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"Where's Sakai headed?   Toward interoperability without sacrificing customizations, flexibility, diverse feature set, peer-based innovation and lower costs. Sakai 10 is about to be released. This release celebrates ten years of Sakai providing flexibility, control and cost savings.  Sakai 10 is the first of a series of releases that will respond to the needs of higher ed stakeholders everywhere."

"1/5 of all Sakai institutions appear to be actively running, piloting, or planning to switch to a different LMS. The most popular LMSs being run in parallel are Blackboard Learn and Canvas."

The result, should the trend continue, might not be a learning management system, but what analysts call a "learning ecosystem." Not a black hole where content is dumped at one end of the semester and grades at the other, but an open platform where faculty members are free to browse and embed the tools they want to use -- for example quizzes from Khan Academy, plagiarism detection from Turnitin or a homegrown solution -- regardless of whether they logged into Learn or Sakai, and regardless of whether their system has its own, similar tool.

English professor Christine Cucciarre said social media will play an integral role in her course "Writing the New Media," which is offered in the spring. She said the class requires students to use Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs and web design programs. Cucciarre said she likes using social media sites because of the ability to share posts. She said the class's Facebook group allows her students to share an interesting story or news clip with their peers, and students can also share content with their friends by reposting the link to their own page.

A graphical display of this information might be helpful. Below is a graphic that depicts the student learning outcomes for a course I taught last year, a course for preservice teachers and the teaching of writing in K-12 schools.

This is right on target for what I am trying to pull together for my major project for my program. Mat, when you designed your Fall 13 course - did Canvas have advantages over SAKAI when it came to the mechanics of assessing your students' work?

Lecturers in higher education often consider the incorporation of web technologies into their teaching practice. Partially structured and populated course site templates could aid them in getting started with creating and deploying webbased materials and activities to enrich the teaching and learning experience. Discussions among instructional technology support staff and lecturers reveal a paucity of robust specifications for possible course site features that could comprise a template. An attempted mapping from the teaching task as understood by the instructor to the envisaged course website properties proves elusive. We conclude that the idea of an initial state for a course site, embodied in a template, remains useful and should be developed not according to a formula but with careful attention to the context and existing pedagogical practice. Any course template provided for the use of lecturers should be enhanced with supporting instructions and examples of how it may be adapted for their particular purposes.

"I don't believe that the LMS is dead, yes my livelihood depends on it, but the facts are that institutions like "software systems" that help meet strategic objects. The cool part (and often challenging for buyers) is that there are hundreds of systems that use the LMS moniker."

""My dream is that every single person on the planet can build their own LMS, if that is what they want to do. I want to build an ecosystem of tools that make life easier for teachers""

After some time playing and building a course, something happened . I realized that I trusted in the platform and I let it to take me wherever it wants. It's fair to to say that Instructure's people, and all the other people involved in the development of Canvas, must be congratulated. Bravo!!!.

Although faculty and students are the primary learning management system users, administrators and IT experts often select the system. This article stresses the importance of involving all stakeholders in the selection process, offers a step-by-step guide to LMS selection, and enables readers to develop a customized list of LMS features that align with their institution's instructional and learning priorities.

"With the report, Educause has launched the Next Generation Digital Learning Environments Initiative, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported effort to examine why colleges and universities are using "antiquated" technology -- and how to replace it. The average institution's learning management system, according to Educause's data, is eight years old."