It’s an amazing speech which highlights an even more amazing glimpse into what may be the best innovation in the world of LMSs we’ve seen. User centered, aggregating content and dynamically and adaptively helping students move through assessments toward proficiency: it is exactly what is needed in schools today.

For more information visit http://www.khanacademy.org/

Check out the TED talk by Salman Khan at: http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

See the full video channel from Mr. Kisow at http://vimeo.com/channels/169334

This video focuses on the home page layout:

Change Home Page Layout Instructure Canvas from Mike Kisow on Vimeo.

Source: [Twitter]

Image from Morehead State Trailblazer http://goo.gl/DhUN4

Ralf Otto of Ruhr-Universität, Bochum in Germany provided me with a wonderful resource he’s created recently.  Ruhr-Universität utilizes both Moodle and Blackboard (as a growing number of colleges and higher education institutions are doing) and over the last two weeks was charged with comparing the two LMSs head to head, he said in his message.

The comparison matrix covers 103 different aspects of the LMS and whether or not each is capable (and sometimes how).  How does each measure up?

According to Ralf’s comparison Blackboard Learn 9.1 (SP3) and Moodle 2.0.1 are extremely similar in their capabilities in about 95% of the features and tools.  With a few extensions and additional plugins, according to Ralf, the LMSs can mirror each other in 100% of the functionalities they set out to provide.  It’s a great resource for any institution considering Moodle or Blackboard.

For the full comparison that Ralf created please visit: http://moodle.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/file.php/1/Feature_Comparison_Moodle-Blackboard.pdf

For Blackboard competitors this is an important milestone which signifies the LMS bohemoth’s willingness to compete with it’s own variation of free.  For teachers at any level without access to an LMS, Coursesites is one additional brand name now competing to get “a foot in the door” with new users at the early adopter level.  It will be interesting to watch how the service adapts and develops.

The user experience overall is top notch, there are loads of themes and tools to customize sites and course creators familiar with Blackboard Learn already will appreciate the additional course format templates available to help differentiate and optimize a course design and navigation.

According to the announcement from Jarl Jonas, Blackboard Sr. Program Manager,

I am pleased to announce that CourseSites will enter General Availability tomorrow, Thursday, February 10, 2011. I want to thank all of our pilot participants once again, along with those instructors who experimented and taught actual courses during our two month Early Release period. It’s because of your participation and insightful feedback that we’ve been able to put forth the most powerful online teaching tools to high school teachers, higher education instructors and community educators. We look forward to your continued feedback through the Instructor Community!

If you’re not familiar with Coursesites, registration is free and open to the public.  Create an account and your first course in a few clicks today by visiting http://www.coursesites.com/.

For more information review the official press release [link].

The partnership will provide Moodlerooms’ clients with easy access to the GGfL repository of learning objects which can be integrated into courses and classrooms in it’s hosted Moodle sites and can be further contextualized with assessments and assignments for managed learning. According to the release,

GGfL offers a dynamic selection of resource types, including interactive activities, contextualized audio and video files, images, e-books and other documents from some of the world’s most innovative providers. With the assistance of an intuitive search and retrieval system, learning resources can be easily searched by keyword, age range, subject, resource type, content provider and timeline, ensuring educators and learners can quickly identify and access the resources they need.

The partnership positions Moodlerooms to pair it’s LMS infrastructure with one of the world’s largest troves of consumable education-based content; providing a possible turnkey solution for schools and classrooms.  This signifies a major victory for joule and Moodlerooms and could increase it’s viability when compared with other LMS vendors with content troves already at their disposal.

Important next steps for Moodlerooms and joule will be showcasing the ease of content integration into it’s joule-based classrooms.

Moodlerooms is a growing Learning Management System vendor and contributor to the Moodle code base.  It’s products, Power and Joule are both based on the Moodle core and are available as hosted solutions for educational institutions in the US (and beyond).  Moodlerooms head quarters are in Baltimore, Maryland.

Global Grid for Learning is a repository for copyright-cleared digital educational materials and is a unit of the Cambridge University Press.

Sophia, according to it’s site, seeks to invert the teacher to student ratios seen at colleges around the world in order to provide a plethora of choices for learners to learn in any style they seek.  These opportunities are organized in “learning packets” which can be consumed at a learner’s convenience and which are vetted both by content experts on the site (self-appointed) and student users.

What is evident is that Sophia aims to build a content repository based on trust in users to identify the best packets available.  An underpinning which focuses on quality of resources rather than quantity.

According to the Capella Education Company press release [link],

The content on the Sophia website is organized by “learning packets,” which are small collections of academic content focused around a specific subject that can be created using text, images, slideshows, video or audio. It will enable educators to supplement their teaching methods with interactive tools to create a customized learning environment on topics across the academic spectrum. Sophia has been called a mashup of Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube, focused solely on education. It will be free for the general public, and will be made available through licensing for school districts, colleges and corporations for their own internal use.

Check out a demo of Sophia by one of it’s staff members embedded below (direct link: http://vimeo.com/18788798):

Minnedemo Winter 2011 – Sophia from TECHdotMN on Vimeo.

However due to the popularity of 1.9 and the timing of 2.0′s releases Martin has mentioned that support for 1.9 will continue, but only through the end of 2011,

This would normally mean that we would stop supporting 1.9 when 2.1 comes out, but given that it’s such a big jump to 2.x, and the release timing was bad for the north hemisphere, I plan to keep putting resources into supporting 1.9.x until December 2011.  I doubt we can stretch beyond that, because it’s getting harder and harder for our developers to remember how to write code for 1.9 [emphasis is original, link]

11 months is a short duration for planning a major transition for some institutions, no doubt many will start planning now for the future of their LMS.

That said, there’s a major case to be made for continuing the development of Moodle 1.9 beyond Moodle HQ’s “end of life” cycle.  As a quality LMS for schools, businesses and other organizations the 1.9 release may find “new” life in continued community support for years beyond (one of the many benefits of open source). Moodle 1.9 was first released in March 2008 [link].

For more information:

• End of Life discussion: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=168021
• Moodle Development Roadmap: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap