Increasingly I am focusing on things other than repositories (Amen!) but it still occupies some of my attention, so this news (even 3 months after the fact) still caught my eye. Apparently Harvest Road, an Australian learning object repository/learning content management system vendor, has been acquired by the Italian-based elearning product vendor Giunti Labs.

Harvest Road was a publicly listed company on the Australian exchange that has now been de-listed (presumably because of this acquisition.) They were extremely aggressive in trying to market their product around the world over the past 4-5 years. You can draw your own conclusions, both about what this says about Harvest Road and what it says about that market. From where I’m sitting, though, it would be hard to spin this in a positive way. – SWL

Ahhhh, love those Google searches. Whilst searching (and still seeking) information about the standards compliance of WebCT CE 6 content exports, I stumbled across this find, the dynamic Learning Content Management System. Built as an extension of the open source CMS called Silva, dLCMS bills itself as a “content management system for web based learning materials” built on top of Zope and released under a BSD license. It stores resources in XML format and has created packages which have been successfully imported into OLAT, ILIAS, Moodle and WebCT. It looks to have been produced by ETH Zurich (and possibly on soft money that’s now run out) but possibly worth a look. – SWL

The folks at Connexions have released the software that powers that site as open source code, so presumably you can now run your own instance if you wanted. Connexions is neat in that it shows a working example of learning content as XML being re-aggregated and re-skinned. For me the challenge with its particular implementation is in how the content is created – the Word-to-CXML convertor has got to be a great improvement over asking faculty to hand-code XML (where but at a Science and Engineering school could you even begin to get away with this), but it still strikes me as a barrier to the approach. That said, 115 courses/2000+ modules is nothing to sneer at, so clearly some users are willing to use the current set of tools on offer through Connexions. It should be noted too that the paradigm for reusable content has always been more reusers than original authors, and in this regard, reusing content in other contexts once created in Connexions seems reasonably straightforward.

Tools like eXe offer some glimmer of what an easier to use tool to author learning content that was also XML might look like, but I’m not sure I’m convinced yet. Some will no doubt rejoin about the virtues of RSS in this regard; again, I remain interested but unconvinced. Not of the virtues of XML or of the traction of RSS for syndication of content, but unconvinced that it represents the solution of how to easily author learning content in a format that is then easily findable, re-aggregatable or re-presentable (which I take to be the problem at hand, but maybe I’ve misunderstood). Structured blogging? Again, maybe.

I know that in my own project, our first attempt to get an approach working that made use of an XML database as a backend failed. Our second attempt, which went into pilot last week, uses The Learning Edge. It doesn’t deal with XML-native content at all, mostly because no one has any for us to deal with. It focuses on dealing with what people do have – all sorts of HTML, Word docs, powerpoints, PDFs, Flash movies. It tries to assist with re-use (the ‘re-aggregating and re-presenting’ above) by integrating a WYSIWYG authoring environment directly with the repository that allows people to drag and drop existing content into new collections. We will see how it works. I am definitely not holding it up as the way to do this either; in general I remain unconvinced (and exhausted) by the entire enterprise, and mostly just want to go off and play my bass. – SWL

One of the 6 finalists in our evaluation of various learning object repository packages in the BCcampus LOR project I am currently managing, The Learning Edge is from a relatively small company based in Tasmania, Australia. Even though we ended up going with another option, we were really impressed by this software and on the straight-ahead basis of features it actually looked to be the strongest of the lot that we looked at. Boasting a clean interface that was incredible customizable through a set of powerful administrative tools, the software impressed on many fronts; it was one of the few that seemed to be cracking the nut of digital rights management, and had an impressive workflow engine and a Java-based authoring and aggregation tool that was quite powerful. If you are in the market for a learning content management system (which is a closer description than just a ‘learning object repository’ to what this software actually is) and are looking for a commercial product you might do well to include this one on a list of those to examine more closely. – SWL

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…

The system itself is built on top of ZOPE, which is encouraging if not in-and-of-itself groundbreaking. But it’s the proprietary portion of the product, the portion that OpalTree themselves have built, that does seem groundbreaking – in contrast to most existing repository systems, that rely heavily on human cataloguers and seemingly inflexible taxonomies, this system seems to be built on more ‘emergent’ principles, and presents information to users based on their specific contexts and the contexts in which the resource has previously been used. In their own words, CADRiA “learns from the context in which information is used, predicts the information that will be needed to fulfil a purpose, dynamically builds semantic models of information that humans can navigate, and automates the assembly of knowledge objects that fulfil the information requirements of end users.” While it sounds fanciful, the demo I saw led me to believe that these folks are actually achieving some of the promise of XML, web services, the semantic web, learning objects … not by brute force but by pairing them up with some slick natural language processing and data mining techniques, like I think we all thought was supposed to happen, eventually. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I actually saw that day, and I will be doing more investigation of these folks in the context of our own LOR project, but I hadn’t seen them mentioned before and they struck me as worthy of a look. – SWL

“The newly released eXactWEBCT delivery plug in enables WEBCT users to transparently add an effective back-end LCMS technology to their existing WEBCT delivery installations supporting easy authoring, packaging, indexing, storage, management and cross conversion of their WEBCT contents to and from AICC, LRN, IMS and SCORM formats.“

I am REALLY interested to hear from anyone who has had any experience with Learn eXact, and more specifically using it in the context of WebCT. – SWL

- from [elearnspace blog]