Jim

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.

I used to work in ET (Educational Technology) for a public university in Texas. We used a major commercial course management system. The software was certainly pre-packaged, but given that it's not the only application we used on campus (we had registration systems, authentication systems, assessment software, but also blogs, videoconferencing, gradebooks), we inevitably had to do some custom configuration. I'd be willing to bet that any university IT department worth its salt strives towards at least *some* level of integration between its apps, if for no other reason to keep the students from calling their intstructors with confusions, and in turn having the instructors call IT. We also didn't want to have to upload a data file every day to populate the course lists and rosters.

We had good sysadmins and custom-app staff around anyway, so we used them to adjust the system to do what we needed. We repeatedly came upon "unsupported" customization needs. The APIs didn't do what we wanted. The version of the system that we licensed wasn't extensible enough.

That system cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $65,000 a year. The one with a more flexible extension API cost (IIRC) about twice that. And it still didn't do what we wanted out of the box, nor did the APIs exist to do some of the advanced integration we wanted to do.

We stopped, took a look around, and found the open-source Sakai Project (http://www.sakaiproject.org./ We took our $130K per year license fee and hired a programmer with half of it, paid $10K/year for project partnership (revision control & forums access, plus project input), and after a year of development (or so I hear, I've since left), had a system that does exactly what we needed, was more flexible, had a better support structure (talk to the developer directly!), and cost about half as much to run each year. Plus, we had a good programmer on staff who could work on other projects too.

On a related note, http://www.a-hec.org/open%20source%20030106%20clar ifications.html explains who the study funding came from (Sun, Unicon, and SCT). They're all course management systems vendors, and one of them actually distributes/supports Sakai commercially. It also mentions the BlackBoard/WebCT merger (the two most-important course management software companies) specifically as a compelling reason that universities are considering open source.

I also can't help but point out - Open Source basically started in universities, and the internet is based on that software. If it isn't ready for prime time, it's a little too late to turn back.

HTML and Web based courses provide much more flexibility than Flash. Flash would mostly be useful, as it is usually used on the web, to force students to sit through piles of crap, but is otherwise probably overkill.

Why not markup multiple choice questions and tests in XML format? Last I looked there were several such to choose from (and using a database to save the questions and statistics provies for all kinds of nice features).

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!

Better known than Dokeos and Moodle in the US is the Sakai project This is a big collaboration between a bunch of research-1 schools (MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Indiana) with about $6 million in backing from the Mellon foundation. I might have used this in place of Dokeos if it existed when I installed it, but then again maybe not. It's a much more top-down piece of design as opposed to the very bottom up Dokeos and Moodle.

I gave a talk at a conference over the summer about Open Source CMSs and the trends. BB/WebCT/Angel and the like should be very, very scared, at least for their core CMS products. There's been little real innovation in them in the past few years so the OS ones have a static target to shoot for and lots of schools are really, really sick of the companies backing them. Blackboard contacted the Sakai project heads about a collaboration- the response was "We've not interested in working with you." BB will survive by diversifying and moving to financial services- they sell a one-card system (doors, meals, vending machine, bookstore, etc) that is also a credit card, and they get a cut of every purchase. That's what is going to keep them alive, since BB the product itself is in trouble.

Moodle is only one of many!

I am required to pimp the Sakai project, an open source collaboration between a bunch of schools, including UMich, Indiana, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. The biggest production install is UMich, with around 100,000 students using it.

Forget Moodle, the up-and-coming piece of course management software is Sakai. Open source. Developed by universities for universities. "The Sakai Project follows what is called the community source model, which is an extension to the already successful, economically feasible, open source movement forged by projects such as Apache, Linux, and Mozilla. Based on the goal of addressing the common and unique needs of multiple institutions. community source relies more on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members, than some open source development models." (More)

Forget Moodle, the up-and-coming piece of course management software is Sakai. Open source. Developed by universities for universities. "The Sakai Project follows what is called the community source model, which is an extension to the already successful, economically feasible, open source movement forged by projects such as Apache, Linux, and Mozilla. Based on the goal of addressing the common and unique needs of multiple institutions. community source relies more on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments by community members, than some open source development models." (More)

Yup I'm privy to some of those horror stories, even though I'm just a backup sysadmin for Blackboard. No wonder universities got together for an alternate. It's not ready for primetime but if Bb doesn't get its act together I wouldn't be surprised to see Sakai gain momentum.

I'm working on an open-source Learning Management System called Sakai that has a tool for online test taking - you set up the test, tell the system what the correct answers are, then students sign in and take the test whenever.

There are obvious limitations to online test taking, but it *does* provide automated grading, and with the right institutional commitment it can have a positive impact on student learning.

It's being used at New Zealand Poly with >40,000 users on a 4 unit cluster, for instance.

Sakai largest installation is uMich with 27,000 students (reportedly on 27 servers) Sakai's release notes call for a new server for every 2000 students.

Moodle has a gradebook, a quiz system, and many other tools that haven't been written yet in Sakai.

Moodle is being used at more than 4000 registered sites world wide, including a number of 10,000-20,000+ student systems.

And Moodle is built with the same technology that Yahoo chose as the best for a (really) large site: PHP.

You can check out Sakai at collab.sakaiproject.org, join up and try the discussion tool out.

ALso see a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm --note this is Moodle 1.3 vs. BB 6, Moodle 1.5 is due out in a few weeks with RSS, a wiki, a new gradebook, and extensive performance tuning by the NZVLE project.

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.

The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education

http://www.sakaiproject.org/support.html

In brief, the Sakai project was started by a few large institutions who were tired of buying into the licensing fees of other learning management system products like WebCT and Blackboard. They decided to create their own and make it open source - both free as in beer and speech. However, the support for Sakai comes at a price, albeit a much lower price than the aforementioned commercial products were offering.

In the end, you recieve a completely open learning managment system created and maintained by developers at these institutions and supported by commercial interests.

I'm from University of Wisconsin and am involved with this and other "open source" initiatives. Now, I also didn't work on the language of this particular license. I have worked on other licenses for other "open" projects, and the wording of the draft Croquet license is similar. One of these projects is Sakai, and we have a UW version of this license queued up for projects we are now working on.

Would FreeUser (or anyone else) please explain in a bit more detail the objection to the draft Croquet license? In particular, I'm wondering about "an advertising clause that is incompatible with the GPL".