Posted by alistair.boudreaux on April 23, 2010 at 7:53pm
Hello everyone!
I am happy to see people already participating in this group. As Kim mentioned, this group started due to a need for schools to leverage the open-source community of Drupal in developing learning management tools. Our 'birds of a feather' discussion group made it painfully obvious that the current crop of LMS tools are not fully meeting our needs.
Hopefully, as more people get involved we can begin to create a set of modules (some that already exist) that we can fit our individual uniqueness and stop throwing money into the black hole of licensing fees and poor customer service.
Comments
Corporate market
Will this group focus only on the academic environment? Or will you also consider LMS features for the corporate market?
The group that gathered in a
The group that gathered in a spontaneous birds-of-a-feather were mostly from the academic institutions with a couple of web shops doing work for academics. I would suggest, however, that we brainstorm around a set of features that we would like to see in an LMS, match existing modules to what we can and then scoping out modules for development.
Then, based on the features, you can decide what works and doesn't for you.
My $0.02.
--Mike
Corporate market
Although this started with academic institutions in mind, I agree with Mike that this group should focus on the LMS irrespective of whether this is corporate or educational.
If you wait by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.
Corporate market
One of the things necessary for the corporate LMS market is SCORM and/or AICC compliance for online course launch, delivery and tracking. I don't know about the academic market. Is this part of the plan?
SCORM
I won't presume to speak for the entirety of of the academic market, however, I think the only compliance issues of concern is 508 accessibility.
From my point of view SCORM and/or AICC compliance was not one of the aspirations for an LMS. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be. I would like to hear more from the members of the group.
If you wait by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.
Corporate LMS
In my view, learning in an academic setting centers on a defined group of students that meets physically together regularly for an extended period of time with an assigned instructor. An LMS designed for this environment would support this type of experience, and provide lots of tools for learning interactions among students and teachers outside the classroom.
On the corporate side, formal learning was historically people going to a central location for classroom training. It has now evolved into blended learning, a combination of online and offline instruction. Online includes asynchronous courses, which people can take anytime, anywhere (like distance learning in the academic setting). Plus online webinars (synchronous, or recorded and available asynchronously). Plus traditional classroom training. And emerging now, social learning tools.
The core functionality of a corporate LMS is to deliver and track asynchronous courses and assessments, using a standard like SCORM or AICC. Many can also track webinar and classroom training scheduling, attendance and testing. A learning content management sytem (LCMS) adds collaborative course authoring and a learning object repository. Many LMSs have evolved into talent management systems, tracking employee skills and development. And now some are adding social learning capabilities.
At a minimum, a corporate LMS has to be able to deliver and track asynchronous courses using SCORM. However, I think it's the social learning tools that will distinguish LMSs going forward.
Most enterprise LMSs are proprietary and very expensive. Most open-source LMSs seem geared to the academic market. However, it sounds like this group was formed because the current proprietary and OS LMSs are inadequate.
My $.02.