XplanaZine

Big, proprietary systems. Names like Microsoft, Oracle, and yes,
BlackBoard jump to mind.

The advantages of these systems? They were early players in
their markets, gained a significant piece of the market share,
and helped define the standards (formal or informal) by which we
do certain things with software. They provide broad, common
solutions that can scale to need. And everyone uses them so you
can almost guarantee your compatibility with others if you do
too.

The disadvantages? These large, broad platforms are not always as adaptable or agile as we need them to be. In addition, they are expensive. Small budgets need not apply.

The budget and agility issues aren’t just relevant to smaller companies. Ford announced recently that it was abandoning Oracle’s online purchasing system after spending $200 million since 2000 trying to get the software to work. Ford is returning to its homegrown, legacy systems because, while they may not be fancy, they work.

In the education market, players like BlackBoard and PeopleSoft are being pressed to deal with the realities of tight budgets and open source pressures. OKI, SCORM, and IMS are open standards that provide for creating better education-directed applications and allowing those applications to talk to each other. OKI, in particular, also paves the way for new applications to communicate with existing institutional infrastructure. These standards have fostered the development of both smaller commercial and institutional products that compete with the larger platforms by providing more flexible and institutional-specific solutions.

LMS platforms like BlackBoard and WebCT are responding to the open source challenge, particularly the demand for importing and exporting standards-based learning objects into their systems. This month, WebCT announced its partnership with MERLOT to facilitate the use of WebCT-based learning objects from MERLOT to create learning units or courses. BlacbBoard, in turn, announced the release of its Enterprise Learning Object Repository that will allow BlackBoard users at an institution to search for and share learning objects.

The question is whether or not these evolutions by BlackBoard and WebCT represent significant changes or address the limitations inherent in being a large, proprietary platform. The strikes against them are that:

• they are expensive
• they are proprietary and inflexible
• they are closed systems

Addressing a user’s desire to use standards-based learning objects that are really independent of any particular platform is nice. But, in order to do so, one must be using enterprise and latest-edition versions of the platforms (most expensive). In addition, while these systems are necessarily interested in getting objects into their platforms, they are not open in terms of exporting objects in as open a fashion. So, even though there is an evolution towards being able to use standards-based learning objects with some ease, the primary complaints remain: they are expensive, they are inflexible, and they are closed (things come in easily but don’t go out).

Institutions and Instructors are looking for solutions that:

• are universal and mobile: instructors and research content does not stay at one university for an entire career. Such content and work needs to be able to travel from one institution to the next easily, regardless of the platforms adopted by a specific institution;
• are cost-effective: institutions are responsible to their constituents and must spend learning dollars wisely.
• they can control to some extent: we want solutions that can be modified to fit our individual needs and that can map to institutional resources (development and infrastructure resources).

Large, proprietary systems continue to evolve and some are getting the message better than others. Meanwhile, other players are emerging rapidly. The next two years will be very interesting.