e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: RFP

  • Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?

    Well this was interesting:

    In a blog post from Monday, Unizin announced a public Request For Proposals (RFP) to solicit bids for an enterprise and multitenant LMS. The RFP states its purpose:

    We seek to identify a qualified vendor (“vendor”) to make available an enterprise and multitenant learning management system and related services (collectively, the “LMS”) to Member Institutions.

    Say what? (more…)

  • Interesting Comment on Pearson’s LMS Plans From Customer

    On April 1, long-time eCollege (aka Pearson’s LearningStudio) customer Texas Christian University (TCU) gave an update on their LMS selection process to the student newspaper TCU360. In this article there was an interesting statement ((Statement from the original article before it was updated.)) worth exploring [emphasis added].

    “eCollege” will soon be a thing of the past.

    TCU has narrowed its search for a Learning Management System to two platforms, Blackboard and Desire2Learn (D2L).

    “We’ve had feedback, from faculty specifically, that it’s time for change,” Assistant Provost of Educational Technology and Faculty Development Romy Hughes said.

    TCU has used Pearson’s Learning Studio system since 1999.

    “Pearson is out of the learning management system game,” Hughes said. “We need something to evolve with the Academy of Tomorrow and where we’re moving to at TCU.”

    That last comment got my attention. (more…)

  • 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. (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)