WebCT, Sakai Project Mavens Pledge Open Standards Harmony

Course management system developer WebCT last week made an announcement underlining its desire to work with the open source education community. WebCT said chief technology officer Chris Vento is a founding member and co-chairman of the IMS Global Learning Consortium's Tools Interoperability Working Group, which aims to make CMS platforms and tools interoperate whether or not they are open source or commercial products.
WebCT said Vento initiated the working group last fall after an appearance with Brad Wheeler, vice chairman of the Sakai Project, an open source organization, at the alt-i-lab learning technology conference. The first project of the working group is to demonstrate compatible software at the next alt-I-lab meeting June 20-22 in Sheffield, UK. The group will demo an open source assessment engine and open source homework tool that will run on commercial and open source platforms. Outside observers are taking a wait-and-see stance on the cooperation pledge. Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher who maintains the edtechpost Wetsite, said, "from where I'm sitting, if there's a way that third party learning tools can interoperate with different learning environments that is not based on proprietary APIs, that seems like a good step forward. If, instead, the Tools Interoperability specification becomes 'Powerlinks for everyone,' well then . praise the lord and pass the hand grenades."

Source: Campus Technology