Category Archives: lms evaluation

This week’s LMS Choice Announcements

Posted on December 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

 

As the end of life looms for Blackboard’s CE/Vista product increasingly regular reports are being received of institutions’ choices for its replacement.

This week’s announcements included two large Blackboard clients, UMass and UEN (Utah Educational Network).

UEN, not surprisingly, announced the decision to support their statewide network with Instructure, built by a Utah-based developer. Their announcement here.

Today, UMass Amherst announced their decision to phase in Moodle over the next two years (just beating the event horizon for the CE/Vista end of life, Dec. 2013). John Dubach, CIO for UMass Amherst, writes of their decision.

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Posted in Course Management, lms evaluation

Notre Dame’s current FTEs and skill set supporting our CMS/LMS

Posted on November 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

 

The University of Notre Dame has some unique characteristics, but these are not necessarily advantageous towards fully utilizing the best of teaching and learning technologies, including the LMS.

The major factors your institution must consider when benchmarking your course management staffing:

  • Does your institution have a School of Education? If you do, they will tend to keep the educational use of technology ‘fresh’ on your campus. Or perhaps I should say, they could do that, if you’re intentional about allowing them to.
  • Does your institution have a distance education program? Are you thinking of starting or expanding one? Instructional Designers will be a part of your campus already.
  • Does your institution require (“Can” your institution require?)  the posting of grades and/or syllabus for all courses in your LMS? Many of your faculty will need help complying. Instructional Designers will help grow their own business.
  • Do you have, or do you intend to grow, multiple integration points into and out of your LMS? Not just SIS provisioning and SSO to digital library resources, but other tools such as iTunes U, the next generation of Wimba/Elluminate tools and so forth.

Notre Dame’s current LMS Staffing

 

Hours/Week
System Admin

2
DBA

2
App Admin (regression testing, patches, certs, provisioning, monitoring)

4
OIT Help Desk

5
MCOB Help Desk

4
Kaneb Cntr

4
Language Cntr (Wimba)

2
Library eReserves

.5
Second Level Support (FAQ’s, blogs, communication)

16
Academic Technologies (iTunesU, Streaming media)

2
TOTALS

41.5

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Posted in Course Management, Here at Notre Dame, lms evaluation, Teaching and Learning

What does an LMS do? What should it do?

Posted on June 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

If you think you’re evaluating a replacement for your current system and you don’t know the answers to these two vital questions, think again.

As Blackboard’s adopted products, Vista and CE, near their end of lives, many institutions are again evaluating what’s next.

Stay with Blackboard on their next generation product? Maybe even re-define what “it” is? Do you really have to replace “it” with a monolithic “system” or are the technologies that enable learning chosen one at a time as best fit for your institution and then glued together by a central authentication system and/or portal?

I wrote about Notre Dame’s evaluation process oh… what was that? About 3 years ago now. I had a series on “Switchers” using the old Tarenton cigarette motto “I’d rather fight than switch.” (Moved my blog after that and all those graphic links broke…sniff).

Well, switch we did. Many of us. A few of us were caught having just switched to ANGEL only to have ANGEL purchased by Blackboard. Some of us switched to Desire2Learn, and I hear they’re going strong. Many of us, like Notre Dame, chose the devil we know over the devil we don’t know.

This year, at BbWorld ’10, the Blackboard conference, several of us are inviting you to join us in a panel panel discussion around how to determine what it is your institution needs and how to find it.

I have to say Blackboard Learn 9.x may prove to be a better option today then it was just a couple years ago. Why? … That posting is for another day.

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Posted in Current Affairs, Here at Notre Dame, lms evaluation, Web/Tech