Ruth, thank you for this. I understand the challenge of not only representing a group decision, but articulating the rationale for one this complex. I am going to take a stab at this also, and if I get it wrong, I welcome input from others who were involved. I made reference, in the second part of this interview, some activities at SUNY that relate to our attempt at selecting a technology platform to support learning. I think that we were trying to address similar issues that the FCET was at UCLA, but we develop a solution that was rejected internally.
If this is a topic of interest it might be worth referencing two sources. The more palatable of the two is an interview with Pat Masson on “JISC eLearning Forum” titled Developing an SOA at SUNY; Lessons learned, which can be found at http://www.elearning.ac.uk/features/masson. The second source is a little more dense and would require teasing out the relevant points. It is the Technology Strategy Report that was released as part of SLN's Request for Public Comment process. The report can be found at: http://le.suny.edu/sln/rpc/sln2tsr.pdf
One other resource that puts a lot of context around why we were so focused on a SOA can be found in a posting titled The Long Tail of Learning Applications on e-Literate by Michael Feldstein. As usual, Michael was spot-on.
The following evaluation criteria for our technology selection process were teased out of the work from our task force:
- Strong support for integration of new teaching and learning tools via open standards.
- Student-centric rather than course-centric application design.
- Support for the IMS Learning Design Specification. Native interoperability with SUNY's portal environment.
- Strong integration capabilities with campus IT systems.
which were based on the task force's recommendations to:
- Prioritize and emphasize teaching and learning
- Harness the strength and diversity of the SUNY federation
- Plan for tomorrow's campuses
Obviously there is a lot packed into these recommendations and each are explained a bit in the Technology Strategy report. Internally, we debated the relative advantages of Moodle, Sakai, and after a lot of spirited discussion, developed a recommendation based on an SOA using some major components including a portal framework, an authoring and packaging tool, and a suite of teaching, learning, and administration tools, most of which were open source. In the end, this solution was not accepted, nor was Moodle or Sakai.
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