Instructure Canvas is the new hotness in the LMS market, but for many it remains out of reach. For many schools who need an LMS on a shoestring budget, their best option is to contract for an open source Moodle install from a 3rd party hosting company. This is a common service available from many...
Comment on What’s Really to Blame for the Failures of Our Learning‐Management Systems by Michael Feldstein.
This post does a great job of summarizing the absurd challenges surrounding the LMS procurement process. It explains (without casting blame) why so many LMSes have such a similar set of...
I’ve been through a few LMS evaluation processes, and I’ve assisted others via Quora.com and commenters on my blog. One thing I’m always amazed by is how very smart people fail to focus on the right things when evaluating an LMS.
The best way I know to avoid the common pitfalls in an LMS evalu...
One of the thrilling features of the Iron Man movies is the idea that Tony Stark can step into a mechanized robot suit and control it as if he were just moving his body naturally. The suit is expertly designed to understand his movements in real time and seamlessly amplify them to give him superhuma...
A friend reminded me of the site Spurious Correlations, which shows absurd “relationships” between data that couldn’t possibly be related– though it’s fun to think that it is.
T...
In the previous post, Saving Universities in the Era of MOOCs, I discuss the value proposition of traditional universities, and how those values are changing as massive, free online courses gain traction in higher education. This post will exami...
Promoting Interaction in Your Assignments – Broadband from Samuel Merritt U Academic Tech on Vimeo.
Do you wish you could make one change in your course that would increase student engagement and boost your course evaluations? Research shows that courses with high rates of in...
I’ve been blabbering on recently about #Markdown here on TedCurran.net, and I just managed to interest a roomful of seemingly sane people why putting weird characters all over your writing is a good idea. I’m taking this as a sign that people get it– we need to write for the web, not the deskt...
2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare’s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to l...