Course Management Systems: A Tipping Point
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).
Innovative features, says Brooks,
come from a variety of sources—generally,
via the staff working with faculty
and students. One current development
effort, question pooling, would allow a
group of instructors to access a large
pool of test questions. A faculty member
could either select the questions or have the system select a number of
questions from the pool, so that students
are presented with a random set. “That
[idea] came from the instructors understanding
that they share tests back and
forth,” says Brooks.
Typically, as Brooks’ team receives
requests, gets ideas, or must modify the
system to address changes in legal
requirements, it’ll go through a requirements
analysis, then do prototyping to
“flesh out the ideas,” she says, “to mimic
the behavior in a simple way before we
build something big and complex.”
Working with Sakai required a similar
approach—though “it’s a little more
complex and interesting,” Brooks says.
A couple of years ago, for example, the
Stanford team worked with a group
from Indiana University to develop testing
and quizzing functionality. Even
though IU is a much larger university,
the two schools came together and
developed a common set of needs
requirements. The meetings, she says,
became “really interesting because staff
on both sides got a lot of new ideas for
things they could try; new functionality
within the system. There was a lot of
give-and-take about what the system
could do, but also regarding screen
design and user friendliness (and how to
build it in), with both sides sharing concepts
and coming away with new ideas.”
The effort resulted, she concludes, in
“staff development as well as a more
comprehensive system. When we were
done, we all got more than we would
have gotten separately.” And that, she
explains, is why participation in Sakai
has been so rewarding. “Stanford has
written 25 percent of the code in Sakai.
That means that we’ve gotten four times
more software than we’ve written.”
MIT: The Best CMS Is No CMS
Phil Long, senior strategist for the Academic
Computing Enterprise at MIT,
recounts his school’s long and storied
history in developing technologies that
have contributed to course management
and collaborative learning. Among the
major initiatives: iCampus—the collaboration between MIT
and Microsoft Research that funds research by
MIT faculty in the area of educational
technology—and OpenCourseWare, which publishes
course content from MIT.
iCampus, says Long, is developing
tools that could be “called” from a CMS.
In this sense, he says, the CMS presents
the “surrounding infrastructure”—the
place that “represents the location a student
might go to for Chemistry 101.” But
in the course of working with Chemistry
101, he explains, there might be a lab the
student has to complete. “In that context,
she might connect to the iCampus online
remote lab for semiconductor testing and,
using the iCampus iLabs system, invoke
and conduct the experiment online via her
browser. Then she’d come to her course
management environment to find out
about the day’s events associated with the
course, to scan notices, and to submit her
iLabs experiment work to the teacher.”
Long sees the link between course
infrastructure and course content as a
force for pushing innovation in course
management systems. “Not to disparage
them, but the people building a CMS
probably would have no idea how to build
a [chemical engineering] experiment, and
they shouldn’t be expected to,” he says.
“But if they build the CMS properly, they
should be able to present a good interface
that says to the tool developer with a specific
tool in mind, ‘This is how we would
connect to you. And here’s the kind of
information you need to present back to
me, so we can work together.’”
But Long maintains that the ultimate
innovation for CMS is its absence altogether.
He envisions a future where there
is a series of core services that work
together but are not necessarily wrapped
into a single software program. “Those
core services will provide an infrastructure
on which to build and attach very specific
software tools for specific disciplines
and problems. I think we’re moving in
that direction, but we’re not there yet.” He
explains his thinking: “Any major course
management system—Blackboard, Sakai,
WebCT—is presented as a big package.
You get it and you install it. At the back
end, you have a big set of computers that
runs the databases, manages the [background
operations], etc. And when you
connect to it, you have to be authenticated
via the authorization model that the
particular package employs. That’s the
way we currently build things. But we’re
starting to move toward building these
things in a way that separates those functions
so they can evolve and develop semiautonomously.
For example, my campus
uses the Kerberos authorization system,
and we would like to evolve the development
of Kerberos without having to reimplement
it within every single software
package that we use.”
Long is speaking about the move
toward service-oriented architecture and
implementing best-of-breed functionality.
Ultimately, he says, “those services
should be provided separately, so that
you use the best grouping of them that
makes sense for your particular need.”
He sees a scenario in the course management environment in which “people
can build, add, and aggregate tools independently
for a collection of the functions
that, at the moment, are thought to
be the best combination of things you
see in this environment.”
THE DAY THE INNOVATION DIED?
Could CMS innovation be stalled by Blackboard’s
patent and its patent infringement suit?
