elearning compendia

Coping in a world with software patents

by Paul Bacsich, 28 September 2006

Summary

This posting is designed to suggest that individuals and professional associations in the e-learning world consider seriously the steps they might take to cope more adequately in a world where software patents are increasingly more prevalent. There is a slight UK focus but it will apply all the more so in the US.

I wrote a version of this paper initially for the UK Association for Learning Technology (ALT) but was encouraged by reactions to it from people including Seb Schmoller to make it more widely available. His posting Should organisations now put public knowledge and knowhow on Wikipedia instead of publishing it themselves? Views requested is relevant.

BENVIC benchmarking in context

by Paul Bacsich, 14 June 2006

BENVIC was developed under an EU project, also called BENVIC (in full, Benchmarking of Virtual Campuses) in the era 1999-2001 There is a project web site still at http://www.benvic.odl.org/ – but it has not been updated since 4 February 2002. The consortium was led by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and had a strong set of partners (including UCL in the UK). However, for various reasons including retirement of key staff the work does not seem to have continued – anyway, follow-up work is not evident.

It has proved to be quite easy but also informative to correlate the BENVIC approach with the Pick & Mix system. This demonstrates how the value  of BENVIC can be preserved within the modern context of benchmarking e-learning. Indeed, it is planned that some insights from BENVIC will be incorporated into the next release of Pick & Mix, available August 2006. The full report gives more details of the correlation, its conclusions and implications for the development of Pick & Mix.

Paul

Cautious bloggers manifesto

by Paul Bacsich, 14 May 2006

Just occasionally I will reflect on what I am doing in this blog and why. Here are some founding principles of the cautious blogger.

(Some of you may have seen some thoughts like this before, on my "Ebenezer" pilot blog.)

• For me, blogging is not about changing the world. It is about helping my business and my research - and these come first.
• If blogging reduces the effort footprint for my web site, that would be particularly beneficial.
• There will not be a rigid schedule for blog postings - life is too complex for that.
• I will post rather less frequently than many bloggers - weekly at best
• I will try to make up for any infrequency of postings by increased depth of analysis.
• The needs of my (paying) clients come first. They will often get information faster and with more specific comments than general readers of the blog.
• I want to put information out (over the years I have edited several newsletters) but I want to get information back.
• I look to blogging to save me time (on an overall averaged basis) not to cost me time.
• I will not forgive slow, hard-to-use or buggy software just because it is open source.
• If the blog tools I use do not soon fit seamlessly into the Office paradigm, then I will change tools.
• There will be no sponsored postings on this blog.
• If you ever meet me at a conference and I say that I am too busy to talk because I have a blog posting to do, shoot me! (Or better, buy me a large Jameson [not a sponsored posting].)

[Disclaimer: all postings in any meta- category are the views of Paul Bacsich at the time, place and mental condition that they were posted in and do not necessarily reflect the views of Matic Media Ltd or any other employer of mine or any client of Matic Media Ltd or any other blog that I am contracted to post on.]

Paul

Secret histories 2: USOU

by Paul Bacsich, 14 May 2006

 

Historical analyses of e-universities seems to be just like buses down Oxford St [cultural reference: London, England] – you wait ages for one, then two come nearly at once. Shortly after the news came in about the analytic report on BCOU and Tele-U in Canada, along comes this EDUCAUSE article about the rather longer-dead USOU – the US branch of the UK Open University, which flourished from spring 1999 until summer 2002. The article is written by Katrina Meyer. Some in the global audience may not recognise her but in the US she is a regular author and speaker on e-learning topics (including those of interest to us) and is heavily involved in WCET including having presented at most of the recent WCET conferences. (I went to several WCET conferences in the 1999-2002 era, which were excellent.)

Secret histories of e-universities: the Canadian scene

by Paul Bacsich, 13 May 2006

The small but (we feel) select community of e-university analysts round the world were pleased to see recently that the long-expected study of Canadian e-university "changes" has appeared. This is a twin study of two interesting situations: the absorption of the British Columbia Open University (BCOU) component of the former Open Learning Agency by the new Thompson Rivers University (TRU) and the merger of tbe Tele-Universite de Quebec into the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The study was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) from Dominique Abrioux, who is President Emeritus of Athabasca University and and Professor at their Centre for Distance Education.

Prehistoric benchmarking e-learning

By Paul Bacsich, 13 May 2006

Having at long last decided to organise a web site with details of my company Matic Media Ltd and lots of stuff on my main publications and presentations, I have spent some days going back in time through outputs from my work, and got to the mid 1990s just as I left the OU for Sheffield Hallam U.

I came across a paper (still online) on virtual universities which I remembered - but what I had not remembered that it has a benchmarking aspect. In the section on so-called Dimensions of Virtuality, I put together a table of criteria for a set of virtual universities, and scored them on a 1 to 10 scale. (Indeed, I dimly remember even runnning a participative workshop or two on this - most likely at Online Educa - with members of the audience shouting out suggested scores.)

Welcome

This is the weblog of Matic Media Ltd. It focusses on a small number of topics in e-learning that are of especial interest to the company:

• benchmarking e-learning
• quality of e-learning
• costs of e-learning
• change management
• procurement paradigms for e-learning systems
• next-generation technologies to underpin e-learning
• e-universities around the world
• critical success factors of e-universities and national e-learning programmes