Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012 - (Page 34)

“ If you look at all those needs and that comes with it, that is has been in the traditional LMS. I haven’t seen any one vendor emerge as far as together.” putting increased customization more than what all of those pieces as one of the “Big Three” textbook publishers, he says those improvements may not come until designers of an LMS-CMS hybrid look at such a tool as more than a way to drive users to their content. “I think Pearson’s goal is to sell their textbooks and to use [OpenClass] as a way to sell the books, either online or in print,” McIntosh says of the tool. “It’s kind of like a service they are providing to enhance the sale of their textbooks.” The worlds of open-source and proprietary learning-management systems also appear to be converging, which may partly explain why Blackboard bought Moodlerooms and NetSpot, two companies that sell learningmanagement software built upon the opensource Moodle LMS. Historically, some experts say, commercial LMS vendors have worked mainly with entire virtual schools and other institutions that are implementing online learning in a broad, systematic fashion. Meanwhile, Moodle users have often been early-adopting, tech-savvy teachers looking for a more affordable way to manage content within their own classrooms and not necessarily across classroom walls. —Matthew Wicks_Chief Operating Officer_iNACOL emerge as far as putting all of those pieces together.” Blending Systems The LMS pieces themselves aren’t as rigidly defined as they used to be. Conventionally speaking, a learningmanagement system is the software on which the online portion of any partially or fully virtual course is delivered, documented, and reported. A content-management system is the software on which Web content is organized, edited, and published, and a learning-contentmanagement system is a CMS used specifically for educational purposes. As the field has developed, some companies—such as Washington-based Blackboard and Desire2Learn Inc., of Kitchener, Ontario—have grown to offer both LMS and CMS products. And as schools look for systems that fit their particular approaches to course delivery, many vendors offer products with features that blur the LMS-CMS line. A few companies are progressing toward products that fully mesh the LMS and the CMS, says McIntosh, including iVersity, of Berlin, and Pearson, of London, through its new, free OpenClass system. With an increasingly wide swath of the schools in the United States embracing online or blended learning in some form, McIntosh says the demand for simpler, more unified products that combine both features will only increase. But there is still plenty to improve upon in the iVersity and Pearson products, he says. In the case of Pearson, which is also recognized Vendor Collaboration Perhaps heartened by the successes of early adopters, more superintendents and principals are beginning to explore components of virtual or blended learning on a schoolwide level. And while open-source systems can be a good fit for a blended classroom where content is coming from a range of free and proprietary sources, the challenges of unifying student data, providing system security, and maintaining an opensource LMS can be daunting. “Open educational resources are really only useful to a smaller subset of the market than we talk about,” says Myk Garn, the director of education for the Southern Regional Education Board, a 16-state group based in Atlanta. “We’ve learned that this stuff has to be enterprise-class,” he says, meaning the software must be fast and highly reliable. “No matter how innovative you are, that ain’t cheap, and it takes serious people doing it.” Moodlerooms and NetSpot are among the companies that specialize in providing support to schools that want to use an opensource LMS, Moodle, on a systemwide scale, but even they struggle to keep up with the increasingly diverse school and district needs, says Moodlerooms’ chief executive officer, Lou Pugliese. Given trends like the increase in mobilelearning, social-networking, and adaptivelearning tools in education, he says, his company’s acquisition by Blackboard reflects an industry sentiment that what’s best for business is to collaborate across vendor lines. “We’re moving toward a more vendor-neutral environment where we’re trying to serve the marketplace better,” Pugliese says. “I think the customer is much better served to the extent you can manage the chasm between an opensource and proprietary system.” McIntosh, of Trimeritus eLearning Solutions, adds that, despite the size of his growing 34 >> www.digitaldirections.org  http://www.digitaldirections.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012

Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012
Contents
Editor's Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Game On
Applicable Knowledge
Digital Badges
Lessons From Higher Education
Competitive Edge
Recognizing Online PD
Ready or Not
Q&A
Opinion
Data Delivery

Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012

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