Tag: evaluation

This Month’s SideBars: Focus on CMS

http://online.bcit.ca/sidebars/current/index.htm

If you haven’t seen it before, Sidebars is an always fun and educational newsletter produced by the staff of the Learning Resources Unit of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). This month they focus on all things CMS – they are undergoing their own change process currently and have published their well-worth emulating evaluation plan, and various staff also contribute pieces on a few existing open source choices as well as rolling your own CMS.

On this last one, I don’t disagree that you can piece together a variety of inexpensive components that make up part of what we now think of as a standard CMS, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get something that is entirely functionally equivalent, as well as integrated, without a lot of time, effort and money. This is where the CMS movement started from – trying to provide an easier way to access a common set of apps that were being implemented piecemeal. Whether one in fact needs all of that functionality is another question, a good one that doesn’t often get asked enough, and again the folks at Sidebars point to a useful Syllabus article by the Steves from TLTR . Great issue. – SWL

An Evaluation Framework for Course Management Technology

http://www.educause.edu/asp/doclib/abstract.asp?ID=ERB0314

“This research bulletin describes an evaluation framework for analyzing the teaching and learning processes that course management technologies support. Because the project has pedagogical goals at its foundation, the framework assesses the gain (or loss) of learning effectiveness and of teaching efficiency and the total cost of ownership. “- SWL

MiCTA/ATAlliance Announces eLearning RFP Award

http://www.micta.org/programs/elearning/
awards/default.asp

While the RFP from MiCTA was first released in Novemeber 2002, this is still newsworthy as they continue to announce the availability of liscence agreements with the ‘winners’ of that RFP, the latest being last week’s announcement that the agreement with WebCT had been signed.

This is potentially of widespread interest – for those not familiar, MiCTA was formed in 1982 as a group of telecommunications directors who gathered regularly for information sharing purposes. This then grew to a body that aggregated demand, initially for telecommunications services but more recently for a host of goods and services, now including ‘eLearning CMS.’ It brings together a membership base of 19538 organizations (1432 institutions of higher ed) and negotiates with vendors to offer ‘preferred customer status’ to its members. Membership is open to ‘not for profit organizations’ at the annual cost of $75.

They have posted the full details of their extensive RFP process for these eLearning CMS online. – SWL

University of Florida Selection Process recommends Vista

http://at.ufl.edu/~cmsag/

Thanks to Michelle L. from UBC for pointing this site out to me – the University of Florida’s CMS selection committee seems to have settled on a recommendation of adopting WebCT Vista. They publish all of their meeting notes here as well as their required feature lists, which may be of interest. In general when we consult with institutions on a CMS selection proces, I always recommend they establish some sort of web presence as part of the process and publish as much material there as they can. CMS selection is already frought without enough issues and lack of transparency need not be one of them – SWL