Case Study: CMS in Transition: Managing Change

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Case Study: CMS in Transition: Managing Change

10/4/2005

By Joanne Dehoney
Director, eLearning, TELR
Ohio State University
dehoney.1@osu.edu

Rebecca Andre’
eLearning Consultant, TELR
Ohio State University
andre.1@osu.edu

In a relatively short time – three years – e-Learning offerings at The Ohio State University (representing supplemental, blended and fully online courses) grew to include a significant share of total courses. In FY04, 1,643 instructors in 135 departments at the university offered 2,507 courses (3,487 sections) through WebCT. Forty-five thousand students--about 77% of the student body--had a WebCT account in FY 2004. Large first year courses in the departments of biology, statistics, chemistry, and theater depended on WebCT’s course management and testing functions – unaware that WebCT 3.2 was really not designed to manage the high load. Given the importance of robust and scalable courseware to the university’s educational mission, it was time to explore CMS options.

In June 2003, the Office of the CIO determined that the WebCT environment would meet Ohio State’s needs for no more than twelve to eighteen more months. A committee of 42 OSU administrators, systems engineers, and faculty users, representing multiple colleges, formed three groups to review policy, product strategy, and stakeholder CMS perspectives. Four CMS finalists (WebCT, Desire2Learn, Blackboard, and Angel Learning) were thoroughly tested by users from across the university. In winter 2004, the recommendation of the majority of team members was to purchase Desire2Learn (D2L). Ohio State’s eLearning support organization, Technology Enhanced Learning & Research (TELR), was given responsibility for the implementation.

Moving from a reasonably entrenched system to something completely unfamiliar is not a task to be taken lightly, particularly for an institution as large as Ohio State. For TELR the central challenge would be to meet the needs of large numbers of students and instructors with a small number of support personnel. Six months of planning went into the D2L implementation effort before TELR even finalized the licensing agreement. Planning covered every detail of the project from an 18-month projected calendar of communications, to service level agreements with internal partners such as the Help Desk, to user support.

We are currently about half-way through the implementation with many significant milestones behind us. Overall, the change has been reasonably trouble-free, especially from the viewpoint of faculty and students. Our complete project assessment will not take place for another eight months, but interim results suggest that three aspects of the implementation—attention to branding and visual identity, diverse and modular instructor support, and prioritizing the development of bridging applications—have helped us manage change.