Components of a LMS

I think many if not all the features listed under Learning at the fronter website would be useful. Maybe it would be easier we we copied the list here? In any case, at my institution, the highest priorities would be portfolio, SCORM support, collaboration tools, and integrated support for a classroom response system.

We have a lot of faculty who are hooked on classroom 'clickers'. Our current system is a small device which uses radio to allow students to respond to questions during class, and have their responses recorded on the professor's laptop. Right now our system is in flux because the company we picked was bought out, so everything is on the table. Some of the systems under consideration provide non-proprietary, web based response systems, including web forms, phone texting, etc., which means that any student with an existing mobile device can answer, even if it is just a non-web-enabled phone. BUT, we don't have any contenders that are truly integrated with our LMS (Sakai). I think if there were a good Drupal tool for collecting student data during class, it would be a compelling option, and I think such a tool could be built within Drupal. Maybe it even exists? It would have to do far more than the built-in 'poll', but be far simpler and more reliable than the existing Quiz module. Ideally it would be something faculty could author questions for from within PowerPoint, since that is what they are used to doing.

The other thing that I think Drupal might be well-suited for and which is huge on University campuses right now is the portfolio. Sakai has a portfolio system, and we already have provided our students with Google Apps accounts, so this is a crowded space, especially when you add in faculty/programs currently providing Dreamweaver portfolio templates to their students. Ideally, a campus portfolio would need to combine the strengths and avoid the pitfalls of all three by providing:

• privacy, but with the option to go public with a subset of pages ( call it a presentation portfolio )
• a means for institutions to link portfolio items with their stated General Education Goals for the purposes of accreditation and institutional evaluation
• an intuitive user interface for all parties: students, institutions, evaluators (both internal and external), faculty, career counselors, potential employers
• good export/archiving options. individual portfolios should be portable.
• good linkages to course sites, if these are separate, such that submitting an assignment and submitting an artifact for use within a portfolio is the same operation.
• and, to top it all off, it needs to allow students to individualize a portfolio's look and feel, and for faculty to set course or departmental constraints on the look-and-feel.

Maybe it is off topic to go on and on about portfolios in an LMS forum, but I don't think so. For universities, at least, it is becoming a must have feature, and why would you not want your portfolio to be integrated with your course tools?