Duncan at CAPDM

It's the boring stuff that delivers change - CAPDM OLS25 took place recently in Leeds. Our MD was there and, after an unexpected hiatus, shares his highlights here.

So, I went to Leeds for #OLS25, had a brilliant time, and then got... waylaid somewhat by life events! But I'm back now, and raring to go. My highlights: www.capdm.com/2025/08/15/i...

Likewise! Great chats. Thank you!

Fantastic #OLS2025 coverage from @dresdeb.bsky.social over the past two days. It's been a great conference and I've met some really interesting new people, as well as bumping into some old friends.

Heading down to @universityofleeds.bsky.social today to join #OLS25 starting tomorrow. I know @mdkorosec.bsky.social and the team have been working incredibly hard to put this together. Especially looking forward to @neilmosley.bsky.social, Phil Hill and Glenda Morgan's insights.

Scottish finances drop 92 per cent with nine institutions in red Increased staff and other operating costs blamed for ‘significant deterioration’, with spending on restructuring ballooning

Scottish universities recorded a surplus of more than £17 million in the past academic year, a 92 per cent reduction on the £211 million surplus recorded the year before. @twilliamsthe.bsky.social reports

#AcademicSky #EduSky

This is a *really* good set of tactics for reducing the impact of AI rot in teaching and learning.

The University of Leeds has become the first Russell Group university to officially announce that it is quitting Elon Musk’s social media site X.

It will, however, be alive and well on Bluesky.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Oh the joys of being ill right through the Christmas and New Year break and only feeling properly better the evening before you're back to work! Always seems to be the way... Anyway, happy new year everyone. Let's make 2025 a good year for online learning in higher education!

It would be good if conversations around widening access to #HigherEd in the UK included the genuinely game changing possibilities opened up by online and distance learning, as a new generation of school leavers is not troubled by online or mixed-mode learning. #LTHE #EdTech

I keep reading about "AI"-powered mind map generators, and while I kind of admire the technical achievement it really underlines the mismatch between this sort of #edtech and, you know, actual *learning*. It is in the individual's own creation of a mind map that learning happens. That's the point!

Quite the analogy here 🫢, but there's a parallel between how publishers have come to treat book authors and how #highered institutions have come to treat the authors of their critical #onlinelearning content. In both cases an ongoing relationship can be much more rewarding for both parties.

Indeed! (This post was an attempt at humour. Sorry!)

Draft Dubai Declaration on OER The 3rd UNESCO World OER Congress took place in Dubai last week. The previous two congresses, held in Paris in 2012, and Ljubljana in 2017, resulted in the Paris OER Declaration and the Ljubljana …

Over at the #OpenScot blog, @joecar80.bsky.social and I have been starting to think about the Draft Dubai Declaration on OER and whether it might prompt the education sector in Scotland to reconsider the benefits and affordances of #OER openscot.net/oer/draft-du...

As MD of a company which supplies services to universities I of course agree with this, but it's critical that universities themselves continue to own and run their core functions. In my experience too many unis focus on control of the inconsequential bits and relinquish it over their core business.

By the end of our conversation my contact was really keen to work with us but their bosses had already decided to buy the shiny new tool which promised point-and-click course authoring (with AI assistance, inevitably). I wonder what they will have built in 3 years. Maybe I'll be proved wrong. [5/5]

What struck me was what could have been achieved with £50,000 here, versus what is likely to happen. We've just completed a complex medical programme comprising 42 hours of study, and we charged less than £35,000. Content development was on top, of course, but it shows what can be achieved. [4/5]

It was a classic tools-first purchasing decision. I counselled against it, and in favour of spending the majority of the money on making the content as good as possible, then finding an LMS that met the needs of that content and those learning from it. But you win some you lose some. [3/5]

They had a budget of about £50,000 over three years, I think from a specific grant, and they decided to spend about £35,000 of it on three years of a subscription to a new integrated authoring and delivery environment. Most of the remainder was admin costs with a few thousand for content. [2/5]

Interesting conversation recently with a potential customer in the UK charity sector looking to set up a learning portal. Various chats and demos later they decided to go in a different direction - absolutely fine, of course, our solutions aren't for everyone - but the logic fascinated me. [1/5]

A great example of the limitations of large language models. Remarkable how much additional prompting was needed for both LLMs to actually report back the obvious truth.

Hearing #Moodle is having a Black Friday special where it's completely free to download and deploy all day. Absolutely no charge for a complete, world-class learning management system, plus no ongoing subscription charges, nothing. Incredible deal. 😉

Would be very happy to do you or anyone else a demo - might need to be in the new year though!

So for most of our clients the editing is outsourced to our staff who deal with the XML for them. But some clients do licence the software to use themselves, and we typically set them up with a customised OxygenXML, although we don't embed the tools in the editor as the OU does, they are separate.

Sorry, going to have to disappear for a bit but will catch up later. 👍

So that course and all of its interactive features is built from an XML source plus a few images. Like all our demos it's due an update but it was an attempt to show how Moodle can do clean Canvas-style courses better than Canvas can. (IMHO. 😉) There's a print output there too from the same source.

Spot on Mark, it's Docbook-based at its heart but we can obviously work in other schemas that can cross-translate. (We started out with SGML ISO12083 many moons ago!) Yes, for Moodle we essentially construct a course restore package. There's an example course here: moodle4.demo.capdm.net

We help you build learning at scale - CAPDM CAPDM helps learning providers to build and manage world-class programmes of online and distance learning to future-proof their content and build their own capability in course production to deliver c...

You can read more at capdm.com or please do ask me anything since it's basically my favourite subject 🙂 although I have to disappear shortly to make the tea... 😂

Basically it's an XML-based publishing environment that we've developed over many years to solve the publishing challenges of our HE and publisher clients. At its heart is a batch publishing process that can build, for example, a Moodle course and a professionally typeset book from the same source.

Courseworker - CAPDM Courseworker® by CAPDM is an enterprise-level, cloud-based course production and management environment. It greatly simplifies the production of high-quality professional online courses using “write o...

I don't want to do a hard sell but I'd have to recommend my own company's solutions. 😉 You can read about CAPDM's single-source learning content publishing solutions at courseworker.com

The OU has done great work in this area. It would be remiss of me not to point out that CAPDM's Courseworker publishing system is also a single-source XML-based solution specifically for learning content. We and some of our clients have been using it and its predecessors for nearly 20 years now.