Innovation in LMS: Challenges Facing the Traditional Model

Yesterday, we highlighted Khalil Yazdi's exploration of how LMSs have been traditionally provisioned on higher education campuses. In keeping with the effort to highlight excerpts from Yazdi's whitepaper, Innovation in LMS: Underlying Economic Drivers--Motivating a New Model for the Provisioning of Course, Teaching and Learning Management Software Systems, today, we're diving deeper into the challenges that higher education technology leaders are facing on their respective campuses with traditional LMS delivery models in place.

As we continue exploring Yazdi's arguments over the next few weeks, let us know how you think LMS delivery is evolving, and what you'd like to see from this wave of LMS innovation. Feel free to discuss in the comments below.

Innovation in LMS: Challenges Facing the Traditional Model

However well intended when initially conceived, the combined impact of emerging technologies and budgetary realities have made existing legacy models of services delivery and operational management technologically obsolete. Stated differently, a new and emerging LMS vendor would not replicate the traditional model in designing and provisioning teaching and learning systems. Similarly, those institutions evaluating LMS alternatives for the first time will likely prefer cloud-based solutions to those built on the traditional model.

Furthermore, the economic realities facing the public sector have made legacy technology architectures financially unsustainable such that much of the existing technology in use now represents an unnecessary drain on increasingly scarce resources. Indeed, given the combination of technological change and budgetary pressures facing institutions, continuing a legacy services model now requires compelling justification. This is generally true for all institutional investments in IT, and while teaching and learning tools are generally “protected” operational outlays, the LMS industry has seen some of the most aggressive adoption of emerging technologies, making an evaluation of cloud-based options in the provisioning of LMS services important to all institutions.

Where cloud-based solutions were often viewed as “experimental,” there is now an emerging but clear trend towards the adoption and migration to SaaS-based LMS solutions. In light of the technological improvements of cloud services models, coupled with the significantly lower costs these models can offer customers, some educational institutions have made a full migration to LMS in the cloud as a means to enhance services while lowering their operational support costs and alleviating some of their mounting financial pressures.

The practice of marketing and licensing to the institution results in an institutional governance challenge as the attempt is to purchase learning or course management software in an exclusive manner for all institutional users. Regardless of how well managed the process, there will be users that would have preferred a different solution. Such selection processes tend to reduce wide ranging and diverse needs to an otherwise manageable set of requirements that can be presented to the available marketplace of vendors. LMS governance can limit internal political risks for IT and other support staff but carries a relatively high, albeit implicit, cost that includes both the diversion of time and effort as well as creating a source of “friction” relative to change – thus reducing institutional agility. With the limiting effects of institutional calendars and activity cycles, the selection, implementation and realization timeline can easily go to 12 or 18 months – during which almost every member of the institution is acutely aware of the effort and most will have to participate in some manner.

Attempting to satisfy the maximum number of faculty during selection may have the perverse consequence of maximizing the number of “occasionally unhappy” users who are generally “OK” with the selected vendor but otherwise unsatisfied with one or more functional components or features. Ironically but not surprisingly, the selection process resolves to a “minimizing unhappiness” effort rather than one that attempts to maximize value to ALL potential users. Once a system is in place and as faculty and staff work-habits take hold, institutional resistance to change grows over time and the challenges of migration to other solutions can be quite daunting. In totality, the combination of technology support and faculty effort in developing and supporting their courses makes the LMS one ofthe most complex applications in the institutional portfolio. There are more direct users of LMS systems than there are direct users of institutional business systems – excepting perhaps, e-mail and other communications –which can make the challenges of governance, training, migration and support overwhelming.

The traditional use of conferences and product development groups to provide guidance to product development further reinforces the “minimize unhappiness” outcome. Such collective decision-making limits the agility of vendors to be innovative relative to product and marketing strategies. From such forums, vendors tend to get advice from users that have limited experience in competitive offerings. As a practical matter, those responsible for the maintenance and support of such systems are typically disinclined to have the product change too much too fast – given that any changes will create new/additional work that they are ill prepared to carry out and their input may represent a perspective that is biased towards little or minimal change rather than a more aggressive position towards innovation.

While generally consistent in approach to proprietary LMS vendor provisioning, open-source LMS solutions do have a somewhat more flexible development environment in that the user community is empowered to add desirable features and functionality to the base shared code. In particular, managed open-source solutions have the ability to more rapidly deploy tested and certified features and functionality – albeit, there is an additional cost in exchange for more reliable software tools. Open-source LMS vendors also provide strategies for the user community to add features based on published standards, some of which might be certified for quality and reliability by the managed open source provider.