I am currently building a social eLearning site and I will proactively never call what I'm building as an LMS. LMS' key words are "management" where I'm building a site that will facilitate learning not just manage it.
I agree that the big game changers are live work collaboration and video chat and the standard Google has set is absolutely great. As a recent grad (may, 2011), working on group projects was absolutely essential to successful learning and by being able to allow similar interaction online is a win-win.
We have both those features in the site we're building...and the reason we're not too terrified of others using Google's APIs is that the user will ultimately still need a Google account to use them even on a different site.
If OpenClass is truly open, why make everyone sign up and then also sign up to Google? Not everyone has a Google acct. What about all the countries around the world that would benefit from a true "OpenClass"?
Check us out at www.cloudeas.com...our landing page is still not up yet as we recently started this project but with the amount of traction this article is getting, it's needless to say our landing page will be up today (tonight at the very latest).
We are 5 recent grads that feel the exact same way you have about blackboard---absolutely sick of it and it actually distracted us from learning rather than enhancing it...we decided to build our own: built by students but designed for professors
I agree that the big game changers are live work collaboration and video chat and the standard Google has set is absolutely great. As a recent grad (may, 2011), working on group projects was absolutely essential to successful learning and by being able to allow similar interaction online is a win-win.
We have both those features in the site we're building...and the reason we're not too terrified of others using Google's APIs is that the user will ultimately still need a Google account to use them even on a different site.
If OpenClass is truly open, why make everyone sign up and then also sign up to Google? Not everyone has a Google acct. What about all the countries around the world that would benefit from a true "OpenClass"?
Check us out at www.cloudeas.com...our landing page is still not up yet as we recently started this project but with the amount of traction this article is getting, it's needless to say our landing page will be up today (tonight at the very latest).
We are 5 recent grads that feel the exact same way you have about blackboard---absolutely sick of it and it actually distracted us from learning rather than enhancing it...we decided to build our own: built by students but designed for professors