I have been thinking a lot about Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Course Management Systems (CMS), or whatever else you might want to call them. In my role as chief technology advocate here at the Yale School of Drama (YSD) I am chairing a faculty technology planning committee, and we are considering advocating wider faculty use of Yale's LMS options. Currently Yale uses an internally developed system called CLASSES, but it looks like we may be moving to Sakai over the next couple of years. And I am not just a planner, I am a user as well. I am taking classes at the on line Capella University, and they just migrated their classroom environment to WEBCT.
Let me say right upfront that as a student I don't like WEBCT. I just find it to be a very inflexible learning environment. My list of complaints grows every day, mostly around items such as it doesn't auto link web addresses in postings, you can't edit your own posts, and other simple user interface/usability issues. The vexing thing is that the features I expect are standard on most other web-based applications I use, so it seems reasonable to expect them in this environment. A more serious issue is that the WEBCT environment seems to be a series of small boxes. In order to get to see the current discussions, for instance, I need to drill through several levels, and finally reach a point where I can see the detail of just one post. The problem is that I often want to respond based on a couple of prior postings, but can't see them when I am doing my own post. This design might be intended to minimize student confusion, but I find it very limiting, and it makes it difficult to see information in its larger context.
I had a demonstration with Yale's test version of Sakai yesterday, and in contrast I really like it. With the little testing I have done I find it to be quite flexible, and it has many nice features. The killer feature, as far as I am concerned, is its ability to integrate RSS feeds. I am getting my web design class posted on the server now, and am eagerly looking forward to working further with it. I'll report back how my students find it, and my impressions after using it in a real classroom situation.
The best aspect of Sakai is its open-source roots, and the ability for the institution to customize the portal based on their requirements. For instance I was discussing the availability of a blogging tool with the Yale project head. That may be coming in version 2.0, but if not it is not a big deal for Yale to grab one of the open source blogging tools and integrate it with our Sakai portal. That is the type of flexibility that I have come to expect in my web experiences, and I am sure exactly what our students are expecting.
The larger issue is whether we even need to be deploying LMS'. George Siemens at elearnspace offers an interesting review of the pluses and minuses of LMS' at http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lms.htm . At incorporated subversion they have another perspective on the topic at http://incsub.org/blog/?p=202. Both are great articles and well worth checking out.
In the end there are plenty of organizational needs at university's and I don't think our need for some type of LMS will go away. But I am all in favor of the open source, open standards route, and am looking forward to my further foray's with SAKAI.
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