Webinar Series: Optimizing the LMS for Today's Institutions

One of the most enjoyable parts of organizing webinars is the opportunity gain real world perspective from those who have implemented an LMS for their institution.

In our most recent "Perfect Fit" webinar on May 20, Khalil Yazdi, economist and former CIO for the University of Mary Washington and previously the Vice Chancellor for IT and System Research for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, provided a wealth of valuable insight that I wanted to expand upon. He focused on the strategic challenges that a CIO faces when evaluating a campus-wide decision, such as selecting an LMS. In case you weren't able to attend the webinar, you can view it on-demand here.


Khalil highlighted that today, an LMS is one of the most mission critical applications for an institution. Once implemented, there is no window of opportunity to take down, evaluate and update simply due to the fact that any downtime of an LMS whatsoever is poorly tolerated campus-wide. Due to the LMS becoming so robust and versatile day-to-day tool for teaching and learning, there's rarely a time that an instructor, student or campus staff member isn't using it. It is this concept of reliance that make the question of LMS selection and delivery so pivotal for an institution.

At the same time, LMS solutions are provisioned to different kinds of users with varying participation scope. In a selection process, all users must be taken into account. And with the complex governance model of most institutions, difficult choices are made and general functionality is favored over specialized functionality in the effort to please the majority of students and instructors.

This practice begs the question: Shouldn't an LMS please everyone? If so, how do we provide this?

A CIO or campus technology decision-maker should focus on taking an optimal approach to outfitting an institution with a system that can satisfy basic functionality, but provide the option to integrate specialized learning tools and solutions. Enabling flexible, emerging technologies and extensible learning systems that enhance and enable diversity of choice are key to delivering the most effective and engaging learning. Institutions need to move past a system that offers narrowly-defined choices and implement a system that is adaptable, enables freedom of choice and is capable speaking to both institution-wide needs as well as the specific pedagogical approaches of its faculty, academic disciplines and programs of study.

So, how do we optimize the environment? How do we employ rich and diverse enabling technologies as intended and in a way that allows us to diversify the environment within which we teach and learn? Our institutions need supporting technology to deliver the kind of customizable solutions that their faculty and students prefer. Provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) through private cloud services and provisioning LMS services in a virtualized manner is pivotal to disconnecting discipline-specific solutions from the internal institution environment and standardizing them on all solutions.

Such a conceptual shift in our thinking and deployment of course, learning and teaching management systems will take a few years to get to -- but it is necessary to begin the difficult work of adopting technology standards and establishing vitally needed interoperability of content between and among different institutions, available LMS solutions and teaching/learning spaces.

The question is, how do we get there? More importantly, what's the first step to starting the conversation?