What is wrong in this picture?
I realize something is odd in the OpenSource LMS world. It looks like Moodle people leave Bb/WebCT alone, but focus on competition with Sakai. What is wrong with this picture? OpenSource != Open Minded?? Instead of looking at the good features of each Opensource application and merge the good features for a better product, are they competing for the 5% of market? Do not forget, the beauty of opensource is "OPEN!" Go figure ..
(previously posted on my another blog, i think it is more suitable here!)
posted by Max J. Tsai @ 6:15 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Zack said...
The competition between Sakai and Moodle was initiated when the Sakai project leads decided to start their own web app platform that was independant and incompatible with Moodle. This harms the over all effort towards an open-source alternative to BlackBoard/WebCT because it fractures development resources, mindshare, funding, and adoption.
9:43 PM
Max J. Tsai said...
I do not see the start of Linux was trying to harm BSD as I do not see that is Sakai's intention to compete with Moodle. If you look at Sakai, it was started with merging of several existing LMS implementations. Actually, there were many OpenSource LMSs prior to Moodle and Moodle started its own implementation of OpenSource LMS with its pedagogical principles in mind! As well as Sakai. It is Open Source and Open Speech after all! I do appreciate both products and they give the opportunity for looking at online learning and teaching from different angles. My hope is to bring Moodle into Sakai as the core LMS module and use Sakai as the Collaboration portal by taking advantage of portlet and web services.
10:03 PM
Zack said...
Whether or not Sakai was intended to compete with Moodle or not it certainly is as long as CIO's and CTO's are forced to choose between on system or another. Portlets / webservices only offer a very light level of integration. Since Moodle will never been ported to JSF/J2EE I don't see a likely scenario of Sakai or Moodle playing nicely together.
1:27 AM
Max J. Tsai said...
No, using web services does not require for any other application to change platform. That is the beauty of it! I have done some web services in PHP as well. I am not sure why it is a problem for 'users' to have varieties of choices on products? For more research focus universities will need something different for the universities that focus on general education.I would see it is the benefit of the CIO/CTO to get to decide what fits the university culture. That's why there are pedagogical difference between Moodle and Sakai in the design level. I feel sorry for people to miss that by only looking at the software. I would believe the birth of Moodle was Martin's implementation of 'his idea' for online teaching and learning. Why not Sakai or others?
Moodle's success is not mainly due to the PHP - it is the design concept and openness of Moodle!
6:39 AM
Zack said...
* webservices only offer a very 'light' level of integration.
* having 2 competing non profit projects trying to build open-source LMS solutions will greatly slow down the effort on a whole.
* Moodle would not have succeeded if it was built on JSF/J2EE
2:39 PM
Max J. Tsai said...
There is already effoet on WSRP-based Integration ..
"Toward WSRP-based Integration
The University of Wisconsin developed an Alti-Lab 2005 demonstration of Moodle and Web Services as part of the tool portability work. This is described by Learning Technology Standards Observatory saying: “Demonstrations were available of Blackboard, Sakai, WebCT and Moodle Learning Management Systems (LMS), each inter-working with two assessment tools (Perception from Questionmark and SAMigo from Sakai) and ConceptTutor from University of Wisconsin - Madison. The TIF has been developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium as an efficient, reusable mechanism for integrating LMS platforms with third-party tools, thus allowing institutions to extend the functionality they can offer learners. alt-i-lab is organized by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in collaboration with a number of affiliate organizations. alt-i-lab 2005 (June 20th - 22nd) was hosted by digital South Yorkshire, attracting over 200 attendees from 14 countries to Sheffield, UK.”
Yesterday the University of Wisconsin’s Dirk Herr-Hoyman said he would be preparing a brief report on uPortal and Moodle integration. This should be available shortly. If developed, this would implement Moodle as a WSRP portlet within uPortal—a project suggested last year by Moodle partner Bryan Williams of remote-learner.net. uPortal developer Michael Ivanov confirms this is “reasonable” even though uPortal is written in Java and Moodle in PHP. I believe you will see Moodle as a WSRP portlet by February 2006 when the ITC MoodleMoot takes place in Savannah, Georgia."
4:32 PM
[another comment from Ben]
I couldn't agree more. I don't think anyone in the Sakai community sees Moodle as a comptetitor. If anything Moodle is used as inspiration. Let's all just focus on doing good work, and leave competition aside.
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Posted by Ben Brophy to Digital Campus at 2/01/2006 11:26:43 AM
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