You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.
For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:
Click here to view the embedded video.
(...)Read the rest of New LMS Entrant: NIXTY (611 words)

I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but I’ve become aware of several recent conversations that have led me to the conclusion that it would be useful to get this out.

As promised, here’s the interview:
Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m at the Desire2Learn conference this week and will have a couple of posts up soon about the astonishing progress the company is making on a number of fronts. But I’m writing this post in response to some news that’s coming out of BbWorld. I am delighted (though a little surprised) to hear that Blackboard has just committed to releasing support for the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) standard and will be testing interoperability with SunGard. I haven’t heard any details yet, although based on their announcements about supporting two other standards (BLTI and Common Cartridge) by the end of 2010, I’m guessing that they will get their LIS integration out some time in 2011.

Up until now, it would have been fair to call Sakai 3 a mature experiment. Two years of work have been invested, mostly by Cambridge, to test out some ideas about the design, architecture, and development ecosystem of next-generation virtual learning environments. We have learned a lot from it, but the level of commitment to turn it from an experiment into a product system has been somewhat vague.
That changed a couple of weeks ago at the Sakai conference in Denver. We now have a much clearer idea of when Sakai 3 might be deployable as a production system to meet different purposes.
(...)Read the rest of Sakai 3 Roadmap and Progress (379 words)

(cc) photo credit: zolierdos
I’m a little late on this one, but late last week the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Blackboard’s rehearing petition. Their only recourse now would be to appeal to the United States Supreme Court and hope that the court miraculously decides to hear their case. As a result, Blackboard will have to return roughly $3.3 million to Desire2Learn, wiping out 100% of the company’s earnings for 2008.

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:

Scott Wilson , Paul Sharples, Dai Griffiths and Kris Popat have an article up on their work embedding Wave-enabled widgets into Moodle using Wookie. (Try saying that ten times fast.) What they envision is very similar in a lot of ways to what my former SUNY colleagues and I were thinking about when we proposed a Learning Management Operating System. Of course, that was 2005, so we were thinking about portlets rather than widgets. The lower barrier to entry and client-side nature of widgets are game changers.

Mark Smithers has a post up listing all the public LMS evaluation projects by universities he knows of. This is a great service to the community; if you know of any others, please let Mark know.