I have been on holiday for a while and occupied preparing for the new year. As everything is starting to settle down now I am working away the backlog... Some of this may well be old news for many of you, but I will mention it anyway.
It was not a big surprise, but Microsoft is now edging into the e-learning market. They are giving away a learner kit and community developer kit with Sharepoint. In their words:
'schools can readily build a standards-based education portal for administrators, educators and students to share information, collaborate on projects, and access rich learning resources from a single point of access.'
As I do not have an installation at my disposal I cannot judge exactly what this facility has to offer. As could be expected it appears to be very strongly based on file management and workflow. This is certainly practical for group based work and setting out and collecting assignments. I am not sure this covers the wide realm of e-learning possibilities offered by specially designed e-learning platforms. However, Microsoft does seem to be edging into this market with the familiar - it is free, why not give it a go - strategy.
Microsoft does seem to be moving into the gap that a number of traditional e-learning systems are not coping with quickly enough. Traditional VLE's were teacher centred. The demand on a present day VLE is that it should offer these traditional features, but also integrate and offer tools for collaborative work, contributing, sharing and referring to information by all (net2'ing), netcasting (in the widest sense of the word) and a seamless integration with campus wide information systems.
» Read the news on the Microsoft website