Innovation in LMS: Start Your Foray into the Cloud With the LMS

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, where Yazdi's explored the best practices to employ when choosing and provisioning a SaaS-based delivery model for LMS. Today, Yazdi explains how migrating to cloud-based LMS solutions and services, in some respects, can have a transformative impact, similar to that of online banking – it will fundamentally change the way institutions, their faculty and their students understand teaching and learning.

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: Start Your Foray into the Cloud With the LMS

In some respects, migrating to cloud-based LMS solutions and services will have a transformative impact similar to that of debit cards, ATM machines and online banking – it will fundamentally change the way institutions, their faculty and their students understand teaching and learning. Just as what occurred in the financial sector, the cloud has been viewed with some initial trepidation and suspicion. As was true for personal banking, migrating to the LMS cloud will soon become a natural and expected mode of delivery for teaching and learning support services.

Of all of the applications used in education, the use of Internet-based solutions is most dominant relative to teaching and learning activities, both informal and formal (online and hybrid courses). It is now commonplace to discover faculty independently moving to cloud-based services – typically for basic communication, collaboration and content management purposes. Partially in response to this growing phenomenon, LMS vendors are also making rapid progress converting 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.

It is also true that the underlying technology requirements to leverage SaaS-based LMS are relatively easy to deploy – and indeed, for many institutions the basic set of requirements around identity management, content authoring and sharing are either already in place or soon will be. Thus, SaaS solutions, designed and marketed as cloud services, have the potential to be
priced competitively in comparison to externally and internally hosted provisioning – with the additional benefit that a significant portion of the IT and academic management “overhead” is eliminated. 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.

It is helpful to approach cloud services with a partner that understands both the business of teaching and learning as well as having the ability to provide cloud-based services that are customized to individual institutional capabilities and needs. To avoid surprises, it is most helpful if that partner can provide both traditional hosted support environments and cloud-based services – giving academic and IT staff the time and opportunity to better understand usage level and costs (it is easy to be surprised by the bill for services when paying by the drink). It is helpful if the vendor/partner is able to provide traditional institutional supported LMS, while providing faculty interested in doing so the opportunity to explore the flexibility and innovative features typical in SaaS solutions – in configurations that are not limited by accommodations to institution-wide needs.

Educational institutions need time to develop a “services consumption” mentality relative to learning and course management tools and to wrestle with the technical and cultural challenges of using virtualized solutions and shared resources. Teachers, faculty, academic administrators and IT staff also need an opportunity to explore the challenges of getting the data they were used to getting from in-house infrastructure and applications once they are removed from their direct operational control. A good SaaS vendor should be able to help ease that transition by ensuring that institutional users can quickly get up to speed with their software and by providing on-demand support.