OpenClass is worth a look, particularly if you are already using Google Apps. However, in my view it doesn't quite live up to the marketing hype from Pearson's about  'going beyond the LMS'. It is not a re-envisioning of the LMS from the ground up, but rather a rebadging of the the old ecollege LMS platform, with some links to Google wrapped around the outside. Once you get into actually setting up your course it largely looks, acts, and feels like every other LMS in the market.

If nothing else it could be an easy way to get your feet wet in the e-Learning space without a big outlay in time and money for the setup. But …. make sure you look at it from all angles – 'free' isn't always 'free'. You need to consider how it might integrate with other systems like e-portfolios, and also how easy it will be to manage course setup, account management, etc. if you were to role it out school wide.

Audrey Walters gives a brief but balanced look at some of the pros and cons of OpenClass –  the comments on this post are also worth a read.

However, I think there are a couple of key things that need to be added to Google + to really make it fly in the Google Apps corporate and education market:

1. Shared circles – in a corporate and education context there needs to be a way of pushing out shared circles across a domain. There is no way that with a staff of over 90 people we want every staff member having to create their own CORE staff circle, and keep it up-to-date with new staff, and removing old ones.

2. A more permanent congregation space than the Hangouts provides - hangouts are great for the one off synchronous gatherings, but there needs to be a place to easily gather for, or review,  ongoing asynchronous discussions around a given topic or interest grouping. This could be as simple as a way of showing the activity stream for a shared topic in addition to the personal circle limits that the activity stream currently has.

Additional note – 23/07/11 – looks like Google are taking care of number 2 at least – http://allthingsd.com/20110721/frid-ge-acquired-by-google-to-build-groups-in-google/

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the usefulness of these two additions in your Google Apps context.

The multi-person video conference facility looks particularly impressive. It will be interesting to look at the potential impact of this on traditional multiparty videoconferencing in the likes of the Virtual Learning Network. I think schools now more than ever need to question ongoing investment in $15 – $20k worth of specialist VC equipment.

http://www.techday.co.nz/itbrief/news/google-launches-cloud-connect-office-beta/18789/5/

What a small team at Waikato have been doing though is using Wikipedia to do the disambiguation and make the connections. As they put it:

“Wikipedia represents a giant multilingual database of concepts and semantic relations”

One part of their project, Wikipedia Miner does the following:

• provides simplified, object-oriented access to Wikipedia’s structure and content.
• measures how terms and concepts in Wikipedia are connected to each other.
• detects and disambiguates Wikipedia topics when they are mentioned in other documents.

There other project Hopara uses this information to create a browse enhanced search interface into Wikipedia.

Not the answer to all the world’s problems, but huge potential here to start making sense of the web without having to pour millions more into dublin core based meta data projects …. maybe.

http://www.core-ed.org/lab/os-design-dev-tools

Working a treat on my single Tek4L blog, so now just need to do a test upgrade on the main CORE blog MU installation.

http://blog.hansdezwart.info/2009/12/10/did-you-know-moodle-2-0-will-online-educa-2009/