Forum OpenACS Q&A: openACES vs Blackboard

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1: openACES vs Blackboard
Posted by Michael Serio on 06/15/01 05:51 PM

I'm currently evaluating eLearning systems for Berklee Media, a division of Berklee College of Music. So far Blackboard 5.5 Level III has most of what we need -

  1. User authentication via LDAP or kerberos
  2. IMS/AICC-standard course management
  3. framework for supporting a variety of content formats (mostly via browser plug-ins)
  4. virtual classroom
  5. assessment 'engine'
  6. community portal
  7. ASP solution (not required but a nice to have)

Blackboard doesn't provide:

  1. Automated registration and course enrollment w/online credit card processing
  2. IMS-compliant user, group and membership data for the courses, faculty, and enrolled students - Blackboard is dependant on a Java or XML interface to a university's existing system (such as SCT Banner or Colleague) but we want to run standalone

From what I understand regarding ACES it appears to do most of what we need. I'd like to bring in a development team that's built or building an openACES (or ACES - although we want to use openACES for obvious reasons :) application that could

  1. give a presentation (powerpoint or wimpypoint) highlighting openACES features and benefits compared to Blackboard
  2. show a working online demonstration of the system and
  3. provide an understanding of a timeline for openACES plus customization (time and $$) to meet our requirements

We will be making a technology decision by the end of this month and need a limited but functional beta system by September - we want to build/serve courses but won't be enrolling students.

If you can demonstrate that openACES is a more cost-effective choice over Blackboard and can meet our timeline, please send an email to mserio@berklee.edu.

I'd also appreciate comments on the above if the information I've provided is incorrect. Thanks!

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2: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 06/18/01 07:52 AM
Hi MIchael,
I am in Australia so I would not be able to help for the overall project, but we woul dbe able to do help on specific modules. I am already porting some of the modules required in OpenACES. I am also in the process of collecting info to do a new competitive analysis. Regretably ACES has never appeared on the several comparissons I have found so far including:
  1. Center for Curriculm transfer in Canada.
  2. FutureU an old report (Jan 200) of the most popular systems.
I think that OpenACS has a number of functionalities that those products do not have, particularly those related to:
  1. content management (have a look at this document I wrote on the subject)
  2. workflows,
  3. ecommerce,
  4. costumer resource management (where the customers would be your students)
It is a toolkit, although you can use some of its modules out of the box. Due to its origins it is much stronger in taking the University as a community, but I think it is not as strong (yet) on teaching and learning tools. With regrads to your requirements (beware that I do not have experience using ACES)
1.User authentication via LDAP or kerberos
ACES has an LDAP module. It is now being ported to 4.x
2.IMS/AICC-standard course management
I believe it is not AICC compliant, but in the original requirement document it was already mentioned. I believe this is already a high development priority.
3.framework for supporting a variety of content formats (mostly via browser plug-ins)
I haven't tried it, but I heard that dreamweaver has an adaptor for embedding tcl code. Any other kind of file can be uploaded using forms.
4.virtual classroom
I am not sure what you mean with this. Each course has a news center, file storage, calendar, etc... more than you normally have in a real classroom.
5.assessment 'engine'
I know it is implemented using the Survey engine, but I haven't ried it, and I do not know how good is the instrictor support for grading and so on.
6.community portal
You can be sure that this will be MUCH better than any of the other products.
7.ASP solution (not required but a nice to have)
Since it is open source you can deploy it as you like. You can have one main installation or each department can have their own. You could even offer e-learning solution hosting to other school.
If you are looking for people to host it for you. I believe that there are several companies offering this service (furfly?)
There is a demo running at aces.arsdigita.com. I believ it is a very old version fo what aD installed in Sloan. I understand that all the bugs have been fixed and Sloan is plannning to use it as the main delivery platform next semester.
As I said I am working collecting info on this so I would apreciate help from people with more ACES experience.
cheers
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3: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 06/19/01 02:20 AM
Michael,

I was just looking at the list of IMS/AICC certified products and blackboard doesn't seem to be one of them.
http://www.aicc.org/pages/cert.htm

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4: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 06/19/01 02:43 AM
Blackboard is not listed in the IMS consortium either. In fact reading from their own marketing material, it seems to me that they are it is just an "objective". The exact words are "the Information model used by Blackboard 5 is that defined by the IMS consortium"
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5: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Serio on 06/19/01 02:52 PM
Rafeal,

This is interesting as some of the other major players aren't listed either: eCollege, webCT. Not sure of if it's significance.

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6: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Rafael Calvo on 06/20/01 01:58 AM
Looking at the IMS spec documents I found that staff from Blackboard participated in them. Maybe you need to pay to be certified and blackboard (and the other) did not want to pay...

Webct and blackboard seem to have most of their client in universities. Saba (that is certified) has more corporate clients. I would not be surprised that do not have certification as such a high requirement.

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7: Response to openACES vs Blackboard (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 06/21/01 04:57 AM
A few general points about ACES vs Blackboard:

Regarding IMS "compliance," "conformance," or whatever, you
probably already know that no two vendors implement the same
subset of that spec, so it's very hard to compare two platforms
without getting very specific. Michael, you have wisely specified a
(sensible) subset of the standard that you care about; you might
want to look at it on even more fine-grained a level to see which
calls and APIs are implemented within that subset.

At the moment, ACES does not comply with the IMS. However,
since there has been some work to integrate XML capabilities
into AOLServer, I don't imagine it should be too terribly hard to do
what you want to do. (For those interested in reading more about
the "standard," go to http://www.imsproject.org.)

Regarding the assessment engine, the tool currently in ACES is
survey-simple, which is completely inadequate as a testing tool.
Blackboard's testing tool is, well, adequate, but not great. There
is fairly strong interest within the ACES user community in
porting the survey builder module--an extremely powerful tool
which, as far as I can tell, aD never quite finished. based on the
ASJ article they have written about it, such a tool would blow the
other test engines (including those in Blackboard and WebCT)
out of the water.

Frankly, I think item number four on your list--"virtual
classroom"--is dangerously underspecified and possibly
underweighted. After all, the main point of these systems is to
provide a teaching environment, i.e., a virtual classroom. Just
saying, "Oh yeah, we have one of those" isn't going to tell you
whether teachers and students will actually use it and be happy
with it. You need to break down the features of the virtual
classroom, as well as the potential for easy customization and,
perhaps most importantly, the quality and adaptability of the user
interface.