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Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System
By Josh Fischman
One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.
Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has joined the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.
Continued at: http://wp.me/p11BlP-GH
Quo Vadis, LMS? Trends, Predictions, Commentary
From Campus Technology
The LMS market is in flux. According to a 2010 survey conducted by the Campus Computing Project, Blackboard’s dominance of the higher education market declined from 71 percent in 2006 to 57 percent in 2010. Open source alternatives Moodle and Sakai have continued to make inroads, as has Desire2Learn–together they now control over 30 percent of the market. The entry of Instructure, whose Canvas LMS recently scooped up the business of the Utah Education Network, provides an additional plot twist. And hanging over it all is the imminent migration of hundreds of legacy Blackboard clients to new systems as their existing platforms are retired.
Often overlooked in the numbers game, though, are more fundamental–even philosophical–questions about the evolving role of the LMS and its ability to meet the needs of higher education today. If the debate of recent years has been between open source and proprietary systems, the focus is gradually shifting to how all of these systems will tackle the thorny issues of informal learning, social networking, assessment, and a mobile learning environment.
Continued at: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2011/07/01/quo-vadis-lms-trends-predictions-commentary.aspx
7 Things You Should Know about LMS Evaluation
From Educause
For most institutions, the LMS is the most significant enterprise application for teaching and learning. It serves as the resource hub for the institution’s classes and delivers courseware to students. Depending on the particular system and its implementation, an LMS might also manage course registration, course scheduling, discussion forums, blog sites, student scores, and student transcripts.
At many institutions, the current LMS is five or more years old, and although the application has likely been upgraded several times, the teaching and learning context might have changed considerably in that time. Moreover, other products, including open-source options, have emerged. All of this raises the question of whether the institution should conduct a complete evaluation of its LMS strategy. Formerly, such an evaluation would generally have been the province of the IT department. Today, portions of the analysis are handled by members of the academic community, including faculty members, students, administrative personnel, library staff, and teaching and learning center staff, all of whom play a growing role in the present wave of LMS evaluations.
Continued at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7072.pdf
Focus on Adult Learning . . . Innovation through Inquiry 