Tag Archives: edX

Google’s News LMS (Apps for Education)

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A colleague at work alerted me to the news that Google has a new free LMS for schools. Google Classroom will be the new tool that adds a Learning Management System to Google Apps for Education.

Campus Technology has a brief piece of news here, and Google has a page where you can sign up for an invite.

There is a certain degree of déjà vu all over again with the news. Google has released, or announced, similar initiatives in the past:

Google is known for discontinuing great products and services (such as Lively, Wave, Google Reader), seemingly because a product manager leaves or moves on to another project. Whilst being a free option, there may be some risk in committing to the new Google Classroom.

CourseMaster, edX, and my LMS Wishlists

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Coursemaster

On Friday, I had the chance to talk with Daniel McKelvey (VP of Business Development at CourseMaster).  CourseMaster is positioning itself as an edX service provider. edX is open source, so those with both the technical resources and the inclination can download and install their own instance of the software. Alternatively, organizations can turn to a third party like CourseMaster.

In our conversation, Daniel positioned CourseMaster as having three distinct advantages (i.e. elements added by the company):

  1. LMS core (branded, fully serviced and supported)
  2. Faculty dashboard
  3. Social collaboration and gamification

Support is for both faculty and students.

The business model is based on users (defined as interacting with 20% of course content) and duration of the course.

This looks interesting, and I intend to investigate further. Working on getting some colleagues to collaborate on a pilot.

The faculty dashboard and collaboration modules are what I am most interested in. Currently, Learning Management Systems are still pretty much Web 1.0. Most educators use the LMS as a publishing platform, and student interaction gravitates towards discussion, quizzes, and the uploading of files. Hopefully we will soon see Learning Management Systems approach Web 2.0 interactivity.

For example, services like Doodle allow me to quickly (and automatically) negotiate the best time for a group of colleagues to meet. Imagine if a LMS allowed for that type of automated decision making for the composition of student groups (based upon skillset, timezone preference, and/or project preference).  Affordances like this are what is needed in a LMS, particularly as we see increasing time demands on both students and faculty. I still have yet to see true collaboration tools built into the leading LMS providers that come close to the power of Google Docs, Skype, or Facebook. WordPress is a model that I would like to see Learning Management Systems follow here, where you could browse for plugins that add the collaboration functionality you need (that being said, WordPress  can be used as a LMS).

A Visit to edX

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edX

At edX

I was lucky enough to visit edX last week. This is going to spur me into investigating their technology a little deeper. Johannes Heinlein provided a very helpful overview of where edX is now. Personally, I find it very interesting that Google is now onboard. edX might have the potential to supplant Moodle.

Anyway, Jeff Cattel (from CLN) sent us all a photo from the day…