This fall, I'm taking a class online about taking classes online. (Next up for me? Writing a book about writing a book, and recording a podcast about recording a podcast.) It's being offered through ION (Illinois Online Network). ION's a great source for educators accross the state (in business and institutional environments). They are leading the way in the maturing area of online learning.
Recently, in the class I'm taking there's been some discussion of the merger of the online education environment companies WebCT and Blackboard and what this merger might mean for online educators. Both companies are in the business of creating online classrooms. They give you the basic stuff you need -- chat rooms, test editors, discussion boards, assignment submission tools, student tracking, etc -- and you, the educator, arrange it all to suit your classroom goals. Then students log in with a password to access the class. Online education has come a long way from the time when someone c0uld throw a few links up on a webpage and call it a resource.
ION itself uses Moodle (The Moodle link takes you to a page which is itself an example of what the moodle environment looks like), which is from neither. Moodle is open source, which basically means the software is free and you are free to change the it's code (assuming you know how). So you can see how the war between the VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments) is getting complicated.
With education budgets shrinking, colleges and university have to take a long, hard look at open source solutions to online course management. SIU uses WebCT, but I've heard that they are looking at other options. Are they going open source? I don't think so, but it's not because those alternatives aren't there.
No comments:
Post a Comment