There are two things to realize... most of the professors want their content freely available. The more people see it and use it, better for us.
The problems are: 1) really technical stuff goes into publications and proceedings. That is what we get paid for. Many journals do not allow free distribution. To me this is a major problem. Things got worse over the years. The only solution is if the governments step in and require that all publications based on public funded research be freely available online. Yet I do not think it will happen. 2) Most educators do not see themselves (ourselves) as content creators but as filters. We provide a prospective but putting things into a context (which may be local of a community, a organization, a city, a nation) and filtering things out. We pick a textbook not because it is the best or the most comprehensive book on a subject but because we feel the book capture what is important to us. 3) University are subject to restrictions. For example a teacher can show a movie in class even if it is copyrighted and even if the class is virtual. This puts them under DMCA restrictions. The vendors tell them they need a CMS with strict access control and DRM on media content. 4) Students cheat. 5) Book publishers have standard protocols for distributing digital content such as quizzes. The current LMS (good or bad) try to provide support for 2, 3, 4 and 5 but forcing faculty to organize content into learning objectives, link resources to those objectives, keep the content private, monitor that students click on what they are supposed click and do not turn in content that comes from the web and constitute plagiarism or copyright infringement, create courses from canned content coming from publishers. They are not designed to share content, reuse content or be open in any way. Things are changing but it takes time. Massimo On Sep 28, 10:58 pm, Jason Brower <encomp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Google just paid 10 million for an idea like this. Make edgucational books > free online. > So we are not alone in this goal. > > ----- Original message ----- > > I agree with you. > > > On Sep 28, 4:39 pm, KK <nkanna...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Massimo, > > > > Having developed and deployed one if the early LMS in 1994, LMS > > > should allow collaborative learning between students, with teacher > > > acting as a mentor and catalyst. This is different from forums. Also > > > it should allow crowdsourced content from all teachers worldwide to > > > replace text books. Testing should be problem solving with open books > > > and it should not copy Blackboard or WebCT or then Open Source > > > knockoffs like Sakai. It should scale a talented teacher to reach > > > thousands of students worldwide rather than some arbitrary limits. It > > > should allow competence-based learning rather than be time-limited > > > Such an LMS will over take the current limited ones. My wishlist is > > > too long. > > > > Nat Kannan > > > > On Sep 28, 10:01 am, mdipierro <mdipie...@cs.depaul.edu> wrote: > > > > > Once again... who here is interested in a web2py based Learning > > > > Management system? > > > > What features would you like to see? > > > > > Massimo > >
