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The Interactive Campus: Administrative and Course Management System Vendors Take Up the Challenge
6/3/2002
Administrative and Course Management System
Vendors Take Up the Challenge
Emerging media and highly interactive technologies raise
the bar for the development efforts vendors must make to remain current in a
growing eLearning environment. Possibilities for improved user interaction with
both academic information and administrative data, plus expectations for more
integrated systems, contribute to a blurring of the lines between administrative
and course management systems. Several types of companies involved with
eLearning products or infrastructure work in the eLearning space, and product
categories are not as clear-cut as they once were.
The eLearning
landscape is changing in response to interest in portals, Web-based or
Web-enabled systems, and a gradual but general evolution in academic
institutions towards life-long learning. What kinds of interactive technologies
interest vendors most, and what technology directions and market influences are
they considering as they plan for the future? To find out, Syllabus polled
technology leaders at key companies.
Blackboard chairman Matthew Pittinsky says, "The biggest
challenge when looking into the future is discerning between interesting
technologies that are eye candy, and those that are really going to impact
student outcomes." Pittinsky cites three defining technology directions that
will impact his company's future development: immersion, standards, and
specialization.
Immersion technologies will be unlike anything we now
commonly use for teaching and learning. The PowerPoint presentations and
streaming video of today are just the tip of the iceberg of interactive
learning, Pittinsky explains. Virtual biology labs and avatars are
representative of the kinds of immersion technology we can expect to use in the
future, given increased bandwidth. And the online videogame industry is
pioneering applications that could eventually be used to make education at a
distance more socially powerful.
Standards will continue to pave the way
for collaboration and sharing of content, so that institutions can discover and
incorporate the best, high-end learning materials from others into their
learning management systems. Standards will also influence how programs will be
formed across institutions and the ways in which faculty collaborate. Learners
will bring portable data with them as they move among programs and institutions.
Learner profiles will contain data about their educational history and learning
preferences, allowing for personalization of course materials and programs—this
will put the learner in charge of the educational process.
Specialization
will create discipline-based tools and pedagogical approaches, while
institutions standardize on one course management system that will offer
gradebooks, discussion boards, and other more generalized tools. Once a standard
course management system has been installed, institutions will license or build
a wide variety of additions that tailor a particular eLearning environment to
the instructional approach that makes the most sense for the professor and the
subject area. Pittinsky points to Blackboard's Building Blocks initiative, which
includes open APIs and a free SDK that has been put into use by institutions
such as Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon to develop extensions to
Blackboard.
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