Summertime Planning

I am impressed by how many educators have signed up for haiku LMS in April and May. One would think that teachers are busy dealing with the yearend push and summer vacation plans. I’m sure there is a lot of that going on; but in the midst of all that many of you are creating a new classroom website for the fall. Now THAT’s planning ahead.

I have talked about our plans to roll out haiku LMS v2.0 some already. But since so many educators are already getting ready for next year it seems appropriate to give you a heads up on what to expect when you login to your myhaikuclass.com site this summer or fall.

I won’t force you to read through the list of new features here. But I do want to explain the gist of our version two upgrades. And you can take a look at the details by visiting the new list of upcoming features on our website. As you know, the haiku LMS of today provides one of the fastest and easiest ways available for you to create and maintain a classroom website. The drag & drop CMS, the easy way we’ve organized content blocks, the calendar that seems to know what you want to do before you do it; even the integration with Flickr, YouTube, Google Video and ODEO make it not only easy and fast, but fun to maintain your website(s).

But of course we never planned to stop there. As the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling illustrates, innovation in our industry may be incremental but it must be encouraged and supported by the law. We take innovation seriously; as our online software makes clear. And the LMS in the name haiku LMS is not there by accident. Although we went to market with the tools that encourage educators to simply post content… we have from the beginning wanted to innovate the learning management system experience for everyone.

Some of our users volunteered as User Testers for haiku LMS v2.0. Many of them have used online Discussions, or a Gradebook, etc. for years. We do User Testing in order to make certain that haiku LMS fulfills our commitment to HARMONY, SIMPLICITY and COMMUNITY. And we certainly make changes based on feedback. But along the way I can’t help but be a little proud when our testers tell us how much they appreciate our innovative approach to learning management. Sure, we have a significant advantage by starting from scratch when most LMS products use technology that is “old” in a technology sense. But I think it is more than a technology issue. Developing software is, for us, a means to an end. What we are really after is a better education for students and a better teaching experience for educators.

Take a look at our upcoming features and watch for an announcement this summer when haiku LMS v2.0 launches. As always, I welcome your feedback. In the meantime, best wishes for a fruitful, stress free summer. Cheers!

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Comment by Steve Hargadon on May 17, 2007 at 1:29pm: Allen:

For me, this crosses he line a little with regard to vendor promotion on Classroom 2.0. I think this post would be reasonable if made through your LMS site to those who signed up, but here it's just a sales pitch. I'm interested in others' feedback, especially because we want to create an ability for vendors to contribute in constructive ways to the dialog--but posts like these, I think, will just turn people off from reading their feeds from Classroom 2.0.

Other thoughts?

Comment by Allen on May 17, 2007 at 1:33pm: Steve,

I appreciate your comments. I posted this after reading several forum comments from people looking for information about Web 2.0 applications. I'll certainly understand if you decided to remove the post. I don't want to cross the line. Thanks for your comment.

Comment by Steve Hargadon on May 17, 2007 at 1:35pm: I appreciate that you made it a blog post, and not a forum post. And I'm not sure that my reaction will be the consensus--so, if you're willing, I'd like to leave the post up and see how others respond.

Thanks,

Steve

Comment by Jason Hando on June 9, 2007 at 1:33am: Steve,

Glad you are tackling this issue head-on and with full transparency to the classroom 2.0 community.

I know it is hard to police, but I think that nobody should be allowed to post a marketing message about a product or service that they receive financial profits from. If this LMS is a free, open source, product then as an educator I would like the creators/inventors to share what their product does [briefly, read below]. But if it is a commercial product then we open the floodgates to SPAM.

The only other potentially objectionable aspect to the original post is the lengthy pitch - why couldn't he have simply said, "check out this product, described here [link]"? It is bordering on SPAM if you ask me.

Cheers,
Jason

Comment by Allen on June 11, 2007 at 8:18am: I hope all those commenting and those who haven't will check out haiku LMS. This is a FREE Web 2.0 service.

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