Google Apps for Education: When Will It Replace the LMS?
Audrey Watters, e-Literate, May 3, 2012.

In view of data provided by Jonathon Rees (image above) Audrey Watters writes, "if, indeed, people are primarily – heck, overwhelmingly – using the LMS to share documents and send announcements, then wow, we need to really look closely at what Google Apps for Education is providing campuses." OK, but there's still not on the chart. Like integration to the university's student record system, for example, tracking and analytics, and of course the positioning of the LMS as a portal for resource and textbook sales. Other people - not just professors - use the LMS, often in ways that are not visible to professors.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Books, Portals, Google, Student Record Systems]

The UK's battle for open standards
Simon Wardley, O'Reilly Radar, May 3, 2012.

Interesting item on a well-meaning attempt to establish open technology standards in Britain that has been hijacked by paid lobbyists pressuring the government to reverse course. "'Software patent heavyweights piled into the first public meeting,' filling the room with unrepresentative views backed up by vendors flying in senior individuals from the U.S. It apparently seems that the chair of the roundtable was himself a paid lobbyist working on behalf of those vested interests, a fact that he forgot to mention to the Cabinet Office. Microsoft has now been 'accused of trying to secretly influence government consultation.'"

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Microsoft, Great Britain, Open Standards, Patents, Copyrights]

Massive Courses, Massive Data
Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, May 3, 2012.

One wonders what sort of data Harvard and MIT will collect from their online courses. From the description in the article - "granular data on the activity of students in the edX environment" - it sounds like it will be your typical hit-count data. I think that distributed courses, rather than ones centered on a platform, will produce different types of data. In the meantime, let's not forget that Harvard and MIT are not first in their analysis of MOOC data (indeed, their data does not even exist yet) - there exists a considerable body of work that has simply been ignored by the people who write at Inside Higher Ed.

[Link] [Comment][Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Academia]