Blackboard Inc. announced today the launch of Blackboard Collaborate™, an education-focused platform for real-time collaboration that helps institutions shift more learning, networking, and communication online to improve education quality while reducing the cost of academic operations.
LMS
Moodle 2.0.3 and Moodle 1.9.12 released
The folks over at Moodle have released versions 2.0.3 and 1.9.12 of their open source learning management system (LMS). Helen Foster writes in the Moodle announcement:
In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, five security vulnerabilities (4 major, 1 minor) in 2.0.2 and two security vulnerabilities (both major) in 1.9.11 have been discovered and fixed. Thanks to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing these security issues.
Some of the new features and improvements in Moodle 2.0.3 include:
- Q and A forum posts only visible after editing time has expired
- Description field in user profile is no longer a required field
- Multiple multimedia plugin filter fixes and improvements
- There is now a link to send messages on basic profile pages
- Duplicate files uploaded through the file picker are now handled
- New capability mod/workshop:viewauthorpublished for controlling visibility of workshop published submission authors
- Fixes to themes for IE
The latst versions of Moodle can be found at Moodle.org's download page.
Create an Interactive Educational Website with Plone using Packt's New Book
Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Plone that helps website creators maintain, manage and edit educational websites. Written by Erik Rose, a member of the Plone 4 and 5 Framework Teams, Plone 3 for Education will help website creators represent educational courses using Plone's various built-in content types such as news items, collections, and events.
Plone is a free open source Content Management System (CMS) that’s built on top of the Zope application server. Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser. It is because of its superior security and advanced back-end, that it holds a technological edge over many major CMSes.
ATutor First Open Source IMS Common Cartridge Compliant LMS
ATutor 1.6.4 has acheived IMS Common Cartridge 1.0 Lite compliance. And, it's not just a cartridge player, it's a whole common cartridge authoring and management system, built right into the LMS. No need for third party tools to create cartridges. And, no "lock in." Compliant cartridges are exported from the system so its easy to move content from ATutor into other elearning environments.
These are the details of the latest ATutor release from SourceForge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sfnews/f...
Common Cartridge: The primary addition in ATutor 1.6.4 is support for the IMS Common Cartridge Lite 1.0 content interoperability standard. This standard combines IMS Content Packaging and IMS Question Test Interoperability (QTI), as well introducing tool interoperability with the ability to now associate activities with content. Changes for Common Cartridge have also added Web links to external Web sites as content pages. (Thanks to the Ontario Enabling Change program for funding this work, and the University of Bologna's Department of Computer Science for their contribution.)
Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development - A reliable and straightforward guide
I opened my copy of Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development
by William Rice with a high expectation that it would be an informative
and practical reference text. Why? I was about to upgrade to Moodle
1.9. Did it meet my expectations?
Now read on...
Using
open source software can be a daunting experience, regardless of your
technical or business experience, and this text's purpose is to shorten
users' path to competency in the application. Broadly speaking, the
text covers four Moodle-related activities:
- Installing and configuring Moodle 1.9
- E-Learning course development and delivery
- E-Learning course management
- Moodle administration and maintenance
The author assumes zero previous knowledge of the application, and begins by describing Moodle’s Social-Constructionist
approach to learning, before bringing the reader on a whistle-stop tour
of Moodle 1.9’s features and functionality– a very good idea indeed, as
this goes some way to providing an understanding of why Moodle 1.9
looks and works the way it does for newcomers, acts as a pertinent
reminder for experienced Moodlers, and sets the context for the course
creation sections later in the book.
