The product group I’m in at Oracle (Academic Enterprise Solutions, or AES) has a new white paper out on the company’s vision of the future of the academic enterprise. A lot of this is aspirational, but it does give you a sense of the general direction that the company would like to take in terms of product development. Also, being Oracle’s vision, it focuses on Oracle’s view of academic IT and how Oracle products fit in. If you don’t like enterprise-y approaches or you don’t like Oracle products, then this document probably won’t be of much use to you.
I’d like to acknowledge the influence of a number of outside folks on the thinking behind this paper:
- My former colleagues at the SUNY Learning Network, especially Patrick Masson and Bernie Durfee, were co-creators of the Learning Management Operating System (LMOS) concept that the white paper specifically invokes.
- Much of Oracle’s specific vision of the future of learning environments is heavily derivative of the excellent work begin done in the Sakai community around Sakai 3.
- Oracle’s thinking about academic analytics has been enlightened by the work of John Campbell’s team at Purdue University.
I apologize to any others I may be missing; there are a lot of smart people working on these problems, and the AES team has tried to listen closely to as many of them as possible.
As a former Oracle employee involved some years ago with the earliest iterations of Oracle’s online education (internal and external) and subsequent development of a primitive (at the time) LMS, I’m gladdened to read this well-thought out approach to academic infrastructure and the concept of an “operating system” for learning with a more unified approach for the learner. It’ll be great to see how it is realized by early adopters – will Oracle be sampling the ‘dog food’ and using such a system for its global online education, or is this specifically aimed at the university enterprise?
I’m glad you like the vision, Peter. Right now, our focus is on higher education and there hasn’t been much cross-pollenation with the corporate training side of the house. There’s nothing to say that won’t happen in the future, though.
Hey, okay by me, I made the jump from corporate training to higher education six years ago and have found it to be a much more rewarding environment. But it’s been in those six years that the technologies and pedagogical tools of corporate training geared at tech-savvy, multitasking, time-crunched learners have started to become more relevant and common in academia.
Michael, I like the way you have consolidated the issues and painted a future state of the enterprise LMOS. Do you have a figure showing the transition paths through various Oracle/PS product offerings that you mention in the text? The people responsible for the LMS and those who manage our Oracle investments are different groups at my institution, so an easy reference to the product map would facilitate conversation. Thanks for pulling together the gestalt into such a clear vision.
Joanne we don’t have that graphic at the moment, but that’s a good suggestion. I’ll look into it.