Traversing the LMS Terrain
Kelly Wainwright
Mike Osterman
Christina Finnerman
Bill Hill
Lewis & Clark College
0615 SW Palatine Hill Road
Portland, OR 97202
(503) 768-7245
Whitman College
345 Boyer Avenue
Walla Walla, WA 99362
(509) 527-5419
Bowdoin College
9600 College Station
Brunswick, ME 04011-8496
(207)725-3897
kelly@lclark.edu
ostermmg@whitman.edu
cfinnera@bowdoin.edu
Seattle University
901 12th Ave.,
P.O. Box 222000
Seattle, WA 98122-1090
(206) 296-5594
billh@seattleu.edu
ABSTRACT
2. LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE
With the emergence of strong open source contenders in the
Learning Management System (LMS) arena, many schools are
evaluating whether to stay with one of the commercial LMS
products such as Blackboard/WebCT or moving to one of the open
source solutions which are free to use, but offer no corporate
support. There are many factors contributing to such a decision
beyond price including migration from a current LMS, technical
and faculty support and buy in. In the end, it is a decision that an
institution needs to be well informed to make.
Lewis & Clark College is a small, liberal arts college located in
Portland, Oregon. Our student body consists of almost 2000
undergraduates, about 800 law students as well as nearly 1000 other
graduate students, primarily in education and counseling.
With a two-year residency requirement for the undergraduate
college, the learning management system is used more in a hybrid
sense to make course materials available outside of class. There has
also been interest from our graduate school to explore distance
education options as well as to improve assessment tools.
This panel will discuss the approach of several small schools in
making this decision. Each panelist will share why they chose their
LMS, give a short demo of the interface and some of the features of
the LMS, discuss the implementation process and describe any
lessons that they have learned during the process.
2.1 The Choice
For about the last ten years, Lewis & Clark has supported WebCT
as our learning management system. Due to our small size, we have
always maintained that we will support only one software
application for each specific purpose, and thus WebCT was our only
learning management system However, since we adopted WebCT
so early in its existence, many faculty had difficulty letting go of
their difficulties with the less polished earlier versions. So, while we
were paying close to $10,000 each year for a very basic WebCT
implementation, few faculty were actually using it.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.0 Computer Applications, GENERAL.
General Terms: Standardization.
Keywords:
Learning Management System, Moodle, Sakai,
Blackboard, ANGEL, open-source.
Three years ago, a new faculty member came to us from another
college where he had been using Moodle. He wanted to continue
using it at Lewis & Clark even if he had to support it on his own.
1. INTRODUCTION
What we did not take into consideration was the power of peer-topeer evangelization. It wasn’t long before this one faculty member
had many of his colleagues interested in exploring Moodle.
Information Technology maintained their stance that we did not
support it.
The number of Learning Management Systems (LMS) available to
higher education institutions is growing steadily. With the growing
popularity of open source solutions, the merge of WebCT with
Blackboard, and the addition of several other LMS companies,
deciding which solution is best for your college is becoming more
difficulty. While Lewis & Clark College, Whitman College,
Bowdoin College and Seattle University are similar in size and
need, each has chosen a different LMS system.
Finally, a campus-wide project came along for which Moodle
served as the best solution due to its community-based structure.
Since it was being used for this project, Information Technology
decided the time had come to adopt it as the campus LMS.
2.2 Moodle
Moodle is a LMS that is based on social constructionist theory. This
looks at how individuals and groups work to create their perceived
reality. Moodle has a very strong community feel.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee.
SIGUCCS’07, October 7–10, 2007, Orlando, Florida, USA.
Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-634-9/07/0010...$5.00
In a Moodle course, you deal with blocks, resources and activities.
A block can be on either the right or left side of the page. It can
contain Admin Bookmarks, Blog Menu, Blog Tags, Calendar,
Course/Site Description, Global Search, HTML, Loan Calculator,
Messages, Online Users, Participants, Quiz Results, Random
355
Glossary Entry, Remote RSS Feeds, Section Links, and Upcoming
Events.
The back-end of Moodle is supported by our Network & System
Administrator. While he does not have much experience with PHP,
he maintains the server and works with the consultants and the
Moodle user community to resolve issues as they arise.
The center section of the page is saved for resources and activities.
Resources are any web or text content, links to files and links to
other web pages—the more static elements. Activities are where
you get the true interactivity in a Moodle course. The basic
activities include Chat, Choice, Database, Feedback, Forum,
Glossary, Hot Potatoes Quiz, Journal, Lesson, Quiz,
SCORM/AICC, Survey, Wiki and Workshop.
2.5 Lessons Learned
A faculty champion/evangelist is a wonderful thing. While the IT
department can encourage faculty to explore a new tool, to have a
fellow faculty member encourage it is much more valuable.
There are various other third-party modules that have been
developed or enhancements to the modules above. We have chosen
to be very selective in which additional modules we choose to
implement in order to avoid problems when the server is upgraded.
Be enthusiastic. Focus on the positives of a new system. There will
always be issues, but focusing on the problems make faculty
hesitant to try the new system.
