brought to you by the letter L
Learning Management Systems are not currently fully within my purview, but I have recently been included in discussions about them. So, I have been trying to read up on the enterprise LMS space. Of course we all know that Blackboard recently acquired Angel. We have also read a bit about the reactions to that acquisition. We currently use Blackboard and are considering upgrades and deployment across our enterprise. We are also re-evaluating our requirements and various solutions (Blackboard, Sakai, etc.).
My current thinking has been wonderfully informed by a recent white paper by Oracle’s Academic Enterprise Solutions group. This is a great paper and I recommend checking it out. We run Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, so we are very interested in Oracle’s LMS strategy as we will be required to integrate any enterprise LMS we use with our Campus Solutions environment.
Michael Feldstein’s blog is a great resource if you are thinking about LMS. He had a very good post recently about the Blackboard/Angel thing. He regularly mentions IMS standards, which (I am lately learning) are an important consideration.
Just as important to us is how and where elements of an enterprise LMS are deployed. We will be paying close attention to issues around LMS integration within enterprise portals/web sites at the upcoming Portal 2009 conference at Gettysburg College. This is always an excellent conference — this year’s keynote is EDUCAUSE Vice President Richard Katz.
We will soon see where we land and soon after that see where we go from there.
3 Comments
Educause recently posted a brief (http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutPerso/171521) about Personal Learning Environments that embraces the broader view of LMS that you discuss in your post. A great line from the paper “PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.”
At the college I work at we Usability-tested 4 students to compare Angel, Blackboard, Moodle and eCollege. Students prefer Moodle to other LMS’s. So for colleges that are looking to decide what alternative LMS to use, after the Blackboard-Angel acquisition, our data show students are likely to recommend and feel more comfortable with Moodle.
Thanks for reading and commenting Julia.
Those are interesting results. I’ve not looked at Moodle in a while but I will now based on your comment. We’ve looked a bit at the new version of Sakai, did you consider that at all?
It’s a shifting world out there.