TechTalks Event
Course Management Systems: Today and Tomorrow�
with guest experts Serge Goldstein, of Princeton University, and Dirk Herr-Hoyman, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
April 19, 2001
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What is a course management system (CMS)? How do you measure the success of a CMS? What is the aim of a CMS? Who wants a course management system? Who doesn't? Why? How important are feature sets? Are there hidden pedagogical agendas underlying the implementation of course management systems? In what direction are CMSs evolving? Are they getting more expensive? Why? How does the CMS interrelate with the larger enterprise management system? What are some of the often unforseen policy implications?
In a matter of years, course management systems have grown from concept to reality. How do they affect your professional life? Many of your peers sent in interesting questions to expert@cren.net and Technology Anchor Howard Straus and Co-Host Judith Boettcher used them to create an informative interview with this event's guest experts about what they know about current and future course management systems.
Guest Experts
Serge
Goldstein is Director of Academic Services at Princeton University,
a major division of that institution's central computing organization
Princeton. He has been with Princeton since 1995. Among other professional
successes, Serge acquired and implemented BlackBoard's CourseInfo
product to host web pages for every course at Princeton University
(950+ course websites). Serge has decades of experience in such
things as systems programming, Web design and document construction,
TCP/IP protocols, and networking infrastructure.
Dirk
Herr-Hoyman is a Project Manager in the Library & Information
Retrieval Applications group of the Division of Information Technology
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With an MS in Computer Science
from Western Michigan University and a BS in Computer Science from
University of New Orleans and Indiana University, Dirk has been
involved professionally in IT since 1980. Since 1992, his focus
has been on the Internet and publishing. Dirk has been involved
with the UW System since 1987, both as faculty and a technologist.
Dirk's current interests are integrated Web applications for instruction
and IMS, metadata and full-text searching, and document markup languages
(especially XML). He's a member of the institution's Web Based Learning
Systems Team.
Co-Hosts
Howard Strauss (above, left), Manager of Academic Applications
at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.
Judith Boettcher is the Executive Director of CREN.
Together, Howard and Mark will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.
Background & Resources
One of the very best ways to get background on an issue is by reviewing the audio, transcript, and resource list from any related Tech Talks which have been previously broadcast and are now fully archived. Quite a few archived Tech Talks are germane to a discussion of course management systems, one of the more pertinent ones in recent months is Campus and Student Portals: Where Are We Today? which featured Michael Handberg, Orin Sreebny, and Pennie S. Turgeon.
In an early exchange of emails about a question sent in ahead of the event, Dirk and Ali Jafari (Indiana University) discussed CMS, portals, SCORM, agent-based smart environments, and other related topics. Some of the URLs they exchanged include: a Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled "Universities Begin Creating a Free, 'Open Source' Course-Management System," the Open Knowledge Initiative, Campus Portals dot-Org, and the Advanced Distributed Learning website.
Also, The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) "addresses what is perceived by many in higher education as a critical need: meaningful, coherent, modular, easy-to-use, web-based environments for assembling, delivering and accessing educational resources and activities. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its primary partner, Stanford University, are lead planners in the OKI Project." And here's a link to info on MIT's Open Courseware Project.
Ali Jafar has also shared with us a draft paper on Conceptualizing Intelligent Agents For Teaching and Learning (pdf).
One prominent author about the costs of IT in higher education is less-than-complimentary about the current state of CMS. In a recent Chronicle interview, he said: "Sure you can get [your course] up in 15 minutes, but after that you can spend the rest of your life trying to get it right." A.W. Bates' new book is Managing Technology Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders.
Converge Magazine often treats issues relating to CMS. Higher Education & Enterprise Learning Management Systems by Burck Smith is a good overview and includes, at its conclusion, a nice list of software and companies with hyperlinks. Another Converge article, focusing on evaluating and selecting CMS, is by Cynthia Sistek-Chandler.
The Technology Source is another online resource with an emphasis on related higher education topics. For example:
- Satisfying Student Expectations: Connected Learning Environments by Rodney L. Everhart
- The Role of Education Faculty in Choosing Web-based Course Management Systems: An Interview with Nancy Cooley by Charles Ansorge and Nancy Cooley
- Developing Courses for Online Delivery: One Strategy by Ann Luck
- Creating a Cost Framework for Instructional Technology by Alton L. Taylor and Frank A. Schmidtlein
- And, Plugging in to Course Evaluation by Keith Hmieleski and Matthew V. Champagne, exemplifies a portion of what one of this event's experts calls "best of breed" module selection, where an institution can pick and choose a separate quiz module, homework module, course evaluation module, and so forth.
At another place on the spectrum is the comprehensive, and current site Online Educational Delivery Applications: A Web Tool for Comparative Analysis, which "is designed to help educators evaluate and select online delivery software." Among other useful things, this site tracks industry mergers, acquisitions, and other changes.
Many online resources address CMS, but this conference shares online a plethora of slide shows relating to the topic, Course Management Software Alone Does Not A Successful Online Program Make. It was held on May 9, 2000 at Virginia Common Wealth University. Finally, EDUCAUSE is always a good source of online information. Its ever-growing Information Resources Library is becoming a valuable online research location. For example, there you could find: Who Owns What? Unbundling Web Course Property Rights by Robert Ubell; Students.edu: Guidelines for Online Education Programs; and much more.
The annual WebdevShare conference at Indiana University shares the program presentations online in an archived fashion. Many are pertinent to this event. Regular attendees have noticed that more and more of the program is on course management each year, from an initial emphasis on the more administrative side of things.
Three email discussion lists are of note.
- WWDEV which also has an annual conference called NAWeb) is for "persons developing courseware that is to be delivered in part or totally over the WWW."
- The University Web Developers List (UWEBD) is a lively and experienced list with more than 1,000 college and university webmasters as subscribers. You can get any question answered on UWEBD - and collect a lot of opinions as well!
- The Worldwide Association for Online Education (WAOE) is more than a list - it's home for a truly international group of professionals working on online education issues.
