And for what it’s worth, I agree with you (and with Andre’s point in his comment above), that when it comes to questions of openness and closed content, it is as much a question of policy as technology. I also know that archiving courses is fraught with complexity. (It must be even more difficult to make materials available, because I know we archive online courses in our LMS for a number of years for audit purposes, but obviously in a way that is not accessible to users).

That said, I guess that’s why I think it is preferable to put materials in open, relatively lightweight content management frameworks whenever possible – as you know, it’s the security and multi-role access (yes, usually specified as a requirement by the users) that makes things complicated.

I’m heartened to know that you are taking these thorny questions of openness into account in your development process. Feel free to drop by the Abject any time, Greg.

Andre Malan’s problem, that you describe in your post, is not uncommon. It might interest you to know that there’s nothing in the Blackboard Learn product that requires a course to be inaccessible to a student after it is completed. It’s quite simple for an institution to continue to provide access to courses, and in fact that’s the default behavior of the product!

Institutions have to take some action (e.g. disable/remove/archive the course site, disable/remove the user account) for the user to no longer have access to the course. However, most institutions implement policies of that nature. There are many reasons for that, but the most prevalent is rather pragmatic: in a university-managed system, it’s expensive and resource-consuming (from disk, database, and performance perspectives) to keep every course site for every section ever offered live and available in perpetuity. So most institutions implement some process where completed courses are archived offline after x amount of time.

Anyway, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for change here — both in institutional policy, in the scenarios that our product supports (or could support), and in how faculty select and make available educational resources. That’s why I saved a link to your post in my notebook — it’s a story worth keeping in mind as we develop future versions.

– Greg Ritter (Director, Product Management, Blackboard Learn)

Careful Andre. You’re getting dangerously close to describing an approach that would actually support real life-long learning.

I think the “experience with” part is something that is not often thought about and that neutralizes a lot of the force behind “But everyone else, even the students at other schools, will have access to the same resources!” I worked with those particular resources for 4-8 months, giving me a much greater ability to utilize them than anybody from a different school.

Jim – I’ll leave the bashing to the professionals. Your reaction to the term ‘value-added’ prods me to confess that I very nearly wrote about the competitive advantage of openness as offering a “superior product”… It was a horrifying moment, almost made me trash the whole post. So thinking in this way is something of dangerous game for me, and I figure it’s only a matter of time before I step on a landmine.

Well, the abject shows the way, and I think you get at the crux of the matter via the inimitable Andre Malan—how can having access to the work you have done and the resources you have been “given” not be seen as a basic right of one’s education and part of the “value” one pay’s for. (Value is in quotes because whenever I say that word I think of “value added” and want to puke on my keyboard.) Your frame for this is excellent, and it disembodies thi argument from a technology and returns the onus to administration, professors, and students everywhere, who, I would argue, viz–viz the closed systemic logic of most LMSs have been able to ignore this simple idea of respect and access in the name of security and some notion of proprietary knowledge. And I think that is where the real issue leads to, what does it mean to make learning and sharing a proprietary act when it can be accomplished through cast networks for the sweat of one’s brow (which isn’t free, but ain’t $100,000 either—this is in US according the the cost of undergraduate costs).

Big ideas that would drastically change the way things are done in Blackboard. Tear a hole in the walled garden’s wall, aka super guest access This implies that courses need simple URLs, e.g. blackboard.example…….