Our faculty especially appreciates the ease with which you can
distribute documents to students as resources. They also extensively
use forums. This is not surprising since the discussion feature was
the one most utilized in WebCT. The fact that a student’s picture,
which they can add to their profile, is visible with forum posts is an
added benefit.
Make sure that the implementation is well planned and documented
so that everyone knows and understands their role. We are still
struggling to define our roles.
Install third-party modules cautiously. While the flexibility and
added functionality these modules offer is very alluring, they are not
always upgraded at the same time as the core code, breaking tools
that faculty have come to depend upon.
2.3 The Implementation
We are still in the transition period moving folks from WebCT to
Moodle. We went live with Moodle in January, 2007, after the
semester had already begun. This allowed us to introduce it to
faculty without them feeling pressured to get their current classes
created in a short time frame. Due to the timing of our WebCT
licensing, we will renew for at least one more year which also
allows faculty a little less pressure in their Moodle adoption. To
introduce faculty to Moodle, we held a couple of Moodle
demonstrations where faculty could come and see what it looked
like and what features it offered.
3. WHITMAN COLLEGE
Whitman College is a small, residential liberal arts and sciences
undergraduate college located in Walla Walla, Washington. The
student body is 1,454, and the student to faculty ratio is 10 to 1.
Although the residency requirement is two years, 70% of the
student body lives on campus.
Whitman College's use of an LMS focuses primarily on electronic
document distribution and submission and enhancing out of class
communication. The only distance course offered is the Parents
Core class, which offers parents of first year students the
opportunity to study and discuss the same works their students.
Since not many faculty were using WebCT, there has not been
many to move. For those who do wish to convert their WebCT
course to Moodle, we do have a conversion tool. We are
individually contacting each faculty member who is active in
WebCT to see how they wish to proceed.
3.1 The Choice
Whitman College began using Blackboard Basic in 2000. By 2004,
usage had peaked and complaints and support requests from both
students and faculty arose. The majority of these revolved around
the fact that the Basic edition doesn’t allow for external
authentication (LDAP) or integration with course enrollment data.
Students consistently had difficulties logging in as they had changed
their central password but not their Blackboard password, not
realizing them to be independent. Lack of auto-enrollment and
add/drop syncing resulted in lost course time as students
encountered difficulties self-enrolling in their courses.
One major hurdle in the adoption of Moodle is the migration of the
Moodle server maintained by the individual faculty member into the
campus supported Moodle server. There is concern that we will not
be able to be as aggressive in our maintenance as he is used to, and
he will have to sacrifice the level of control to which he has become
accustomed.
While we are still early in our Moodle implementation, all
indications point to the faculty being quick to adopt it.
A study was conducted in Spring 2004 to evaluate the feasibility of
addressing these problems by upgrading to the Enterprise edition of
Blackboard. The study recommended against upgrading due to
costs. It also suggested an examination of relatively new opensource offerings.
2.4 The Support
Moodle has taken off very quickly on our campus and we have
faculty and staff inquiring about it. We have found that training is
easiest to handle one-on-one, so that the specific concerns of a
faculty can be addressed. Most faculty do not want to use all the
tools, but to get started with a few specific needs or tasks.
The open-source options were evaluated Fall 2004 against the
criteria of most-used Blackboard functionality, integration
capabilities, and maturity and future commitment of the project. Of
the several evaluated (.Lrn, Segue, Moodle and Sakai), Sakai was
chosen as the best fit for Whitman College, particularly for the
strong community involvement and forward-looking vision.
We do offer a Faculty Technology Institute each spring with
workshops geared toward faculty. This year’s FTI had great interest
in the Moodle workshops on specific activities and tasks.
The client support is handled by our four technology consultants.
Any of these four are expected to be able to work with faculty on
their specific Moodle needs.
356
3.4 Lessons Learned
In Spring 2005, Technology Services presented its recommendation
of open-source, specifically Sakai, to faculty using Blackboard. The
recommendation was well-received and the group agreed to help
pilot Sakai starting Fall 2005.
Local branding of Sakai as CLEo has been very successful. It has
helped us to relay the difference between Sakai as a code base and
how we choose to implement and configure it. Another benefit is
the sense of ownership that the campus has for CLEo.
3.2 Sakai
While access to the source code of Sakai allows us to make any
customizations, we've found that this also requires maintaining the
customizations as new versions are released. A better model is to
work with the community to add the desired functionality to the
core code of Sakai.
As a residential college, we only use features that enhance
communication and facilitate electronic file exchange.
Sakai calls the different modules "Tools". The primary tools we use
are: Resources, Gradebook, Assignments, Announcements, Email
Archive, and Drop Box.
Because the institutions that use Sakai are also responsible for
producing it, the community has great potential to produce firstclass software and innovate rapidly. The flip side of this is that each
institution needs to contribute resources to the project to make it a
success. Fortunately, one does not need to be a developer to make
meaningful contributions to the community; there is great need for
producing documentation, quality assurance work, requirements
gathering, project management, and so on.
In addition to its value as a learning management system, Sakai is
also heavily geared towards project collaboration. Several groups
and committees on campus use Sakai as a project collaboration tool.
