e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LMS

  • Cisco Networking Academy Selects Canvas as New LMS to Replace Homegrown System

    It’s summertime, so the LMS news continues . . .

    Cisco Networking Academy, which bills itself as the “world’s largest classroom” with over 1 million students in 165 countries, announced that the program has selected Instructure’s Canvas as its new LMS, replacing a homegrown system in use for over 15 years. The initial announcement was made at Instructure’s user conference, and a more formal announcement will be made Monday at the Cisco Networking Academy conference in California.

    Cisco Networking Academy is the company’s “largest and longest running corporate social responsibility program”, meaning that there is no charge for public and non-profit institutions. Despite the program’s size, the nature of the Networking Academy is often misunderstood – is not a corporate training program, but rather an hardware-neutral educational program in partnership with over 10,000 High Schools and Higher Education institutions worldwide.

    Instructure also released their learning analytics option, as described by Audrey Watters.

    I’ll have more analysis on the announcements early next week.

  • Recent LMS Selections Hint at Continuing Market Changes

    Now that we’re in the middle of June – near the end of the fiscal year for many schools and leading up to user conferences for many LMS vendors – we are starting to see some significant LMS and learning platform announcements. While we typically have a surge in announcements this time of year, this year there are indications from the recent decisions on the continuing changes to the LMS market.

    San Jose State University selects Instructure Canvas to replace Desire2Learn

    According to this article from the student newspaper in February, initial indications were that SJSU might leave Desire2Learn for Moodle, primarily based on cost considerations.

    Students who have learned Desire2Learn, D2L, over the past three years may have to learn a new learning management system next fall.

    In the Academic Senate meeting on Feb. 13, Provost Ellen Junn announced that SJSU may be moving to a new system, called Moodle, after the spring semester.[snip]

    According to Provost Junn, SJSU’s contract with D2L cost $361,198.31 each year, while Fresno State spends about $75,000 on Moodle.

    “(The price) varies from institution to institution,” Junn said.  “The more students you have, the more (the learning management system’s) charge.”

    Update: Fresno State uses Blackboard, not Moodle, as their campus LMS, so direct comparison of costs does not make sense as reported. The relevant point is that cost was a driver for the SJSU re-evaluation.

    The task force mentioned in the article has now finished their work, and the decision was made to switch, not to Moodle but to Instructure’s Canvas LMS. In a letter to the campus last week, the provost notified of the decision.

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  • Piazza – An Example of Free Learning Tool Targeted at Faculty / Student Adoption

    In my recent webcast with Patrick Masson for WCET, we described the growing usage of learning tools outside the official LMS solution. Patrick described survey results done by UMassOnline that captured the rich source of (often free) learning tools used in UMass courses. Much of educational technology is moving from an enterprise LMS market – with feature-rich LMS solutions expected to provide the majority of learning tools – to a learning platform market – with interoperable tools patched together with or without the official LMS by either campus staff or even directly by faculty. These tools are quite often free, and as such they are targeted at faculty and student adoption, rather than institutional adoption via a Request for Proposal process.

    One example of these tools is Piazza, which is a “a place where students can come together to ask, answer, and explore under the guidance of their instructor”. Think of the tool as an combination of discussion board, chat room, and wiki, with some design elements from Google Wave. While the description might be hard to understand, that is part of the issue – Piazza is not targeted to replace the LMS or to replicate specific LMS functionality.

    Jessica Wong at MakingUseOf has a very useful post running through the functionality of Piazza for those interested in the tool itself. My interest for this post is more on what Piazza represents in terms of ed tech trends with the availability of free platforms and tools that are targeted at student and faculty adoption.

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  • What is a Learning Platform?

    While I have written (along with others) about the shift we are seeing in the LMS market, where it is moving from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market, there has not really been a good definition of what a learning platform is. As Jeff Bohrer asked via Twitter, “What are the hallmarks of LMS as a “learning platform” (beyond SaaS)? Any posts you can point to?” Mike Zackrison offer some very helpful thoughts in his response of “A few I’ve observed: cloud, multi-tenant; open API; social, analytics, mobile baked in; apps/content discovery too”.

    Rather than reply within the limits of 140 characters, I’d like to offer a response here (I have trouble with being pithy).

