Innovation in LMS: Challenges of Migrating to the Cloud

Yesterday, we continued highlighting excerpts of Khalil Yazdi's whitepaper, Innovation in LMS: Underlying Economic Drivers--Motivating a New Model for the Provisioning of Course, Teaching and Learning Management Software Systems, and explored Yazdi's consideration for the cloud and the benefits that the IT delivery model offers to today's institutions. Today, Yazdi explores the challenges associated with a transition to a cloud model.

As we continue exploring Yazdi's arguments, 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 of Migrating to the Cloud

To foster a SaaS-enabling environment, institutional IT should consider moving to standards-based authentication and user identity management services, develop a data management and provisioning environment that can be used by SaaS systems, and provide collaboration and content management environments that can be seamlessly attached by SaaS systems. For many applications and business services, the transition or migration to cloud services can be quite rapid and often achieved at very low cost – if the appropriate accommodating technical infrastructure is in place.

One of the more difficult challenges facing institutions interested in pursuing cloud-based services is a vendor that can support institutions through a mix of traditional self-hosting, utility and cloud-based services. This sort of partnership would allow academic and IT professionals the room to consider a flexible migration roadmap to a cloud services model.

Such flexibility as provided in a mixed, hybrid solution is essential to a thoughtful and deliberate evaluation of the tradeoffs in migrating to cloud LMS solutions, including the necessary changes in institutional organizational structure and operating culture – in both IT and academic services areas. Also, institutional IT needs time to re-tool staff, improve its knowledge and skills relative to the deployment of cloud services, and to re-architect core services (middleware being most critical) so as to allow support for cloud-based services.