Current developments in learning management systems

Guess, A. (2008) Outsourcing, Open Source and Budget Cuts Inside Higher Education, Oct 29.

Andy Guess reports on a presentation about the Campus Computing Project 2008 survey at the Educause 2008 conference. Highlights from Andy Guest’s report:

‘This year’s survey, culled from 531 respondents over the Web from September to October of this year, covers the spectrum of institutions from two-year public colleges to doctoral research universities in the USA.

Although enterprise, license-based learning management platforms continue to dominate the higher education landscape (56.8 percent use Blackboard, down from 66.3 percent last year), the potential for increasing open source adoption remains. For the first time, the survey asked respondents about their likelihood to adopt open-source solutions such as Moodle or Sakai. Almost a quarter, 24.4 percent, reported a high likelihood that their institutions would migrate within five years, by 2013. The numbers were significantly lower for other open-source applications, such as content management systems and human resource management software.

As it stands, Moodle is used at more than twice the number of colleges than Sakai, with 10 percent adopting the former institution-wide compared with under 4 percent for the latter. The discrepancy owes mainly to private four-year colleges, which overwhelmingly choose Moodle, while public universities favor Sakai in almost a reverse pattern. The two solutions are divided about equally in other sectors.

The use of clickers is rising, although they continue to be relatively rare classroom tools. At community colleges, especially, their use doubled over the past year — to just over 4 percent.’

The report also covers issues such as IT security, IT budget trends, outsourcing of e-mail.