Here’s another good Campus Technology article (Linda Briggs, 6/4/08 ) this time on higher ed trends in the field of learning management systems (LMS), utilizing data from the recent Gartner survey. I noted three primary trends from the article, which shouldn’t be particularly new or surprising, to any of you keeping a watchful eye on where LMSs are headed. Still, they’re interesting and telling:
Trend #1:
Increased usage of Open Source products; mainly Sakai and Moodle. The surprising leader in growth of the two: Moodle. Gartner predicts that Open Source platforms will secure 35% of market share by the end of 2008.
Trend #2:
Increased development of home-grown products. Unlike the completely “coded-from-scratch” versions we saw in the late 1990s and early millenium, home-grown iterations today may call from “a variety of other content management portal applications with relatively good, usable toolsets.” Campuses now can create their own e-learning systems with these tools. Or they can customize their own LMS using Lotus or SharePoint.
Trend #3:
Additions of social technology-type tools in all LMSs (we saw that coming!)
So let me offer one rant on Trend #3. If one of the main complaints of the LMSs over the past half-dozen years is that they turned into monolithic learning environments which don’t play well with others, why silo-ize even more? Ok, sure there are security issues, but let’s get busy figuring out this collaboration bit. Wouldn’t the resources be better spent coding for integration and interoperability so we don’t see the emergence of each platform coming up with its own [duplicative] e-portfolio, blog, and version of MySpace?
Is it me? Am I just being cranky today?
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