Global Universities: Sowing the Seeds of the Future, or Hanging On To The Past?
The author concludes, "Universities that hang on to an elitist concept of higher education are unlikely to be those that can successfully sow the seeds of a future of mass access, providing millions of people with the intellectual and employment opportunities they are currently denied," and thereby possibly explains some of the difficulties encountered by such enterprises as Universitas 21 (documented recently in OLDaily). More...

Outcomes of Conference
Major outcomes of the Educational Modelling Language (EML) conference organized by the Open University of the Netherlands included: a mapping of the relations between EML � IMS � SCORM, a preliminary architecture for an EML design, authoring and CMS, a UML component model for this preliminary architecture, an identification of users, a prototype design for the user interface, and agreement on business models. More...

OUNL EML and standards

Short overviuew article describing the Education Modelling Language (EML) standards. More...

Online Drop Rates Revisited

IO once signed up for a psychology course by distance simply for the purpose of obtaining a plastic model of a human brain. It need not be stated that I did not complete the course work. Does this constitute academic failure on my part? Hardly. More...

The End of the Course as We Know It
Good article that traces how the use of learning objects is redefining learning delivery, as evidenced by this perspective: "A course should fit the learner's needs, the skills required and their learning style. More...

Toward a Distributed Learning Object Repository Network
PowerPoint slides (1.47 megabytes) of my keynote address today at LearnTec - http://www.learntec.ca - in Miramichi. What this presentation includes that some of my previous postings don't are diagrams illustrating how I think a distributed learning object repository network should be structured. More...

Defend your WLAN

One of the knocks against wireless local area networks (WLANs) is that network security is a bit loose. As a result, a number of companies have developed tools to close your network data against intruders. More...

Ask Jeeves Takes Aim at Google
It's hard to imagine that any search engine could replace Google, but the designers of Teoma think that users will prefer their new layered approach. The company - purchased by Ask Jeeves last year - will have a lot of marketing clout behind it, but my own searches have yielded less than satisfactory results. More...

I Have My Rights!
The purpose of this article is to argue that people have no constitutional right to copy intellectual property, not even under fair use provisions. Of course, as this article is based in the U.S. Constitution, it has little applicability to the world at large. More...

New Standards
Good post on a Yahoo Group list (you will have to register and sign into elearningleaders (something I think the list owner really should change)) on why the author thinks that the IMS and SCORM standards are bound to fail. In a nutshell, the IMS and SCORM standards violate some fundamental principles of useful standards, specifically:

• Standards must be completely platform neutral.
• Standards must be international in scope.
• Standards are all about consensus - not cool ideas.
• Standards require the active participation of people from all vertical markets and all related professions.
• Standards must be durable.
• Standards must accommodate people with special needs.
• Standards must remain pedagogy neutral.
• Standards must harmonize with existing standards.
• Standards must be embraced by a wide range providers.
• Standards efforts must be governed in a neutral manner. More...