XplanaZine

Recently, USA TODAY ran
an interesting article about the declining Protestant majority in America. At present, only 52% of Americans consider themselves Protestant and that number is shrinking. On the rise are those who have no religion, consider themselves “just Christian,” and non-Christian religions. As political scientist Corwin Smidt noted, this “Growing pluralism forces an examination of our commonality,” he says. “How do we find basis for agreement” in schools, neighborhoods and voting booths? It’s a lot more complicated now.”

This is a natural lead in for what is to come on the LMS and general education technology fronts in upcoming years. While many instructors have been unhappy with or felt limited by the choices available in the Higher Education LMS game, the reality to date is that the number of actual players has been extremely limited. In the United States, other than some significant home-grown systems, the only participants in the game to speak of have been
href=”http://www.blackboard.com/:>BlackBoard and WebCT. In the
href=”http://www.edutools.info/course/news/detail.jsp?id=878″>global education LSM market, the situation has been more diverse but the major players (the same two) still hold the big majority of business.

Recently, however, a wedge has been driven into the heart of the LMS majority (monopolistic) share owned by the original and select few. The release of the Sakai beta, an open source LMS platform building on SCORM and OKI standards, already threatens the hold of WebCT and BlackBoard on the large university market. These
universities already have IT staff to handle installation and maintenance of an LMS platform and will welcome not having to pay steep licensing fees for that product.

Part of what has made this possible is the advancement of SCORM standards and the evolution of sharable learning objects across platforms. This development is creating a wave of “ecumenicalism” within the LMS arena. If content can be created, stored, and shared across multiple platforms, why not choose the model that costs less while delivering a solid set of functionality? As institutions are looking for ways to manage IT budgets, working with lower-cost solutions makes lots of sense.

As the mainstream leaders like WebCT and BlackBoard lose market share to Sakai and other open source solutions, the importance of standards will become ever more prevalent. It also bears repeating that this “growing pluralism forces an examination of our commonality.” In the next 18-24 months, academic institutions and content providers alike will look closely at what online learning tools are really about and why/how they are being used. In other words, we will finally leave the stage where it is simply enough to have some form of LMS just to keep up with the trends.

The new LMS religions will demand more serious soul searching and behavior change. Of course, some will choose to remain in the safe, if expensive fold of tradition (WebCT and BlackBoard), but even those will be forced into new analyses is they are to maintain a modicum of success. Principal among the items that will be most important in this period are:

• Degree of interoperability. Systems that offer flexibility and interoperability will be more popular and successful.As faculty and students become more mobile and untethered, transferring content from one location to another will be a key feature.
• Learning object authoring tools. The LMS religion is, ultimately driven by a desire to teach and a need for teaching and learning content. Increasingly content will be rule and systems that focus on content will gain increased market share.
• Ability to create sharable libraries of content. It may have taken some time, but in the future instructors and departments in traditional institutions really will cooperate on content creation and sharing. For-profit schools are already setting this as a priority and have put LMS providers on notice.

As with the greater plurality of religions in America, the LMS scenario is getting much more complicated. We cannot see the final destination yet, but it doesn’t take much of a looking glass to know that things are going to get even more complicated before they start to simplify.