Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market
"For the past decade, the LMS market has evolved from providing tools that were purchased at the departmental level to enterprise-class systems purchased at the institutional or even system-wide level. However, since about 2004 the market has been fairly consistent, dominated by Blackboard corporate strategy.
Blackboard went public in 2004, signaling a real market worth of investors' attention. In 2005 – 2006, the market was dominated by Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT, the number 2 player in LMS, resulting in a somewhat extended Department of Justice approval cycle. Starting in 2006, Blackboard was awarded the infamous '138 patent and subsequently filed suit against Desire2Learn, the new number 2 player in LMS. About this same time, open source started to become a viable alternative to proprietary systems in general, and Blackboard in particular, in the form of Moodle and Sakai. From 2006 – 2009, open source became fully established for campus-wide or system-wide LMS deployments. In late 2009, Desire2Learn successfully fended off Blackboard patent lawsuits, ultimately resulting in all 38 claims being ruled invalid by a US Court of Appeals. On the heels of these efforts in 2009, Blackboard purchased Angel, taking another competitor out of the market."
(Phil Hill, 4 August 2011, e-Literatee-Literate)
Fig.1 "LMS Market Share", [http://www.deltainitiative.com/higher-education/lms-strategy]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
e-learning 1.0: LMSs, VLEs, e-portfolios
"the dominant learning technology employed today is a type of system that organizes and delivers online courses - the learning management system (LMS). This piece of [e-learning 1.0] software has become almost ubiquitous in the learning environment; companies such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn have installed products at thousands of universities and colleges and are used by tens of thousands of instructors and students. The learning management system takes learning content and organizes it in a standard way, as a course divided into modules and lessons, supported with quizzes, tests and discussions, and in many systems today, integrated into the college or university's student information system."
(Stephen Downes, 17 October 2005)
Downes, S. (17 October 2005). "E-learning 2.0." eLearn Magazine, an Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. publication.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
e-Pedagogy & e-Assessment: new kinds of learning
"The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionally focussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learning material to be their prime role. It is through this role that they seek to direct learning. But it has been argued that this traditional teaching skill is redundant in today’s information-rich learning environment."
(Bobby Elliott, CAA Conference 2008)
Elliott, B. (2008). 'E-Pedagogy & E-Assessment'. 12th CAA Conference: Research into E-Assessment. Loughborough, UK, Loughborough University.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
"Most public policy discussion of new media have centred on technologies-tools and their affordances. The computer is discussed as a magic black box with the potential to create a learning revolution (in the positive version) or a black hole that consumes resources that might better be devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version).Yet, as the quote above suggests, media operate in specific cultural and institutional contexts that determine how and why they are used. We may never know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest with no one around. But clearly, a computer does nothing in the absence of a user. The computer does not operate in a vacuum. Injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings.
Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Gitelman, 1999).The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools."
(Henry Jenkins, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, Margaret Weigel, MacArthur Foundation)
[2] Jenkins, H., K. Clinton, et al. 'Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century', MacArthur Foundation.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The film screen as a blackboard for active debate rather than a medium for passive consumption
"Between 1969 and 1972 Godard renounced what he saw as the bourgeois capitalist ideology of individual authorship, and his association with the Maoist Jean-Pierre Gorin. Yet by 1972, with Tout va bien, starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, the larger collective had reduced to the single Godard-Gorin couple. It was clear, however, that Godard was seeking in every way to create a different cinema, not just to make political films but, as he maintained, to make them 'politically.' For financing he turned most often to television, but the producers were not always keen to have the films shown. His topics were internationalist - Britain, Prague, Italy, Palestine - but all within the framework of explicit Marxist critiques. His desire was to turn the film screen into a blackboard, an interface for active debate rather than a medium for passive consumption."
(David Wills 2000 p. 8-9)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
