The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This is not one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It’s just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia. To begin with, you have to love any presentation that includes a graphic like this one:
It is incredibly dense with information yet completely readable. Even better is the narrative that the presenter (Phil Hill, at this point in the presentation) weaves around it:
- Virtually all of these LMSs were started at universities.
- Innovation has all but flatlined (my word, not his) since 2004.
- At the same time, prices have gone up anywhere from 250% to 1,000% in the last decade.
Really good stuff. There are some good (if painful) lessons in the presentation about scaling for large systems too. The whole thing is well worth a watch. Thanks to Phil Hill of Delta and Kathy Fernandes of CSU for inviting me to attend.
You can see the slides here and the WebEx archive (which is worth watching) here.