Edugator Blog

If you are interested in e-learning and information technology you did probably notice the last highly interesting events; Blackboard bought Angel and LETSI officially lost the stewardship of SCORM. After many years of starvation, e-learning is a real business generating increasing revenues in a growing market. E-learning companies as all companies in other industries are trying to maximize their growth and revenues. The North American business market is the most advanced hosting the biggest e-learning companies. Coming from Europe, I have seen the difference in ways and means here.

In Europe, the companies as the countries are smaller and still facing difficulties to make money in an emerging market. Lifelong learning and competency management are not that obvious for working people and the educational market is facing political issues. However, Europe is spending a lot of money in e-learning research project but this money does not create the market. So what’s happening?
North American companies are growing pretty fast while the European companies are growing slowly in a smaller market under development. We are in a globalized world, so European companies should attack the American market, right? But it’s not that simple.

First problem, patents. North America is full of patents locking the market. So the first thing for European companies is to study all the existing patents and to negotiate with the owner or change their applications in order to avoid the patent issue. It costs a lot of money and time.
Second problem, norms. In term of norms we had SCORM a trademark of the US DOD something typically American widely used all over the world. Taking the stewardship of SCORM, LETSI was a good thing to the industry making SCORM more international. Since ADL is back on the track, it remains something American. SCORM is freely usable, not sure that it will be forever. However, we had IMS involving a lot of Europeans in the IMS-LD and IMS-QTI communities. As I discovered in the Long Beach quarterly meeting, IMS-LD and IMS-QTI are no longer a top priority for IMS. Scott Wilson noticed the same thing during the Learning Impact Conference (here). But why ? What changed from the origin of IMS and Educause. The top American e-learning professionals are now members of IMS. They want some solutions as soon as possible to their technical problems. IMS is the perfect place for them to discuss and create the specification guarantying their interoperability. So all the specification leaded by e-learning researcher are scoped out. The majors are now doing their norms according to their needs excluding the companies not members of the club. They are already trusted the industry and tomorrow it will be too late to compete with them.

As a conclusion, in the coming years we should have a Microsoft and a I hope a Apple in e-learning and I hope too a Linux. Norms will be American as well as the biggest companies.

The hottest thing this week is the announce of blackboard acquiring Angel Learning. Both of the companies develop course management systems for schools and universities. Blackboard and Angel were competitors and it’s never a good thing for the customers when the competition decreases. That’s the reason why I didn’t like the announce at all. By reading posts this morning I changed my mind.

Especially thanks to this: “some Angel customers complaining that they chose the company because it was an alternative to Blackboard.” from the Wired Campus.

In other words, Blackboard is still growing but it will a big challenge to keep the existing customers of Angel Learning especially as competitors have already marketed the transfer from Angel Learning to their products.

The deal could be finally a poisoning gift.

Recently I crashed XP on my inspire one . F10 didn’t work for me.This is the easiest way to fix it with no external CDROM drive.

1) Create a USB boot disk with fdisk in it. The best is a WIN98 USB boot disk.

2) Boot on the USB ( press F12), launch fdisk and activate the partition named PQSERVICE.

3) Reboot the laptop and follow the instructions.

4) When the laptop restarts, reboot on the USB then fdisk and define the ACER partition as active then reboot.

It’s fixed.

Recently I read one of the white paper proposed to the LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability)’s call of paper for SCORM 2.0. This paper introduced the OLSA (Open Learning Services Architecture) developped by Skillsoft. The idea would be to integer OLSA to the SCORM 2.0 specification.

OLSA is a specification allowing a server oriented integration of contents. As there’s no norm existing allowing to do that., the skillsoft’s initiative is interesting and adress a problem costing e-learning compagnies a lot of money each time they want to deploy foreign solutions in theirs.

Actually, There are several ways to integrate e-learning contents:

• By creating normalized content packages (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2.4, IMS-CC) usable by all learning management system of the market. SCORM is for e-learning that MP3 is for music, for example.
• By using a server oriented integration (as it is proposed by OLSA for example). The content stay on the author’s server and is accessible via the author’s server;

The last solution has several advantages:

• A fewer risk of being pirated,
• The possibility to address more accurately (than SCORM and other IMS Specifications) the problem of interoperability for learning contents using also dynamic services (Chat, forum, etc.).  In other words, how can I play a learning activity designed in a platform with the platform’s tools in another platform?

As a specialist in learning design I am facing the problem of service interoperability.I think that this kind of initiative could provide a significant help to deploy learning scenarios and thus to implement and use learning design languages.

The questions are by now: What will be the decision of the LETSI ? How Skillsoft will deal with its intellectual property ?

Happy new year you guys. I wish you all the best for 2009.
2009 will see a new start of this blog. Note that the address may change in a couple of weeks.
I’m currently writing new papers and I won’t forget to post them as soon as possible…
2009 will definitively be for me a rich year of research ;0