7.9: Summary

When considering the purchase of any learning management system it is essential to assess your needs carefully before buying and to implement them properly to ensure success.

Here are a few key points:

• There are at least 100 LMSs available for business, and at least 50 available for education. Many of the latter are open-source. Although they offer different features, it is best not to ignore the LMSs from the other sector.
• There is no single “best” solution. The ideal solution is the one that fits your needs and environment.
• Obtaining an LMS will change the way you work. Choosing one is not a technology decision. It is about leadership and change.
• Be sure your LMS will work with the tools that instructors are likely to use for course development, and that it will integrate with other systems such as HR and registration systems.
• Be careful about learning content management. Everyone thinks, “What a great idea—save the course materials in a way that they can be reused easily.” But too often it doesn’t happen. Some organizational cultures do not support the value of sharing. This is a great tool if it is used, but an expensive mistake if not used.
• When assessing your needs be careful of scope creep. When asking people what they would like to see, they will tend to ask for everything. Distinguish between the things that are truly needed and the “nice-to-haves”.

The Future

“We contend that the current technical design philosophy of today’s learning management systems is substantially retarding progress toward the kind of flexible virtual classrooms that teachers need to provide quality education”. (Feldstein & Masson, 2006, para. 4)

There is a need for third generation learning management systems, based on the constructivism theory of learning and social networking in order to support online collaborative learning communities. (See Chapter 30, Supporting E-learning through Communities of Practice.) Developing these third generation systems will be a challenge, especially for the corporate models that haven’t figured out yet how to manage simple emails. As of this writing, education LMSs are ahead of corporate LMSs in this respect, but the latter will also need to include more social learning tools (wikis, blogs, etc.). In the immediate future, LMSs will continue to be primarily administrative tools and only secondarily learning tools. Instructors and students will be challenged to find ways to use them so that they make learning easy.

The most used electronic learning tools are Google and other search engines. In the near future almost everything will be available online. Ten years ago a colleague of mine said that everything that is current and worthwhile is already online. This is much truer now. Google and the Gutenberg Project are putting libraries of books online. Google is putting maps on the Web. Universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are making their course materials available online. Communities are creating knowledge repositories with wikis. Blogs are making almost everyone’s opinions available, whether we want them or not.

Distributed learning platforms will enable people to access learning modules and services from anywhere. Mobile learning solutions will enable people to access information on their personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.

The challenge will be for learners (all of us) to manage all of this. Much of it will happen beyond the scope of any locally installed learning management system. Google and other search engines will evolve to provide management features.

Content will be organized as reusable learning objects much like learning content management systems do, but on a much broader scale. Wikis and folksonomies (also called “tagging”) may help solve this. Wikipedia defines a folksonomy as “an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels [or tags] that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links”.

Personalization and context-aware devices such as GPS (global positioning system) units will also help. Personalization is the ability of a website to adapt to its users, as Amazon does when it suggests other books you may like, or for the user to adapt the website for his or her own purposes, as Google does when it allows you to customize its home page. GPS units can locate the user so that information can be customized for that location. For example, a user who lives in Chicago but is visiting New York would receive weather information for New York.

LMSs will continue to exist for company and institutional record keeping, but much of the learning will happen beyond their scope.