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Learning Landscapes
Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point
12/28/2006
Long recognized as a magnet for new concepts and idea-sharing, the CMS as we’ve known it teeters on a precipice as institutions reassess need and warily eye the pitfalls that may lie ahead.
It’s near-impossible to think about course management systems
(CMS) without thinking about innovation, collaboration, and the
sharing of ideas across institutions and even from vendor to vendor. Yet,
“the next step” in CMS now means distinctly different things to various
colleges and universities as, going forward, they consider their landscapes
of learning, and requisites that didn’t even exist five years ago. What’s
more, recent events in the CMS community—open source efforts and an ugly
patent infringement suit—have further colored CMS decision-making on
campuses and the striving for innovation in course management.
Johns Hopkins: Integration as Innovation
As of 2008, every time students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s (MD) Schools of Engineering and Arts & Sciences log in to their WebCT systems, they’ll get a pop-up screen telling them they’re working on unlicensed software—unless the team at the school’s Center for Educational Resources (CER) succeeds in its mission of finding a replacement course management system. In fall 2005, WebCT announced that it was chucking version 4.3 of its software; in spring 2006, after Blackboard finalized its purchase of WebCT, the company confirmed its intention, setting the deadline to January 2008. So, Johns Hopkins has found itself in the position that many campuses find themselves in: After making do with the same CMS for as long as possible, it’s now time to move on. But “moving on” can be a time-consuming and complex process, and as CER Director Candice Dalrymple points out, “I’m not sure if [Blackboard/]WebCT realizes how many of its users on this old legacy system—that many of us have clung to—will not be able to work within that time frame and keep our faculty happy. I’m hoping we can get an adjustment of at least a semester.”
In the meantime, CER has initiated an evaluation process to determine what CMS platform it should move to next. Although the Center serves two schools at JHU, both of which are using WebCT, the search will now involve all other divisions in the school, some of which are working on Blackboard, others on homegrown systems. The good news? Though the search for a new platform is driven by the need to meet an externally-imposed deadline, CER officials now see this as an opportunity to bring the entire university into one CMS. They don’t see the need to build every possible innovation directly into the CMS, however—as long as the platform allows for integration of external programs. As an example, CER Assistant Director Mike Reese cites the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID), freely available from James Madison University (VA), for managing digital images. “Our students have been able to get to those visual resources through their WebCT course site, even though those resources are not built into the current version of the software we’re using.” That kind of integration, or bundling, he says, is what he views as being the most innovative aspect of the current crop of CMS offerings.
Dalrymple seconds that assessment. “We are very interested in tools that accommodate the research and scholarship function of both faculty and students and make it possible for them to merge their efforts easily, to cross boundaries in terms of what they store. The very fact that you can get content into and out of environments that are accommodating to one another is a definition of innovation.”
Stanford: Innovating Through Open Source
Stanford University’s (CA) primary and proprietary CMS, CourseWork, has been in use there since 1997 or ’98, with upgrades in the intervening years, according to Lois Brooks, director of academic computing. Still, the school has recognized the need to upgrade and replace its system. “People have new wants and needs,” says Brooks, but adds that continuing to rebuild has become “cost prohibitive.”
Yet, in discussions with other colleges facing the same problem, a new plan came up. Along with three other schools (Indiana University, MIT, and the University of Michigan), Stanford founded Sakai, the community source project to build an online collaboration and learning environment. As Brooks explains, one of the goals of Sakai was not only to build software “we could all use,” but to build a program that “would encourage other people in the community to develop other tools for it as well, so we could all get more out than we put in.”
Stanford is currently in a pilot with Sakai, using it in a small number of courses and working to add special functions or features the school has deemed important. The intent is to move off CourseWork completely and onto Sakai by the end of the current academic year (though the school may brand the system as CourseWork 5.0).
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