I got a lot of positive feedback on my “Advice for Small Schools on the LMS Selection Process” post, so I’m going to continue the occasional series. You can find all the posts in the series at any time by going to the “small school LMS selection” tag on my site.
To recap, these posts may apply to your school if at least three of the following are true:
- You work at a small school of 3,500 students or less.
- You have a couple of dozen faculty “heroes” who are using the LMS heavily, a bunch more who just stick their syllabus in it, and a substantial number who don’t use it at all.
- You offer a small number of distance learning and/or blended courses, but you don’t have any online degree programs or similar systematic collections of online classes.
- Your school hasn’t migrated to a different LMS in a long, long time. Maybe ever.
- Your LMS is hosted because you don’t have the IT staff to manage it internally.
- Your “integration” between your Student Information System (SIS) and your LMS is to manually export CSV files from the SIS and upload them into the LMS.
- You have been on Blackboard CE since it was WebCT CE version 4 or earlier.
- You’re not sure if you can handle a migration to anything from either a staffing or a budgetary perspective.
In my first post, I wrote both that “all of these systems are pretty good” and that “all of these systems are pretty bad”. While that’s rhetorically cute (maybe), I realize that it’s not terribly helpful without some more explanation. So this post will provide that explanation.
