An individual who won both the A.M. Turing Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence in 1975 and the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978 is the inspiration behind Carnegie Mellon University's decision to make many of its own learning tools, software and content openly available over the next year.
FLEXspace, the Flexible Learning Environments eXchange, has changed over time, starting out in 2013 as a great place to showcase and exemplify learning spaces, then rapidly growing to include a comprehensive toolset for planning and assessing these spaces, and now connecting a vibrant research community. Here, CT gets an update from FLEXspace.org pioneers Lisa Stephens and Rebecca Frazee.
GitHub has released Classroom Assistant, a tool intended to help streamline the grading process for teachers using Classroom on its open-source service that allows developers to share and collaborate on code.
Blackboard is rebranding its open source learning management system. The LMS formerly known as Moodlerooms will now be called Blackboard Open LMS. The company said it's also "accelerating investment and development of the product."
In the wake of news of its split from Moodle, Blackboard has reaffirmed its commitment to its Moodle-based Software-as-a-Service product and the open source community.
In addition to improvements in cost, the device reportedly allows for larger-scale printing and greater precision than many commercially available bioprinters. The team released its research under a Creative Commons license to encourage others to build their own as well.
OpenScholar, an open source website-publishing system specifically for higher education, has publicly separated from Harvard University to become a private company. The website creation service is already used by more than 75 institutions, not counting the 9,000 sites within Harvard itself, where it was developed.
IMS Global Learning Consortium has introduced LTI Advantage, the next phase of market adoption for its Learning Tools Interoperability standard.
Seeing a conflict between open and proprietary developments in educational technology and in society at large, Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas has started to refocus the open source learning platform's activities to do a more effective job of spreading openness.
To provide help to companies and other organizations that would consider hiring people on the autism spectrum for skilled employment, Cornell University is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in helping to distribute resources developed for HPE's "Dandelion Program."
