Innovation in LMS: Traditional LMS Provisioning

As a way to take us into the New Year, yesterday, we began highlighting excerpts from one of our recently published whitepapers, 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, discusses the inevitable paradigm shift to SaaS and Cloud-based institutional IT delivery models from traditional silo-based methods.

Today, we're highlighting Yazdi's exploration of how LMSs were traditionally provisioned on higher education campuses. Again, as we explore 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: Traditional LMS Provisioning

Traditional provisioning of course and learning management systems is predicated on an architecture that assumes a stand-alone, internally hosted application environment provides for everything from authentication and user management to content repositories and pedagogical tools. This silo-based, single point of service is attractive, as responsibility for interfaces, administration tools and technical support needs are clear and result in stable and predictable services managed through institutional IT and functional academic owners.

In exchange for the perceived benefits, the trade-offs include a requirement of a multi-year institution-wide adoption and results in a “co-vesting” of the institution and vendor in the software as deployed and used within the campus environment at the time of initial purchase and implementation. To ensure continued investment in product development, licensing contracts include maintenance agreements and institutional participation in user groups is expected. It is understood that relatively infrequent but regular upgrades of products occur – sufficient to keep functionality “current” but in a manner that limits institutional IT cost of participating in upgrades.

In such provisioning models, in addition to their necessary support for the LMS application, vendors must support and provide specifications and guidance on other technology layers – from defining expectations on core infrastructure to the management of access, data, storage, servers and network protocols. This reinforces stovepipe management structures and necessitates deep institutional IT involvement and the continued use of traditional proprietary technologies
and architectures. The traditional approach creates a segregated, self-sustaining island of activity linked to other institutional systems through proprietary means.

For internally hosted systems, institutional IT and academic support resources can be manipulated and modified over time to alter the total cost of support in response to emerging budgetary realities. Services are supported by additional work assigned to existing internal resources and typically, explicit commitments of service-levels or quality are not made – a consequence of the difficulty of assigning dedicated resources to all aspects of technological and functional support. As a result, the “total-cost” of services is difficult to calculate and comparisons across institutions have limited value given the diverse ways in which internal “sweat-equity” is applied. As such, internal costs are typically undocumented and unaccounted for – the relative costs of internally supported solutions are generally understated.

Traditional external hosting with existing vendors can be attractive. Note that traditional external hosting and modern cloud-based solutions are substantively different provisioning models and should not be thought of as generally equivalent. For IT, external hosting removes a services area that is often the one most complained about. For academic administration, it removes IT as another participant in the conversation around management and change. For leadership, it clarifies lines of accountability and simplifies operational management. It may also limit institutional flexibility to modify or limit costs over time. Otherwise, external hosting essentially boils down to a substitution of external resources for internal ones with the benefit of predictable costs and quality of services.

For the typical faculty or student user who does not particularly differentiate between internally and externally hosted solutions, external hosting may provide a clearer understanding of the costs of services, levels of quality and feature sets. Unfortunately, this clarity is often the basis upon which requests for expanded services are turned down. With explicit service level agreements (SLAs) and tiered services offerings, the institution typically pays more for each “additional” level, type or quality of service. This has the benefit of providing a more solid basis for cost-benefit analysis relative to the investment in new service by clarifying the understanding of outlays relative to receive outcomes.

However hosted, learning and course management systems range from proprietary to open-source, managed open-source, and more recently, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Each of these alternatives yields very different support, cost and services profiles. The lack of interoperability standards among the alternative LMS solutions suggests that care must be taken in selection and evaluation, because once in place, it can be quite difficult and costly to migrate to an alternative solution.

In attempting to understand and compare the “total cost of ownership” (TCO) associated with these alternative solution models, care must be taken to ensure that the comparisons are made on equal footing – and include both explicit and implicit (or internal) costs. In addition to a comparison of direct software and hardware costs (including maintenance and upgrades), everything from technical and functional support to power consumption and space utilization should be captured. Of the alternatives, SaaS provisioning reduces the number of dimensions of cost down to functional support and the purchase of direct services – and, as will be noted later, without concern for usage levels, growth, upgrades or completeness of features and functionality. The intuition that costs of SaaS-based provisioning is significantly lower is carried in practice and predicated on the fact that there are many fewer “moving parts” to account for.

Given the expectation of a persistent, three-to-five year institution-wide commitment to a solution, the procurement of course and learning management systems anticipates buy-in and commitment from all potential users and support areas. While the compilation of requirements
is usually inclusive of the diverse needs of all participating constituencies, realized features and functionality are limited by the selected vendor’s scope of offerings. With an interest in developing “uniformity” and “consistency” of user experience and standardization of support services, all institutional users are limited by the final selection relative to pedagogical and disciplinary fit.

Governance is also important beyond initial selection and deployment. Post-implementation, a governance environment will ensure the participation of all user constituencies in providing guidance to those charged with maintaining systems and planning for upgrades and maintenance. As the product characteristics change, the decision to develop and deploy new features must be made with appropriate vetting and approval – further complicating governance. Product development typically leverages the input of user groups through conferences and product development sessions where vendors gain insights into the relative priorities of users and are thereby able to more effectively prioritize their product development efforts. This sort of development strategy results in innovation and development cycles that are manageable for both vendors and institutions.

Proprietary stand-alone LMS solutions have facilitated the growth of online and hybrid teaching and learning applications. As a consequence of that growth in usage and their greater familiarity with technology-enabled teaching and learning, faculty and students have developed a greater appetite for specialized and focused features that support their respective pedagogical and discipline-based learning needs. It is also true that course-management, teaching support and learning support are now rather distinct and separately definable feature sets that, while needing integration at some level, can be quite separately provisioned and used. At the technical level, enhanced tools have emerged to support ubiquitous and independently provisioned identity, data and content management tools that are readily integrated into other application environments, including LMS applications. Although support for modular or component-based services has increased in recent years, in traditional LMS solutions, the separation between these divergent uses is poorly articulated in favor of back-end integration.