The solution to the upcoming fall of higher education is openness of content and sell the services beyond the content. Lower the cost by sharing. Will be interesting to see whether higher education would actually go in this direction. Instead what I have seen is colleges trying to figure out how much of a premium…
A friend of mine who I used to work with once remarked (2007-ish) the University System of Georgia does not really work like a system so much as a loose confederation fighting over money. Given I have no access to budgets, I would not know. GeorgiaVIEW works remarkably well given there are only a few…
Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS. Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are…
We started in a conversation about an interesting grant seeking to help students from low-income families through OpenCourseWare and providing them better information. An Open Source LMS != open coureseware. OSLMS is running students through online classes. OCW is providing the content so anyone can download and use it. The better information section sounded to…
A former coworker, Cat Finnegan, worked on retention of online students. Recent articles about online students having higher drop out rates than face-to-face caught my eye. Especially the rationales. The recent articles all are about the work done at KSU (whose online class system we host, well one of them: Blackboard) which will be published…
I noticed a couple weeks back there are interesting spikes in the evening hours of Sunday through Wednesday. Just like morning/afternoon usage, the evening spikes diminish but even more so by comparison. As I recall for Monday through Wednesday, when I first started, the evening traffic almost flatlined at 5pm and then dropped off at…
I knew some things about William “Dink†H. NeSmith, Jr. a relatively new member of University System of Georgia Board of Regents through a friend and former coworker, Andy Fore, who personally knows Dink. Jesup, Georgia publishes newspapers nice guy Dink dropped by to tour our facility and answer questions. One of the more interesting answers…
Earlier today, Blackboard announced the keynote will be given by Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U as the DevCon keynote. It continues the tradition of ironic keynote speakers in even years: 2008 Michael Wesch who spoke on how the traditional one-to-many classroom model isn’t good for helping students learn. The two LMS products Blackboard makes…