History of Virtual Learning Environments - 2000s - 2000

2000

• January, 2000: CourseNotes.com, founded by entrepreneur, and then UT student, Alan Blake, launches in early 2000, with dozens of classes at the University of Texas at Austin. The service was marketed since the summer of 1999, and provides comprehensive professor web sites, including virtually all features offered by Blackboard (i.e., course documents, calendaring, grades, quizzes & surveys, announcements, etc.). The company was later renamed ClassMap and operational until early 2001.
• January 2000: Lamp and Goodwin of Deakin University publish "Using Computer Mediated Communications to Enhance the Teaching of Team Based Project Management" (conference presentation copyright 1999), an evaluation of a trial of FirstClass to teach project management at Deakin in 1998–99. It contains the memorable observation "There were some comments about features which students believed that FirstClass didn't have (eg email, chat sessions on demand) when, in fact, they were available facilities..."University Note also that there are several specifications of pre-2000 versions of FirstClass available (usually as PDF files at university sites) on the web.
• January 2000:, which has been developed at University of Cologne since 1997, has become open source software under the GPL (first release: ILIAS 1.6). Together with developers from other universities in Northrhine-Westfalia the ILIAS team founded the CampusSource initiative to promote the development of open source LMS and other software for teaching at universities.
• April 2000: ePath Learning, established in 1999, launches the first online LMS, ePath Learning ASAP, making it affordable for businesses to create and manage online learning and training. Their vision is to make online learning accessible to everyone. (http://www.epathlearning.com/index.php/epath-about-us/history.html).
• May, 2000: ArsDigita, a Boston Massachusetts based start-up who developed the Arsdigita Community System since their inception in 1997 deploys Caltech Portals at my.caltech.edu

Later that year in October 2000, deploy the ArsDigita Community Education System (ACES) at MIT Sloan School. The system is called Sloanspace. The ArsDigita Community System as well as ACES in the next few years grow to OpenACS and .LRN

• May 1, 2000: Randy Graebner's master's thesis from MIT is published, Online Education Through Shared Resources.
• Mid June, Reda Athanasios, President of Convene International leaves the company to form Learning Technology Partners (which later buys Convene). Now that the Virtual classroom idea is well established, what is needed next is to build all the other supporting technologies to turn the Virtual Classroom to a Virtual Campus with SMS and e-commerce support, he claims. Learning Technology Partners seeks to build technologies to support the Virtual Classroom.
• June 30, 2000: Blackboard Inc. file a patent application relating to "Internet-based education support systems and methods". An international patent application (WO application 0101372 ) is filed on the same date. The applications claim priority from a provisional patent application filed June 30, 1999. A US patent is granted in 2006 (See below) and patent applications in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Australia are also pursued from the WO application.
• Blackboard Inc. acquires MadDuck Technologies LLC, developers of "Web Course in a Box".
• ETUDES 2.5 is demonstrated in March at TechEd 2000 in Palm Springs, California. At or prior to this release, ETUDES included a number of features of VLEs, including course and role based access via login, electronic assignment submission, online assessment, and synchronous and asynchronous communications. The system is in use by a number of community colleges in California, including Foothill, Miracosta, and Las Positas.
• "The Political Economy of Online Education" (Onrain Kyouiku no Seijikeizaigaku) by Kimura Tadamasa was published in May, with the rubric "this book examines the role of secondary education in the new information society, from a variety of perspectivies – sociology, psychology, and human resource management – using concrete examples of online education in educational environments." ISBN 4-7571-4017-7. NTT publishing. Tokyo. (Japanese).
• The MIT Sloan School of Management launches the first production version of ACES 3.4 with a pilot of 8 Fall 2000 classes.
• Northern Virginia Community College's Extended Learning Institute begins using Blackboard after having previously used a variety of other products for Internet-based course delivery, including Lotus Notes (1995), FirstClass (1996–1999), Serf (1997–1999), and Allaire Forums (1999ff.) for its engineering degree program and other courses ; NVCC also used WebBoard (1999) and Web Course in a Box (1998), prior to beginning its use of Blackboard.
• In fall 2000 the open source LMS OLAT developed at University of Zurich won the MeDiDa-Prix for its paedagogical concept. It was optimized to support a blended learning concept.
• In May 2000, HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for (universities in) England, commissions a comparative analysis of the main VLEs, as part of a series of studies for the imminent UK e-University. Over 40 specially-created vendor submissions mostly delivered by 17 June 2000 are analysed by a team led by Paul Bacsich. A companion study analsyed what were then called Learning Administration Systems, in a team comprising Christopher Dean, Oleg Liber, Sandy Britain and Bill Olivier. Final reports were delivered in September 2000.
• Webster & Associates / Infosentials Ltd launches learningfast.com in first half of year. Complete course based assessment, with separate user and administrator logins. Users, on login, are provided with a list of courses that matches their subscription level. Subsequently sold to Monash University.
• In July, 2000, CyberLearning Labs, Inc. is founded. Its primary product, the ANGEL Learning Management System (LMS) evolved from research at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The company will later change its name to ANGEL Learning, Inc.
• A Manual for Students in Web-Based Courses: What do you do now that they have gone to the Web? was published online by Kent Norman at the University of Maryland, College Park, Laboratory for Automation Psychology.
• The Claroline project was initiated in 2000 at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) by Thomas De Praetere and was financially supported by the Louvain Foundation. Developed from teachers to teachers, Claroline is built over sound paedagogical principles allowing a large variety of paedagogical setup including widening of traditional classroom and online collaborative learning.