Microsoft

Cliff Lloyd, Program Manager

Offline LMS Usage Paradigms

Numerous new technologies have appeared in the past year enabling easier ways for an application to establish tight integration between the web and the desktop including: Adobe AIR, Google Gears, and Microsoft Silverlight. This presentation will consider the implications of these technologies on the LMS landscape. In particular, we'll look at a number of LMS usage scenarios not possible in a strictly browser-based implementation model. One such scenario involves Ucompass.com's offline QTI assessment engine that auto-submits test results to a remote LMS server upon re-establishment of an Internet connection.

Edward Mansouri, CEO, UCompass.com

The Digital Confluence:   Online Content meets LMS

Representatives from ANGEL Learning’s product development organization provide an update on two recent experiments in marrying digital content and standards with a LMS system.  

Common Cartridge.  ANGEL Learning is a believer in open standards for online learning content.  We’ve been an innovator in trying to incorporate emerging standard into shipping products that we support.  We’ll share our story about being first to market with Common Cartridge and provide a view about what’s needed next to accelerate this initiative.

Digital Textbooks.   ANGEL Learning is supporting efforts to bring low cost digital textbooks to market in cooperation with major publishers.   We’ll provide a summary of recent work we’ve conducted with our customers to pilot a new digital textbook product— CourseSmart.  We’ll share findings and discuss our vision for the potential union of digital textbook products and LMS systems.

Ray Henderson, Chief Products Officer, ANGEL Learning
Dave Mills, Chief Technical Officer, ANGEL Learning

Open University

Dr. Ross Mackenzie, Product Development Manager, Learning & Teaching Solutions

Wimba

Steve Kann, Founder and Chief Engineer

Building a custom learning platform using OSIDs and learn eXact

Traditional learning platform design has been limited because of "vendor lockdown" obstacles. This presentation will demonstrate how Giunti Labs implemented OKI OSIDs as an option for their clients to construct custom learning platforms.

Bryan Eldridge, Director of Professional Services, Giunti Labs

The TELOS system.

The LORNET research network, hosted as Télé-université, is a major Canadian project in learning and knowledge management technologies. Its major result is a highly innovative assembly system for learning and knowledge management Web-based environments. TELOSmanages a network of learning resource repositories, enabling its designers to flexibly assemble learning objects or resources into multi-actor environments. The system is based on a service oriented and an ontology-driven architecture. It provides a graphic editor for programming the assembly and execution of multi-actor workflows and more generally of software component agregation scenarios. One goal of the system is to provide flexible platform extension and interoperability capabilities to organizations.

Gilbert Paquette,  Academic and Technology Services, Télé-université 
                         LORNET Network Director
François Magnan,   Main Architect, LICEF Research Center, Télé-université
Suzanne Lapointe,  Technology Transfert Officer, Télé-université

Télé-université, LORNET Research Network

Bringing Standards from Sky to Street: A view through the lens of the CSU Digital Marketplace

In order for any standard to have sustainable learning impact it must ultimately meet the needs of higher education's key strategic priorities and programs easily and reliably. The California State University is committed to IMS standards and is employing specific standards in its development of a key priority initiative, the Digital Marketplace (DM). This session will focus on our IMS standard integration plan for the DM while highlighting the need and challenge to develop extensions to certain standards to fit DM requirements, and a discussion as to how best to address this challenge through consultative dialogue and planning.

Widgets and Embedded Applications

At Learning Impact 2007 in Vancouver, Ucompass.com introduced
"Enrich", its free and open framework for injecting external e-learning
applications into existing, legacy web content with a single line of
XHTML.  In this presentation, we'll see the progress that's been made over
the past year moving this initiative forward that includes a robust model
for easily inserting learning games, telecommunication components, and
instant messaging widgets into web documents to greatly enhance the
content's user experience and interactivity.

Edward Mansouri, CEO, UCompass.com

Digital Content and Course Materials - preparing the college store for change

Against a backdrop of growing technology usage and digitization of course materials, college stores are preparing for a future where textbooks will be available in forms other than traditional print. The college store industry is active in identifying and monitoring trends that will speed up or slow down the transition. The industry is also actively exploring new business models, products and services that will allow them to continue to provide value to faculty, staff, and students on college campuses. Future initiatives at the national level will concentrate on three areas: education, partnerships, and developing an enhanced trade infrastructure. This presentation will highlight some of the key trends identified by the college store industry and some of the strategic initiatives underway.

Dr. Mark Nelson, Digital Content Strategist, National Association of College Stores

A big e-Learning in a small island

1. Current status of e-learning in Taiwan and what we prepare to do. 2. LORT: A Web 2.0 federated repository of e-Learning content in Taiwan. 3. A Common Cartridge repository by Taiwan. 4. A new model of rapid e-learning content development.

Chen-Yu Lee, Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan

Introduction to Digital Textbook Utilization Pilot Project in Korea

Korea, a highly informatized nation, is recently seeing rapid social
changes and a shortened knowledge life cycle. Revising the national
curriculum to reflect such social changes is an inevitable choice as
students who are used to learning through various digital media find paper-
based textbooks outdated, but revising such textbooks takes time.

To address these problems by applying rapidly developing information
communication technology, the Ministry of Education and Human Resources
Development established a plan in March 2007 to generalize the use of
Digital Textbooks in schools.

The Textbook Challenge

For decades if not centuries the textbook has served education as an essential resource for instructors and students. For instructors the textbook can provide the outline of a syllabus, the timeline of a course, a resource for lectures and a supply of ready-to-use content. For students the textbook has served as a homework help, a study reference, a course guide and an exam crammer. All of these benefits are to one degree or another implicit in the nature of the content of the textbook, its structure and organisation, few of the benefits are explicitly presented. The electronic world does not do implications, it deals in binary data, in explicit relationships. The challenge for the textbook is to take the wealth of implicit data and relationships embodied in the print medium and convert it to an online educational experience. I intend to use my session to explore some of the issues, present some solutions which Wiley have adopted and discover methods others have used. The discussion will of course include issues with respect to learning impact, technology trends, and standards.

Julian Clayton, John Wiley & Sons

Putting first things first: Using learning standards and XML technology to build better instruction with learn eXact

Up until now, there has been an unnecessarily large chasm between instructional design practitioners and the power of standards that they have at their disposal. This presentation will examine how the use of an XML template-based approach and the use of SCORM 2004 property wizards simple sequencing tools helps bridge this gap and produce higher-quality, more personalized instruction.

Informs

Informs, Inc is a software engineering and information technology firm located in Montgomery Alabama.  Since 1979 we have been providing custom and packaged software and services (including administrative software, procurement software and student information system software) to state and local governments and higher education customers.  Based on the advancement of web technologies such as Java, web services and service oriented architectures (SOA), Informs has adopted an open standards open source approach to the development of its newest software products.  SISJ2K, our latest student information system software product, is built on an open source, open standards, and open architecture framework.  It allows our customers to more readily adopt and develop a network of interoperability between all of their application software products (whether they be proprietary or open source) at a significantly lower cost and with greater flexibility and speed.  As a new member of the IMS GLC Enterprise Project, our goal is to contribute our experience to the expansion of the enterprise data model and to expose our SISJ2K application services to communicate with any learning management system using the latest technologies offered by the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards.

Rose Thorsen, Vice President for Student Information Services, will discuss the goals and objectives as it relates to Informs’ participation in the Enterprise Project.
 
Jim Moon, System Architect and Java Development Manager, will discuss the technological approach used to achieve interoperability between SISJ2K and the LMS.

University of Catalonia