Innovation in LMS: An Introduction

During the 2010 EDUCAUSE Conference this past October in Anaheim, CA, we had the pleasure of announcing many of our most recent projects and company developments, including two whitepaper releases, one of which we've been highlighting for the past two weeks.

To take us into the new year, over the next few weeks we'll be highlighting portions of the other recently published whitepaper entitled, Innovation in LMS: Underlying Economic Drivers--Motivating a New Model for the Provisioning of Course, Teaching and Learning Management Software Systems. In the paper, Author, Khalil Yazdi, Executive Director of Nascent Strategic IT Consulting, explores the approaching extinction of the traditional stovepipe LMS framework on today's campuses and the inevitable paradigm shift to SaaS and Cloud-based institutional IT delivery models.

Today, we're highlighting Yazdi's introduction to the paper. As we explore Yazdi's arguments over the next few weeks, let us know how you think LMS delivery is evolving, and whether or not this change is for the better. Feel free to discuss in the comments below.

Innovation in LMS: An Introduction
Underlying Economic Drivers--Motivating a New Model for the Provisioning of Course, Teaching and Learning Management Software Systems

From a technology perspective, traditional, internally hosted learning management system (LMS) or course management system (CMS) tools are increasingly viewed as over-engineered and unnecessarily burdensome to manage and maintain. From a cost-of-ownership perspective, traditional premise-based LMS tools are increasingly too costly relative to alternative cloud-sourced models of provisioning similar services and features. Emerging cloud solutions hold the promise of empowering individual faculty with diversity of choice and the ability to independently fashion LMS tools in innovative ways. Often, these solutions are provisioned by vendors who are not traditionally LMS providers – rather who supply tools and services that can be co-opted to provide a level of basic support to faculty and teachers.

New open-source solution models promote individual teacher and faculty choices as opposed to institution-wide selection of pedagogical tools – with consequences for how LMS technology is provisioned, licensed and priced. With a greater emphasis on low-cost, on-demand availability, interoperability and simplicity, these solutions give institutions, their faculty and students a more robust learning and teaching environment and enable the reallocation of institutional resources to other core mission purposes. This newfound agility and flexibility allows educators, students and institutions to independently leverage their “technologies of- choice” – and do so with minimal need for support from institutional Information Technology and academic leadership.

Progressive, forward-thinking LMS vendors are now actively pursuing migration of their software and services to the cloud, developing various combinations of software, platform and infrastructure as-a-service offerings. These solutions have demonstrably lower costs and include technical characteristics and feature sets that are competitive with traditional models at much lower costs per-user. Given the significantly lower costs of open-source solutions and their rapid addition of new features and functionality, managed open source providers have a greater ability to migrate such solutions to the cloud while maintaining scalability, security, application resilience and availability – all while keeping provisioning costs low. Open-source-based applications are typically more responsive to emerging customer needs because the on-boarding of new features and functionality is dependent on the needs and contributions of the user community that supports the application. Given the challenges of ensuring that the application components developed by a distributed and diverse community are interoperable, scalable and secure, managed open-source solutions tend to present more stable application environments while providing testing and certification of code.

Institutional constituencies must recognize that cultural and administrative approaches to learning and teaching technology must adapt to the new technology environment. To take advantage of these emerging solutions, institutions will need to re-engineer their internal IT architecture and rethink their management approach in order to facilitate the adoption of such tools and services. In doing so, it is important to distinguish between general technical standards that are relative to data and content, and those that facilitate the interoperability of systems. Institutions and vendors must develop and implement interoperability standards for access, user interfaces, content/data management and migration, security and analytics so that the benefits of using cloud-based solutions can be obtained.

As the “next step” in LMS development, vendors and institutions must work together to ensure that independent support for students, faculty and institutional needs can be provided without adversely impacting necessary integration of systems, effective collaboration, interaction and preservation of the educational record. Utilizing LMS as an early venture into the cloud services arena is an effective first step in exploring the options for cloud technology integration while taking advantage of lower cost support for teaching and learning. Those in the process or anticipating acquisition of LMS systems should make Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based solutions a priority requirement. It is well established that the quality of the student learning experience has a direct impact on student retention and the successful completion of their higher education program. As such, learning and course management systems play a critical role in supporting institutional core missions and impacting the costs of education – to both institutions and students. While provisioning such tools should be accomplished at the lowest possible cost, it is also important that the tools are of high quality and support a broad spectrum of teaching and learning styles. That is, in terms of richness of student experience and scope of functionality and features, it is important that a learning and teaching solution provide high value relative to its cost.

Of all educational applications, the use of Internet-based solutions is greatest in teaching and learning activities. Increasingly, faculty are independently moving to cloud-based services for basic communication, collaboration and content management purposes and pressuring LMS vendors to convert their offerings to SaaS based solutions. Given the increasing number of cost-effective cloud-based SaaS solutions available to institutions, there are compelling reasons for schools, colleges and universities to begin adopting such solutions as part of their technology services portfolio. While there are certainly other cloud-based application solutions that are easier to adopt, leveraging a migration to cloud-based LMS systems presents a unique and comparatively low-cost opportunity to explore cloud services.

The underlying technology requirements to leverage SaaS-based LMS are relatively easy to deploy and are already in place at most institutions. The growing number of SaaS-based offerings are priced very competitively as compared to externally and internally hosted solutions – with the additional benefit of reducing a significant portion of the IT and academic management “overhead.” In short, SaaS-based LMS is a low-cost, high-impact way of introducing cloud services into the institution’s services offerings to educators and students.

Taken together, the impact of emerging technologies and the economic downturn have raised the interests of schools, colleges and universities in cloud-based services, particularly in SaaS-based support for academic applications – including course management and support tools for teaching and learning. While traditional attitudes towards LMS support and a historic lack of interoperability between LMS systems are obstacles to the more rapid adoption of SaaS-based LMS, it is clear that the traditional models are both technologically and financially obsolete.