De-coupling Course Content Management from the LMS/CMS

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De-coupling Course Content Management from the LMS/CMS

1/9/2008

By S. J. (Sandy) Schaeffer III

My campus is in the latter stages of switching to a new Learning Management System (LMS) after 6+ years on a "first generation" platform. Over the course of these years, our use of web-based learning has gone from essentially zero to thousands of courses and hundreds of faculty participants. Using the built-in content management tools of our first-generation system, these faculty members have developed a rich set of digital content for themselves and their students. After we got past the faculty chorus of "Why are you doing this to me?" and "I'm just now learning the old system and you're making me learn a new one!" we moved on to the task of bringing the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of pieces of learning content into thousands of course development areas on the new system (which also has its own built-in content management tools.)

In addition to forcing the faculty to relearn the basics of 'teaching' within the new system (e-mail, discussions, etc.), we had to also show them how to become content managers, using an entirely new set of tools and techniques. For months leading up to the cutover to the new system, our faculty had to learn how to navigate the new system's content management structure and presentation mechanisms. (Needless to say, during the RFP process, all of this seemed smaller in scope and more straightforward.) We have now come to realize that, while IMS packaging or built-in migration tools sounds great on the surface, they fall well short of perfection in the cold reality of thousands of courses packed with individual pieces of learning content.

The harsh reality is that migrating from one LMS to another left us highly dependent on the ability of competing software vendors to provide us with a smooth and clean process for migrating content on a massive scale. I have painfully learned that this requires a great leap of faith and left us forcing faculty to redo work already done. The odd thing to me is not how loudly faculty have groused about what they have been asked to do, but the relative silence of so many given the scope of work we forced on them.
The metaphor that comes to my mind is that of our breaking into a faculty member's carefully organized classroom, throwing all of his or her material into a moving van, driving it to a new location, and then dumping the materials into a heap in front of the new location... for them to sort and re-organize after we're gone.

We are now wrestling with the question of what we will do in another 5-8 years when it is time to switch again. Will we dump the faculty on the street again with their material? Will our current vendor create a smooth path for eventually leaving them? Will the faculty applaud our selection of a new system for them to teach with? The likely answer to all of these questions is a resounding "No!"

What's wrong with this picture?

The central issue is that generally, when we buy an LMS, we are also buying a content management system.