Innovation in LMS: Strategic Partnerships Matter and Conclusions

Tuesday, 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. In the past, Yazdi explored 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 the last post in our "Innovation in LMS" series (our longest running to date), we wanted to get your feedback on the series as a whole. What was your favorite post? If we could do anything to improve our blog series', what would it be? Let us know in the comments below or feel free to email feedback@moodlerooms.com.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for our next series.

Innovation in LMS: Strategic Partnerships Matter

With the ability to meet an individual institution’s needs and level of preparedness, the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that are emerging in the market and provide schools, colleges and universities a familiar starting point and the necessary support to explore the possibilities. The decision by leading LMS vendors to develop SaaS and PaaS offerings will be further enhanced by partnerships with respected infrastructure providers to utilize IaaS provisioning. It is important to recognize that not all SaaS or IaaS solutions are equal. An important consideration in pursuing SaaS solutions is in knowing whether or not the vendor uses an IaaS provider – and if they do, knowing what the reputation of that provider is. Examining more closely how the SaaS
vendor supports the back-end can provide useful insights into the quality and resiliency of the SaaS vendor’s offerings.

A benefit of a SaaS provider using an IaaS partner to support core infrastructure needs ensures that capacity is available on demand – and neither the SaaS provider nor its users need to worry about the recovery of capital investments in that capacity. Combined with the PaaS characteristics in shared or managed open-source solutions, a SaaS provider has the ability to sustainably drive down the costs of provisioning LMS solutions. With PaaS services relative to common, shared or managed open-source solutions, application development, and new features and functionality can be developed at relatively low cost and are almost immediately available for use. Delivered through a SaaS solution, users gain the benefit of new functionality and features without concerns for the costs of implementing and integrating these new features into an existing hardened LMS system.

Conclusions

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. A number of vendors have migrated services into the cloud and provide SaaS solutions that have lower costs and are much more flexible in their provisioning models. 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.