The Future of eLearning in Learning Management Systems

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > The Future of eLearning in Learning Management Systems

Current News

The Future of eLearning in Learning Management Systems

2/3/2004

By Samuel G. Scalise

Learning Management Systems have quickly become an integral part of higher education. More and more, they deliver essential functionality instead of just serving as distance learning mediums or places to post the class syllabus. Our growing dependence on proprietary systems, however, is complicating research and development in eLearning tools-the portion of Learning Management Systems that deliver discipline -specific content and assessment. It's a Catch 22. Without source code access to LMS, it is challenging to develop sophisticated eLearning tools we need unless we also build the administrative management portion of the LMS from scratch, a costly and lonely venture.

Gartner recently released a survey showing pedagogical advantage as a main motivator for institutions to implement LMS. As more institutions come to rely on eLearning tools as an integral part of teaching-as the tools become mission critical-so too d'es this mean affordable, reliable systems are called for. Stability often means proprietary systems, much as has been seen in other areas of software development.

Unfortunately for education, this is a double-edged sword. The tradeoff for proprietary reliability is often a fairly closed system, diminishing innovation. Many proprietary products are not amenable to high-level customization of eLearning tools, yet we are only at the beginning of the explosion in eLearning and our instructors and researchers need the ability to experiment in LMS to tap potential in their fields.

According to Gartner, eighty percent of institutions planning to implement an LMS product in the next year will use a proprietary product. Of the researchers in eLearning who are developing low-level tools that need to be incorporated into LMS, very few will find their institutions supporting an open system with access to low-level code. These researchers often need access to the LMS via source code level Application Programming Interfaces, not just by passing higher-level parameters. They may also need to make more significant changes to the LMS source code itself.

Open source Learning Management Systems provide better access to code, and the increasing license cost for proprietary software is awakening institutional interest in them. A good open source LMS must provide quality code-level APIs and easily modifiable source code for researchers developing new e-learning modules. At the same time, it should provide separate broader course management interfaces with such institutional data as course numbers, class rosters, and announcements.

This may complicate the one-size-fits-all LMS direction of the industry because it appears that the future of eLearning tools will need to be heavily customized for the unique pedagogical needs of different disciplines. This means that, across disciplines, a chunk of LMS will be shared while other parts need to be novel and customized to the discipline -a classic indication for a modular design.

For example, one of the most innovative and potentially powerful areas of current eLearning research and development is dynamic delivery of content (DDC).