When Blackboard announced
patent #6,988,138 on July 26, 2006—and then on the
same day sued Desire2Learn for
infringing on its patent—the company became for many
what one observer called the “Darth Vader” of the CMS
community. In the intervening months, bloggers, magazine
columnists, and organizations have weighed in with
opinions, almost uniformly negative. Both Sakai and Educause have issued public statements against the patent and
the lawsuit. The patent suit also has inspired Boycott-
Blackboard.org, which features an informal petition, and
was a concept put forth by a group of educators who
have come to know each other in the Second Life virtual world. BoycottBlackboard’s
developer Chris Hambly (director of a distance learning
school for music production solutions) says that because
learning management systems have been around for so
many years in various forms, practitioners find the Blackboard
patent “plainly wrong.”
Not surprisingly, the entry for “history of virtual learning
environment” on Wikipedia has
gone into update overdrive, with numerous contributors
methodically building a detailed history of the evolution
of CMS-type technology in order to prove “prior art,” and
thereby dispute the validity of Blackboard’s patent.
And on CALIopolis, John
Mayer (executive director of the Center for Computer-
Assisted Legal Instruction) has posted
audio interviews with legal experts discussing the patent
and the suit. Professor Vincent Chiapetta of Willamette
University (OR) College of Law cautioned against vilifying
Blackboard (“Patent holders aren’t bad guys…”).
Eduventures Senior Analyst
Catherine Burdt views the patent as a strategic move,
claiming she has “seen where [patents are] almost used
as trading cards, in terms of one company holding a
patent for some type of algorithm and another company
holding another patent for another algorithm, so you
need each other.”
Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen (left) claims that much of
the fear that this will be just the first of many lawsuits, is
misguided. “It would make no sense for us, from a
strategic or financial perspective, to sue the colleges and
universities that make up the majority of our clients,” he
maintains. “It’s hard to calm irrational fear, but…this is
not part of some larger overall plan. We’re aware of the
Desire2Learn technology. We believe they are infringing
on our patent and we are seeking a reasonable royalty
because we believe they’re taking advantage of the technology
that we spent a lot of money to develop.”
Yet, part of the growing alienation against Blackboard
may revolve around the very idea of getting
patents. Still, Chasen insists, “Institutions themselves are some of the biggest patent holders, right?” pointing
to the fact that some institutions hold “huge” patent
portfolios. “It’s something you’ve got to be open about
and discuss,” he says.
Other vendors fear being the next target. Says Angel
Learning’s Chief Products Offi-
cer Ray Henderson, “Desire2Learn was the most vulnerable
and thus the first victim. The usual
strategy on these things is to try to succeed
against the weakest member and use
that momentum to go against the next
weakest member.” He fears that as a result
of the suit, the free exchange of ideas that
g'es on in higher ed will be lost. “If people
begin to believe that the information they
offer…could become patented by another
company that listened to it and thought
that was a good idea, it could sure dry up the standards
bodies very quickly.” Those sentiments are ech'ed by
Desire2Learn CEO John Baker, even though he is
adamant that the suit hasn’t slowed the company’s CMS
innovation. “But it may force us to reevaluate our willingness
to share that innovation openly.” That could be the
feared potential outcome: “The innovation d'esn’t necessarily
stop, but the open innovation could,” he warns.
According to MIT’s Phil Long, senior strategist for the
school’s Academic Computing Enterprise, “By and large,
the open source community is sufficiently active, robust,
and diverse to persist. [Any number of] people will stand
up to stake their own claims for prior art. It’s going to be
a long time before this gets worked out.” In fact, Long
predicts a renewed interest in open source efforts such
as Sakai. By tucking CMS innovation efforts under the
Sakai umbrella, he says, “if I get sued, then everybody in
Sakai gets sued, and I’ve got more strength.”
Ultimately, says the University of Wisconsin’s Kathy
Christoph, director of academic technology in the
school’s IT division, the patent will “cut down our number
of choices, if it stands. Little companies aren’t going to
be able to know how to navigate the waters.” And while
she sees the potential for a stranglehold on innovation,
she’s also “curious whether people will then just break
out of that thinking and head in a different direction with
broader innovation. We have a long way to go in creating
technology tools to support learning.”
What of the administrators currently shopping for a
new CMS? “Frankly, we don’t have time to worry about it,”
says Candice Dalrymple, director of the Center for Educational
Resources at Johns Hopkins University (MD).
Update: On Nov. 17, 2006, the Software Freedom Law
Center (which provides probono legal services to protect
and advance free and open source software) filed a formal request with the US
Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine
Blackboard’s eLearning patent, potentially leading
to the cancellation of all of Blackboard’s 44 claims.
The Patent Office will render a decision by mid-February.
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.