California Community College OEI Selects LMS Vendor

The Online Education Initiative (OEI) for California’s Community College System has just announced its vendor selection for a Common Course Management System (CCMS) ((Note that this is an Intent to Award, not yet a contract.)). For various reasons I cannot provide any commentary on this process, so I would prefer to simply direct people to the OEI blog site. Update: To answer some questions, the reason I cannot comment is that CCC is a MindWires client, and I facilitated the meetings. Based on this relationship we have a non-disclosure agreement with OEI.

Here is the full announcement.

The California Community Colleges (CCC) Online Education Initiative (OEI) announced its intent to award Instructure Inc. the contract to provide an online course management system and related services to community colleges statewide.

Support for Instructure’s Canvas system was nearly unanimous among the OEI’s Common Course Management System (CCMS) Committee members, with overwhelming support from student participants, officials said. Canvas is a course management platform that is currently being used by more than 1,000 colleges, universities and school districts across the country.

“Both the students and faculty members involved believed that students would be most successful using the Canvas system,” said OEI Statewide Program Director Steve Klein. “The student success element was a consistent focus throughout.”

The announcement includes some information on the process as well.

A 55-member selection committee participated in the RFP review that utilized an extensive scoring rubric. The decision-making process was guided by and included the active involvement of the CCMS Committee, which is composed of the CCMS Workgroup of the OEI Steering Committee, the members of OEI’s Management Team, and representatives from the eight Full Launch Pilot Colleges, which will be the first colleges to test and deploy the CCMS tool.

The recommendation culminated an extremely thorough decision-making process that included input from multiple sources statewide, and began with the OEI’s formation of a CCMS selection process in early 2014. The selection process was designed to ensure that a partner would be chosen to address the initiative’s vision for the future.