eLearning Projects
All content and software created or funded by SBCTC eLearning will use the Creative Commons CC BY license.
Part of the Washington Student Completion Initiative, the Open Course Library project is about designing 81 high enrollment, gatekeeper and pre-college courses for face-to-face, hybrid and/or online delivery, to improve course completion rates, lower textbook costs for students, provide new resources for faculty to use in their courses, and for our college system to fully engage the global open educational resources discussion. This last point is straight from a guiding principle in our Strategic Technology Plan to “cultivate the culture and practice of using and contributing to open educational resources.”
Open Licensing Policy
LMS RFP
ANGEL is the learning management system (LMS) used by the majority of the colleges in the Washington community and technical college system. ANGEL is a commercial product that has been acquired by Blackboard, a large LMS provider. Blackboard has announced an end of life for ANGEL in June of 2014. A request for proposals (RFP) for an LMS to replace ANGEL will go out in late November. An RFP committee composed of members who represent the college system community broadly including student services, IT, eLearning, librarians, faculty, as well as representatives from all six state universities, with help from faculty will evaluate the responses and select the best vendor. The selection process should be complete in time to have a contract in place by June, allowing colleges up to two years for migration.
Information on User Testing
The LMS RFP search process has now moved into the phase where we are ready for faculty and staff members to evaluate the top three finalists vendors. Those three finalists are Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Instructure Canvas.
Each college in the system will be given funds to pay a certain number of faculty members to formally review all three finalists, work through a series of tasks in each system and then fill out a scoring form. Anyone else in the system is welcome to also fill out the scoring document if they are willing to complete all tasks in all three systems and given equal and full attention to all three. The scoring form is available here.
There also an informal input form that anyone who is interested in providing feedback but doesn’t have time to work through the series of in depth tasks and scoring process may use. The informal feedback form is available here.
We have asked each vendor for access to their systems for our testers. At the current time we tester information from Instructure (see below) and expect information from the other two vendors soon. When more information becomes available it will be posted here as well.
Instructure Canvas Access Information:
To test Canvas please register at the link below. The test accounts last for 14 days, but with one click can be extended to 28 days. You can give this link to all interested (or invited) parties to sign up:
http://demos.instructure.com/register
For people interested in an introduction or a little training before they jump in there are several options.
February, 2012 Note; The LMS RFP committee is on track as per the timeline and we do not anticipate any delays in completing this project.
Content on the SBCTC eLearning site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License