Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Learning Landscapes
Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point
12/28/2006
Wisconsin: Getting the CMS to Work Better
Kathy Christoph directs the Department of Academic Technology in the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) at the University of Wisconsin system, which encompasses 13 fouryear and 13 two-year institutions. Up until 2003, all 26 schools were running either Blackboard or WebCT. Four or five years ago, long before the two companies merged, each announced it would be moving to an enterprise edition, “and the license cost would roughly quadruple,” recalls Christoph. “So, we were faced with two systems with drastically increased license costs. We decided it would be a good time for us to look at the marketplace.”
UW opted to go with Desire2Learn, a little-known vendor at the time. “The considerations were both on the functional (teacher) side and on the technical side,” recalls Christoph. But she can’t deny that being a big customer of a small vendor was a heady experience; in the early days, the company was highly responsive to requests, albeit “in a rather ad hoc way,” she admits. As Desire2Learn has grown and taken on more customers, “they’ve moved to a more systematic method for taking in customer requests; performing analyses and then responding,” she says.
Today, a dedicated group of individuals, representing “about half the institutions” at UW, work continuously on requests for software updates, creating a feature request list. In addition, UW participates in a Desire2Learn group called LISAB—Large Institution/System Advisory Board—which compiles requests into a composite request, and prioritizes the list. In fact, says Christoph, “Just last week we delivered seven very highpriority requests to the company, from the large customers.” Although many of the requests focus on making the existing system work better (rather than adding new functionality to it), Christoph d'es acknowledge the product innovations that are continually introduced by the company. Recent examples include a learning object repository (to store and share content across courses and schools) and ePortfolio functionality.
Like MIT’s Long, Christoph sees a best-of-breed future ahead for CMS. Although a single CMS system is “great for managing courses,” and has “proven to be essential,” the future could look very different, she says. The ePortfolio concept speaks to students’ learning throughout their university careers and beyond, she points out, but adds, “I don’t know that we want everything all tied up in any one system; that’s what we’re trying to get to with these specifications and open source. I’m looking forward to being able to pick a quiz engine from one place and a synchronize tool from another—and maybe even use them through our portal.”
Stanford has written 25 percent of the code
in Sakai. That means that we’ve gotten four
times more software than we’ve written.
—Lois Brooks, Stanford University
What’s Next for CMS?
According to Eduventures Senior Analyst Catherine Burdt, the CMS has become “the hub of a lot of technologies.” It has shifted from a place to hang a syllabus and links to the internet, she says, “to the place you go to access the library and your assignments, take an online quiz, or deliver your papers so that they’re digitally time-stamped into a drop box.” But once you get beyond required functionality (such as the ability to safely and securely share material and interoperate with other systems), the CMS becomes “a more personal exercise for each school,” maintains Stanford’s Brooks.
A case in point, she notes: At Stanford, where almost all undergraduates reside on campus, the CMS is used as a supplement for face-to-face meeting time. Remediation is handled in the one-on-one meetings with instructors. But right down the road, Foothill College (CA) has a large distance education program that serves dozens of other California colleges, so it has added an extra component to its CMS: When the system captures upload content or builds courses online, it creates a consistent look and feel for the courses for each school. That’s important, says Brooks, because it allows the students who aren’t physically attending class at an institution to have the same experience their fellow on-site students are having. The system also includes functionality for remediation so that instructors don’t have to be face-to-face with students, to be able to see if the students have done their homework.
The CMS also is becoming a strong branding mechanism—helping students to know they’re part of their school, wherever they go. Says MIT’s Long: “Students can go from MIT to Portugal, log in to the familiar environment, and have access to the all the materials they would have had at MIT.” The environment of a course shell, plus collaboration tools associated with wikis or other functionality, will forge the connection, he explains. Long has written about the value of “mass participation” enabled by functionality such as RSS (which helps users create “customized digests”), or the ability to share information (say, photos on sites such as Flickr.com, or bookmarks on sites such as del.icio.us), “which allows for particular perspectives of individuals to be shared in ways that weren’t possible before.” But he also sees the downside: becoming engaged by a production process or mechanism—in the absence of any learning value.
Yet the CMS, he says, provides a means by which to “interact with intellectually rigorous material that somebody has a point of view around. It’s not just presenting a random set of things, but a structured, sequenced, thoughtful integration of content and ideas that build on one another, toward making certain points or getting certain concepts through.” It isn’t that Web 2.0 innovations don’t have value, he points out; it’s just that faculty need to impart value through the tools of the CMS.
“For example,” he explains, “on Flickr, you can search for X-rays or radiographs. Some people have used the Flickr feature of being able to highlight an area of a picture and add annotation. So, mousing over an image of a lung X-ray brings up the comment, ‘Here’s what a healthy piece of lung looks like,’ or ‘This is what a lung with emphysema looks like.’ The highlight function is being used as a means to add a particular teaching point, and they’re putting it on Flickr because it’s a great distribution vehicle.” Yet, Long can’t help pointing out the importance of the human hand in such efforts. After all, ‘Some person has to impose and apply that intellectual work to take an object and turn it into a meaningful teaching tool.”
WEBEXTRA :: A graduate’s view of the course management system: Click here.
Susan D. Heid writes about organizational
transformation for a number of
publications in various sectors.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