    Platform Definitions

    First, let’s look at the metaphor. A platform is typically defined in the generic sense as a raised surface of some type that supports other interacting objects. Within computer and software terminology, a platform can be defined as “A platform is any base of technologies on which other technologies or processes are built”. The idea is that the platform is not intended to stand on its own, as its definition includes the support of other technologies or applications.

    Given this context, there is a rather extensive Wikipedia entry on learning platforms with some useful definitions included. I have excerpted several below.

    A learning platform is an integrated set of interactive online services that provide teachers, learners, parents and others involved in education with information, tools and resources to support and enhance educational delivery and management.

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  • Guest Blog at WCET: Institutional Decision-Making and Changing LMS Market

    Today I had a guest post at WCET’s blog. WCET is a great organization that “accelerates the adoption of effective practices and policies, advancing excellence in technology-enhanced teaching and learning in higher education”. They have been leaders in sharing best practices for online education, including taking a leading role on explaining State Authorization regulations as well as others. You can read the full post here.

    The topic of the post is how the changing LMS / Learning Platform market is, or should be, changing institutional decision-making.

    We have seen a great deal of change in the higher education Learning Management System (LMS) market over the past year, as has been described in several blog posts. One of the biggest changes to the market that I’ve noticed is that we seem to be moving from an enterprise LMS market, with full-featured monolithic systems, into a learning platform market, with many cloud-based platforms that don’t attempt to have all the features in one system.

    As Ritchie Boyd has described, the WCET LMS Common Interest Group (CIG) is recasting itself this year as “the ‘Beyond the LMS’ Common Interest Group. The idea is to not ignore the LMS, but rather to acknowledge that there is so much more going on in the broader academic technology ecosystems and their impact on our campuses, and that much of this activity often includes or is enveloped by the formal LMS.”

    In last year’s WCET-sponsored Managing Online Education survey, 47% of respondents indicated they are reviewing their LMS strategy and 27% are planning to change LMS within 2 years. A key question arises, however, about how institutions should adapt their technology decision-making processes based on these market changes. It’s all well and good for the market to change and provide more choices and new approaches, but how should schools decide which system(s) best fit their specific academic and administrative needs? The emergence of new, often free, cloud-based learning platforms may require changes to our decision-making.

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  • LoudCloud Systems Announces Adaptive LMS General Release

    One of the trends that I’ve been tracking in the LMS market is a move away from the monolithic, all-things-to-everyone enterprise LMS solution. There are several different approaches challenging this model, but the general theme is that the ed tech market needs more flexible, targeted approaches to directly support teaching and learning needs.

    The news today is that LoudCloud Systems is officially announcing their LMS solution’s entry into the general higher education and K-12 markets as described in a Campus Technology article. In this announcement, LoudCloud promises what they describe as the “first fully adaptive and configurable Learning Management Systems for Higher Education and K12”. While I cannot judge yet how successful this vendor will be with their strategy, I think the announcement is significant for the LMS market for two reasons.

    • LoudCloud appears to be providing the first disaggregated LMS on the commercial market; and
    • The system has an integrated analytics engine that supports personalized content delivery.

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  • Farewell to the Enterprise LMS, Greetings to the Learning Platform

    Along with others, I have written several times over the past 12 months here, here, here and here about the significant changes occurring in the educational LMS market. In my opinion, when we look back on market changes, 2011 will stand out as the year when the LMS market passed the point of no return and changed forever. What we are now seeing are some real signs of what the future market will look like, and the actual definition of the market is changing. We are going from an enterprise LMS market to a learning platform market.

    What I mean by ‘enterprise LMS’ is the legacy model of the LMS as a smaller, academically-facing version of the ERP. This model was based on monolithic, full-featured software systems that could be hosted on-site or by a managed hosting provider. A ‘learning platform’, by contrast, does not contain all the features in itself and is based on cloud computing – multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS).

    The 2011 EDUCAUSE event captured the zeitgeist of the changes, as it seemed most of the buzz at the conference centered on new LMS solutions and paradigm changes. Instructure made their debut at the conference, Pearson’s OpenClass was announced, Blackboard announced a new move in open content focused on CourseSites, and Cengage demonstrated their MindTap platform. Rather than slowing since EDUCAUSE, we have seen several additional announcements in the past three months.

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