iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Ray Henderson, new president of Blackboard (Bb) learn, sent out an E-Mail/blog post to the WebCT/Bb community today that amounts to a bit of a mea culpa.

As Brock University transitions from their WebCT CE 6 (Blackboard Learning System CE) Learning Management System (LMS) to Isaak, Brock University’s Sakai-Based LMS, it’s nice to see someone from Bb give a honest assessment of their acquisition of WebCT.

Ray shares what he’s come to understand and most of their clients suspected:

…the WebCT course management systems went through a major re-write just before Bb and WebCT merged – CE6 and Vista 4 were the results of that re-write. Just after the merger was completed more than 500 clients ended up going live on these new products.

It wasn’t until these clients went live that we discovered a large number of bugs (over 2,000) and some critical architectural issues. Frankly we made a mistake in not battle testing the new releases ourselves after the closing of the merger and for not keeping WebCT’s support center in Vancouver at full strength.

Brock University was one of those clients, and you can ask anyone who was at Brock University during the fall of 2006 or the start of term in winter of 2007 and 2008 to find out the number of issues Brock had – or read the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies’ annual reports.

That said, it’s small consolation to finally be given a frank assessment of what append and to know that Bb is finally willing to give an honest accounting of that part of their company’s history.

Brock gave-up a considerable amount of features when they abandoned WebCT CE 6 and may have missed out on some real potential with Blackboard 9. But that said, almost everyone at Brock University is pleased with Sakai and the transition appears to be going very well.
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I stumbled upon this new search engine while going through some server logs at work. SearchMe.Com is the best take on flash-based web search that I’ve seen. It’s actually useful!

I’m both excited and to be able to announce that Sakai will bro Brock’s next Learning Management System. Terry Boak, Brock University’s Vice-President Academic finally officially announced the move to an open-source Sakai-based Learning Management System (LMS) at Wednesday May 14th, University Senate meeting. Thus I feel I can now start blogging about it.

This new system will be based on the community-based LMS: Sakai. Brock’s new Sakai-based system will be built upon a cluster that will have all the features of a strong system that is redundant, reliable, scalable, and with sufficient capacity. More about the new cluster is available here: kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Brock%27s_Sakai_System

The spring of 2008 marks the beginning of a phased transition to Brock using exclusively a Sakai-based LMS for the 2009 academic year. Instructors have the option to use Sakai right now and students may already be taking courses that make use of Sakai.

As of July 31st 2009 WebCT will no longer be available at Brock. An implementation plan has been drafted and posted at kumu.brocku.ca/sakai/Implementation_Plan. It should assure that this transition can be accomplished without incidents and discontinuities.

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (CTLET) and others are already beginning the process of documenting Sakai and training faculty and will be posting updates here soon.

A contest to name the new Sakai-based system has been announced and can be found at www.brocku.ca/ctlet/sakai/contest.php – you can win an iPod.

Because of the steps, rules and accommodations we had to adhere to between the decision and the announcement we (Me, iMatt and we, Brock University) actually got scooped by another blog, sakaiblog.korcuska.net/2008/04/05/brock-university-adopts-sakai/, that probably read our non-announcement confirmation statement that we made to facilitate some presentations etc. and academic planning that needed to be done. That’s Brock.
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Most Firefox users know about the super-fast in-page search (ctrl+F/Command+F) – it’s one of those features that have been there since Firefox 1 and prevent users from switching back to other web browsers.

Did you know that you can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word? For example, you want to find “Firefox” on this page, you would type /firefox. Then the first instance of “Firefox” will appear highlighted. This slash search feature is really just a shortcut to ctrl+F/Command+F but it shaves precious micro-seconds off of your workday.

This is part of one of the workshops I’ve been giving at Brock this month (as it pertains to WebCT and security/privacy). I thought it had valud outside Brock’s walls. The videos on YouTUBE so that it’s hamsters can do the heavy work.