. While LMS vendors seek to create an environment that provides an all-encompassing PLE, the fact that they are closed networks and that they are platforms built to meet the needs of entire institutions means that they usually are not personalised enough to meet the needs of a connected learner, who is (most often) already used to the flexibility and ownership web 2.0 tools provide.

Microsoft says it will make changes in its new Productivity Score feature, including removing the ability for companies to see data about individual users, to address concerns from privacy experts that the tech giant had effectively rolled out a new tool for snooping on workers.

Twitter offers two distinct benefits to engaging learners. First of all, it allows learners to respond to classroom discussions in a way that feels right for them, offering shy or introverted students a chance to participate in the class discussion without having to speak in a public forum. Secondly, it allows students to continue the conversation after class is completed, posting relevant links to course material, and reaching out to you (the educator) with additional thoughts or questions.

An Adult Learner Reflects on Technology in Higher Education

an environment unlike anything they will encounter outside of school

mandate the use of "learning management systems."

institutional demands for enterprise services such as e-mail, student information systems, and the branded website become mission-critical

Five Arguments against the Learning Management System

“I want somebody to fight!” Crouch said. “These things are not cheap -- 300 grand or something like that? ... I want people to want it! When you’re trying to buy something, you want them to work at it! [Instructure] just didn’t.”

two quarters of pilot courses on Instructure’s Canvas platform

To the surprise of those behind the initiative, about two-thirds of faculty members said they were satisfied with the Blackboard system, deployed on campus in 1999.

the terrible, horrible, no-good university administrators are trying to build a panopticon in which they can oppress the faculty

If you recall your LMS patent infringement history, then you'll remember that roles and permissions were exactly the thing that Blackboard sued D2L over.

(At the time, Stephen Downes mocked me for thinking that this was an important aspect of LMS design to consider.)

Do you know what the feature set was that had faculty from Albany to Anaheim falling to their knees, tears of joy streaming down their faces, and proclaiming with cracking, emotion-laden voices, "Finally, an LMS company that understands me!"?

Why, they would build an LMS. They did build an LMS. Blackboard started as a system designed by a professor and a TA at Cornell University. Desire2Learn (a.k.a. Brightspace) was designed by a student at the University of Waterloo. Moodle was the project of a graduate student at Curtin University in Australia. Sakai was built by a consortium of universities. WebCT was started at the University of British Columbia. ANGEL at Indiana University.

Let's imagine a world in which universities, not vendors, designed and built our online learning environments.

the backbone of for a distributed network of personal learning environments

the tools shouldn’t dictate the choice

Currently, Canvas and Sakai are the only LMSs reviewed which has somesupport for xAPI (emphasis on some). Blackboard, D2L, Sakai and Canvas all have support for IMS Caliper, a more edu specific format.

ecosystem mindset to delivering course experiences

An institution has implemented a learning management system (LMS). The LMS contains a learning object repository (LOR) that in some aspects is populated by all users across the world  who use the same LMS.  Each user is able to align his/her learning objects to the academic standards appropriate to that jurisdiction. Using CASE 1.0, the LMS is able to present the same learning objects to users in other jurisdictions while displaying the academic standards alignment for the other jurisdictions (associations).

Learning Management,

Enhanced learning experience Graduate students now receive upgraded iPads, and all students access course materials with Canvas, a new learning management software. The School of Aeronautics is now the College of Aeronautics; and the College of Business and Management is hosting a business symposium Nov. 15.

This site is run by Instructure.

Feldstein's Law: Any educational app that is actively developed for long enough and has a large enough user base will become indistinguishable from a badly designed LMS.

Download Dr. Brad Wheeler leads university-wide IT services for IU's eight campuses. He has co-founded and led many multi-institutional collaborations with his current work focused on the Unizin Consortium, Kuali, and IU’s mass Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.

Moodle Pty—more widely known within the Moodle community as Moodle HQ—does most of the development of the core Moodle code and maintains tight control over which code submitted by third parties gets accepted into the code base

Information from this will be used to develop learning analytics software features, which will have these functions: Description of learning engagement and progress, Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress, Prediction of learning progress, and Prescription (recommendations) for improvement of learning progress.

Better yet, tangerines and oranges.

full Caliper Analytics compliance

It’s precisely to meet these demands that Cegid recently launched a Learning Management System (LMS) specifically dedicated to Healthcare, a sector that is converting more and more to cloud-based systems.

In Canvas, the goal is clearly to stop anyone from having fun because everything is supposed to look exactly the same in every course everywhere all the time.

I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

LMSs limit the visibility of copyrighted course content to only course participants for the duration that they need it. (Of course, this would become a moot point if using openly licensed OERs.)

Over the course of many years, every school has refined and perfected the connections LMSs have into a wide variety of other campus systems including authentication systems, identity management systems, student information systems, assessment-related learning tools, library systems, digital textbook systems, and other content repositories. APIs and standards have decreased the complexity of supporting these connections, and over time it has become easier and more common to connect LMSs to – in some cases – several dozen or more other systems. This level of integration gives LMSs much more utility than they have out of the box – and also more “stickiness” that causes them to become harder to move away from. For LMS alternatives, achieving this same level of connectedness, particularly considering how brittle these connections can sometimes become over time, is a very difficult thing to achieve.

This has much in common with a customer relationship management system and facilitates the workflow around interventions as well as various visualisations.  It’s unclear how the at risk metric is calculated but a more sophisticated predictive analytics engine might help in this regard.