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MIT's Pioneering OpenCourseWare Program Opens
its Doors
Although MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been active since April,
2002, the program did not officially launch until September 30, when its stated
goal was to have 500 courses on the site. Throughout the summer, the staff used
a rolling publication schedule, releasing batches of new courses to the site
on a weekly basis. In Sept., the OCW staff worked days, nights, and weekends
to achieve their goal: 500 courses, spanning 33 of MIT's academic disciplines
and all five of its schools.
The idea behind the OCW initiative is to make MIT course materials available
on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. MIT says it wants OCW
to be a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age,
and help make fundamental changes in how colleges and universities use the Web.
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Blackboard to Enter Content Management Market
Blackboard Inc. said it plans to unveil later this year an education-specific
learning content management and e-Portfolio system - the Blackboard Content
System. The company said the system would benefit students, faculty, and campus
IT administrators by lowering the costs and increasing the simplicity of managing
learning content, digital assets, and ePortfolios in an enterprise environment.
Blackboard said that as the use of enterprise course management systems has
grown, so has the sophistication and size of campus learning content assets.
To tap the value of these materials while managing costs, content systems provide
storage and tracking of learning objects for institution-wide re-use; managing
of scholarship in electronic portfolios; and the integration of informal content
with existing library system catalogues.
Six schools are working with Blackboard over the next six months to implement
the Blackboard Content System and fine tune the technology, including: Georgetown
University, Fairfax County Public Schools, the University of Cincinnati, Dallas
County Community College District, the National Defense University, and Seneca
College (Canada).
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eCollege to Acquire College Enrollment Marketing
Firm
eCollege, an eLearning provider for post-secondary education programs, signed
an agreement to acquire Salt Lake City-based Datamark Inc., a provider of integrated
enrollment marketing services to the college and university market, for $72
million in cash, debt, and stock. eCollege chief executive officer Oakleigh
Thorne said the deal will "drive more sales and earnings as well as drive more
enrollment fee revenue for eCollege." Thorne said Datamark would be added as
a separate operating division alongside eCollege.
Belgium Invests 1 Million Euros for Claroline Development
The government of Belgium said it would spend 1 million Euros on research
and development of Claroline, an open source electronic learning platform. The
money will go to Ingeneers Higher Education and the University of Liége. This
summer Claroline released version 1.4 of the software, which includes support
for multiple languages. An evaluation of Claroline, by Eric Uyttebrouck and
Thierry Henau of the Free University of Brussels.
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