I had the pleasure of spending the day getting up to date on the Synergic3 project, a joint effort between the National Research Council of Canada, l’Université de Moncton and Desire2Learn. The research agenda covers areas that may be of interest to those working with learning technologies:
DDRM – Distributed Digital Rights Management
MDX – Automated Metadata Extraction
LD Accelerators – Learning Design (and other) Accelerators
WWF – Weak Workflows
Some papers are publicly available here.
This applied research project has already resulted in commercial software:
The new Desire2Learn Instructional Design Wizard™ and Desire2Learn Course Builder™ are complementary to the existing content management tools, and are the result of substantial investment and years of intensive R&D involving clients, strategic research partners, including National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and Université de Moncton, along with many members of the Desire2Learn R&D group. For more information about this research partnership, please see www.synergic3.com.
I have watched this project evolve since 2004 – from idea to business model to proofs-of-concept & prototypes, and now to enterprise software. It has been most interesting and very educational.
I find that AIF funded projects tend to use brute force, basically just throw a ton of cash and expect results.
6 years is a long time in IT years. And some of the research items such as DDRM and Automated Metadata Extraction were already being developped before 2004. These sound like items from EduSource and Mosaic Technologies projects.
Will this be another case of “too little, too late”.
I think that IRAP projects are a better use of funds than the AIF projects. You can get a lot done for $50,000 in a well managed NRC-IRAP project.
AIF funds could have been more effective had they been used to encourage the development of an Atlantic Canada company or companies.
With research, smaller often means better.
Well atleast the monies didn’t go to blackboard..lol
The fact that some of the research is being commercialized, in v 9.0 of D2L’s product, is an indicator that there is a market for this work.
There is a market for just about anything out there. If development is highly subsidized you can even offer the product at artificially low cost.
The fact that there is a market doesn’t mean we are making good use of research dollars available for Atlantic Canada.
Research funds are getting scarce and the prediction for next year is less. At one point we will have to make better use of resources.