Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle

On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

Because their process was public, we have access to valuable details that are not often available for institutional decisions such as this one.

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Read the rest of Louisiana State University Moves to Moodle (1,031 words)

I thought this was a particularly interesting article chock full of links to other resources (including the LSU report) that says a lot about the types of choices that Higher Education learning infrastructure are choosing LMSes these days.  Never mind the position that LMS as a "bolt-on" part of the Higher Learning infrastructure are a foregone conclusion these days.  Now there are a variety of institutions scrambling to get their online presence firmly established for their existing brick and mortar classrooms because it's an accepted and done part of instructional design and the teaching and learning process that every class needs some kind of online presence whether it's just a syllabus, contact info and a few links to learning materials. 

A few years ago, there was this big scramble to get Blackboard and/or WebCT set up.  Then around the same time, a group of universities already torn between these rapidly expensive and unwieldy and incompatible Enterprise systems and their own home-grown efforts, agreed to put forth an open source effort that would fit ALL their needs and formed the Sakai foundation and Sakai project.  Now, the big players appear to be a (diminising) Blackboard (ate up WebCT), Sakai, moodle, a host of enterprise competitors like Angel Learning, Desire2Learn, etc.. 

Everyone's scrambling to do learning "solutions"  and it's not just higher education. Corporate entities are discovering that LMS are part of a strategy to both shore up expensive sales and client training for their products, manage and improve internal and corporate training, and provide Human Resources/performance management tools.  But institutional academia is interesting because, as I noted earlier, they're often trying to bolt-on a technology tool over an existing learning model that has been highly dependent on interaction as part of an iterative process for success.  Of course, as a chemistry professor once told me, all these technology tools - what they need to do is help shorten the time and effort spend doing administrative tasks such as managing grades, distributing handouts, preparing notes and slides, and so forth.  If it ends up taking me more time to do it online, then I've just wasted valuable time that I could have spend improving my teaching. 

So established institutions do need to think a little corporatively - or at least see the business model - as they approach committing and rollout of their LMS.  The commitment that they make is also much larger than the business world since their ultimate product (and thereby the production quality) - learning - has much more at stake here.  It's too soon right now to start evaluating and ranking schools based in part on the effort and approach that they take towards their LMS however, the time that USNews and other college reporting guides weigh the value of this is not far off the horizon. 

I also watch some of these newer "schools" particularly the technical/vocational and  continuing studies type programs and how the faculty seem to embrace the inevitability of online learning or "hybrid learning" and tailor their instructional design to fit that model.  Many of these types of institutions recognize how LMS are their CPU and really figure out how to make effective use and design around it.

Will this create a "technology gap" between traditional universities that find different ways to embrace and implement LMS?  Will some schools take a defined minimal approach while others build out much more sophisticated integration with information systems such as digital libraries, student resources, portfolios, etc.?  It will also be interesting to observe how different faculty embrace the challenges and rewards of technology as new types of pedagogy are explored and instructional/learning design is thought about more thoroughly. 

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The Mobile OS plan

The Achilles' heel in Google's phone plan | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Interesting perspective on Google's plans, which I think still aren't totally clear yet despite having said that they're "not making a cell phone" or even becoming a carrier, etc. etc. The picture that is painted right now is that they'll partner with carriers and cell phone manufacturers to release their open source platform. It remains to be seen just how that that business partnership will work since cell phone carriers are notoriously well, bad at answering customer's needs. They just push out what they think you should have and what fits their needs as far as profitability. It's a volume industry meaning, like credit cards, they potentially make small margins on the "good" customers that pay monthly and don't exceed their limits, but they rely on volume and the minority of limit breakers to feed their coffers.

I think Google's goal, while on one face appears noble - how can open source not be - is still the bottom line of making money with the best product out there. Certainly no problem with that. And Apple left that door open by making the iPhone a pretty closed environment for developers and Windows Mobile is just not what it calls itself. RIM is altogether another beast closer to Windows Mobile, and Palm OS is now a weak joke just waiting to go the way of the Commodore 64.

So of course I support Google's position here, and Michael, in no way says that it's a bad one. He just thinks that Android puts Google in a business position that they're not used to and not very good at. I think he's underestimating the bankability of open source paired up with the Google name. Also, for us old timers, we're still so tied into the idea of the cell phone being a cell PHONE-FIRST and thereby beholden to the very structure that comes from from years of the FCC controlling bandwidth licensing, and that nothing happens without reception to a cell tower.

Ah, might that be a possible alternative. I know this is pie-in-the-sky here but, why wouldn't Google try to exploit wi-fi as an alternative way in to the general communications spectrum? Ever since it's become apparent that we're using cell phones less and less to talk, and more time to text, view photos, videos, mp3s, etc., I've been referring to these things as Persistent Mobile Devices (PMDs) which I think is a more appropriate moniker and gets us out of the thinking that it is a PHONE. (Yes it is still, but a phone alone never solved ALL our communication/productivity needs and neither would a laptop...) Speaking of, I also pity those who are banking on the laptop as the center of the mobile universe - it is for now, and slipping, but really in a few years will be seen as a more unwieldy device for mobile professionals. It's also going to become a failure in the developing world the way the One-Laptop-Per-Child effort is going but that's a subject for another post. (Years from now, archaeologists will dig up these oddly plastic things labeled "XO" that were build into the foundation of a home in southwestern Kenya...)

But back to the Google's approach. I have no doubt that with Skype, free and open wifi, and open source, a total back door is open here for Google to really define the PMD and kill the cell phone moniker. The devices will still provide phone communication the way our phones do now, but also provide easy internet access via wifi and/or 3G/EDGE/etc. (a-la-iphone-ish) productivity tasks, integrated text communication (email, im, texting), entertainment (streamed, cached, synced, etc.), information and education (direct wikipedia access, LMS, others), maybe even cooler personal management tools like for finance and banking.

So for now, I really wouldn't worry about how Google deals with the position of being a subservient sales partner. Google's PSO program already proves that they're interested and motived to work with other companies towards an end goal of profits for both that is probably a bit less overbearing and "entangling" as Microsoft's. In business, if you can approach your partner convincing them that they have a good idea, that the partnership is worth both your investments, and you show them the respect that they can innovate on your platform as much as you can on theirs, they'll respond accordingly. There's no need to kowtow unless you're trying to sell a bridge to someone with a serious inferiority complex.