Higher Education

The University of North Carolina, a current Blackboard customer that is evaluating Sakai, just published a very interesting report of their findings so far. Among other things, it’s a good model for schools that want to do a thorough evaluation of a platform and have the resources (i.e., staff and time) to do it right. Here’s the excerpt of it that UNC chose to publish in their blog post announcing its release:

The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It’s just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia. To begin with, you have to love any presentation that includes a graphic like this one:

It is incredibly dense with information yet completely readable. Even better is the narrative that the presenter (Phil Hill, at this point in the presentation) weaves around it:

photo credit: Kongharald
There’s a blog post update from Desire2Learn on the latest back and forth between them and Blackboard over the patents. (Remember, there’s more than one patent now.) Here’s the latest, as near as I can follow it: