Developers+

Amid the discussion of open technology and open education that pervades the dialogue in education today, I’ve found it curious that one simple concept receives relatively little attention: to create something open, someone must first be willing to share their creation.  And once that generous decision to share has been made, by an individual or an organization, others must be able to find and use that work in order to make it truly shared.

This simple concept, when considered in the context of digital content, highlights several challenges that have served as barriers to progress toward more open sharing of digital content within our communities.  First, most of us are not really wired as individuals, or organizations, to be good at sharing.  This means that to promote sharing, we need tools that make sharing feel easy, familiar, and safe.  These tools should also make it easy for us to discover content shared by others, and just as importantly, easy to use that content once discovered.

Educators today have access to many sources of shared and open content, and the LMS, in its many varieties, is now ubiquitous as a platform for delivery of digital content.  But the process for contributing or adopting shared or open resources and actually making them available for use within the LMS has remained disjointed, difficult, and often frustrating.

It is my great pleasure to announce that today we release Blackboard xpLor, a new platform that is neither an LMS nor a traditional digital content repository. Blackboard xpLor is something new and unique, designed to simply yet powerfully support the creation, discovery, management, and delivery of shared content, all within the familiar context of the LMS you are already using.

Guest Blog Post from Kimberly Seeber. Kimberly lives in Bloomington, Indiana, US. She is a licensed elementary teacher and a graduate student in the Instructional Systems Technology residential master’s program at Indiana University. Her interests include technology integration in the K-12 environment and online learning. Kimberly is sharing the wealth of knowledge from Week 4 of the Designing an Exemplary Course MOOC.

The last week of the Designing an Exemplary Course MOOC concluded with a valuable discussion about how instructors can support students in an online environment. The discussion began with sharing strategies that promote academic integrity and ended with strategies that support students’ use of technology tools that are not integrated into the course management system.

Plagiarism

Students are not the only ones caught plagiarizing.  In fact, a professor from the University of California at Berkeley is currently under investigation for allegedly borrowing ideas without proper citations, reports the Inside Higher Ed news publication.  Do YOU have adequate measures in place to promote academic integrity in your institution?

Imperial Valley College, a member of the California Community College system, has chosen Blackboard Learn as its new learning management system (LMS) for Fall 2012.

The decision comes after a thorough evaluation of alternative enterprise learning systems, and was driven after a comprehensive round of strategic planning at the College.

“We are really striving to be an exemplar among the California Community Colleges,” commented Todd Finnell, Vice President for Informational Technology. “When we sat down to implement our strategic vision for our institution, it became apparent that a review of our current e-Learning systems was necessary.”

Last week the IMS Global Learning Consortium announced its certification of the Basic LTI 1.1 standard, and at this week’s IMS Learning Impact conference in Toronto you’ll hear much more from the standards organization about this new standard. For those of you not familiar, LTI stands for Learning Tools Interoperability. The LTI standard allows for third-party tool providers to easily plug their applications into Blackboard Learn and other learning management systems. I’m a musician at heart, so when I explain LTI I often use Noteflight as an example. Noteflight is an online music writing application that lets you create, view, print and hear music notation with professional quality, right in your web browser. Since Noteflight supports the LTI standard, a music teacher can create composition-based assignment and grade the assignment all within Blackboard Learn. That’s just one example! The LTI standard has been used by educators to integrate content from other providers into their courses creating truly rich course content. At Blackboard we’ve prided ourselves on rapid implementation of IMS standards, and Basic LTI 1.1 is no different. Blackboard’s support of IMS open standards demonstrates a continuing commitment to creating a learning management system devoted to interoperability and openness. We continue to work with the IMS Global Consortium to expand standards support in our software and lead in the establishment of other industry standards.