3.3 The Implementation
Once the choice was made to pilot Sakai, Technology Services staff
worked with a pilot group of 11 faculty over the Summer of 2005 to
prepare the system and correct any major issues before the launch.
The system was named CLEo (Collaboration and Learning
Environment [online]) locally as conventional wisdom from the
Sakai community indicated that Sakai should be branded locally for
maximum benefit.
It's not only necessary to get buy-in from the faculty, students, and
IT staff using CLEo, but also college administrators and the
governing board. Whitman's CTO has worked diligently to keep
executive administrators, trustees, and overseers aware of our
progress and successes in the CLEo implementation.
Throughout the implementation, we have kept people informed of
our progress, as well as any bumps in the road. This has resulted in
trust in the implementation process and opened the channels for
candid communication.
The Fall 2005 pilot consisted of 15 faculty (4 incoming faculty
joined the pilot group) with 27 courses. Roughly 1/3 of the student
body was exposed to CLEo. Both faculty and students were
evaluated after completion of the term to gauge satisfaction and
readiness for a possible Fall 2006 conversion from Blackboard.
Sakai has been labeled as the LMS for large institutions and not
suited for smaller schools. We have successfully implemented it
with less than one FTE for all aspects of the project, and have found
that the tools are just as suited to our needs and culture as other
products on the market.
The Spring 2006 term added more faculty for a total of 23 offering a
total of 37 courses in CLEo. All of the faculty that had used
Blackboard at some point but had not yet used CLEo were
contacted individually to address any concerns they might have
about the migration from Blackboard. We found that the majority of
the concerns expressed were already resolved in the upcoming
release of Sakai, requiring only minor work to close gaps over the
Summer of 2006. A final pilot meeting was held and the decision
was jointly made by faculty and IT to do a campus-wide conversion
from Blackboard to CLEo for Fall 2006.
4. BOWDOIN COLLEGE
Bowdoin College, founded in 1794, is an undergraduate residential
liberal arts institution in Brunswick, Maine. Bowdoin enrolls
approximately 1,700 students and offers 40 majors for its Bachelor
of Arts degree. As a residential college, Bowdoin does not offer any
online courses. Blackboard is used as a means to extend and
enhance the face-to-face class experience.
Summer 2006 involved working with both faculty and members of
the Sakai community. Several workshops were offered to transition
faculty to CLEo, and each instructor was contacted as their course
materials were migrated. IT staff worked with Sakai community
members to extend existing Blackboard migration code that was
originally written for Blackboard 5.5 archives. We also participated
in a working group that added two key feature gaps to the
Resources tool. Locally, work was done to integrate with course
enrollment information from our Datatel Colleague system.
In addition to courses using Blackboard, several campus
organizations or programs are using Blackboard because of its ease
of use to share content. For example, the Intercollegiate Sri Lanka
Education (ISLE) study abroad program, which is administered at
Bowdoin, uses Blackboard as a means to share information and
communicate with participants before they go abroad.
4.1 The Choice and Implementation
The conversion process was successfully completed for the Fall
2006 term, with 64 instructors offering 117 courses, and 3/4 of the
student body having at least one course in CLEo. We have
continued to conduct mid-term evaluations of faculty to gauge
satisfaction and gather feature requests. Based on the success of the
pilot group, an advisory committee has been formed to review and
prioritize evaluation feedback, guide release and training schedules,
evaluate new features and tools, and act as informal liaisons for
CLEo. The updates that were made for the Spring 2007 term were
based solely on user priorities.
Prior to implementing Blackboard in 2005, Bowdoin College did
not have an integrated learning management system. Some
components of an LMS were offered via course web pages and a
networked file server. Course web pages provided a page for
instructors to upload syllabi or assignments and had been scripted to
link to library eReserves. Most instructors did not upload their
syllabi because of the HTML skill required. Any instructors who
wanted to have an online discussion board had to put a special
request into Information Technology. Given the Information
357
Technology staff time to support these disparate services and the
amount of training faculty needed to upload content, Bowdoin
College decided to implement an LMS. The goal was to get the
system running quickly. A group of including leaders from
Information Technology and the Dean for Academic Affairs Office,
selected the Blackboard Enterprise product.
homework and test answers to make corrections and understand
mistakes.” Several students also pointed out that, through
Blackboard, they were better able to track their progress in the
course. Blackboard, “makes understanding what assignments are
coming up a lot more easier,” said one respondent. Another
commented, “it doesn't allow me to fall behind because I have all of
the assignments on the internet.”
In Spring 2005, Bowdoin piloted Blackboard with 16 faculty and 24
courses. This pilot served not only to work out any training and
technical needs, but to develop Blackboard champions for the
campus. We deployed Blackboard campus-wide in Fall 2005. We
offered 2-day summer pedagogy workshops for faculty. These
workshops gave a broad background in blended learning theory, had
pilot Blackboard users talk about their experience, and provided
hands-on time for the faculty to begin to incorporate the tool into
their course. These workshops enabled us to show Blackboard as
not merely an information dissemination tool, but as a potential
asynchronous interactive part of a course.
Not surprisingly, 96% of faculty said Blackboard helped their
students access their course materials. Though not as widely
realized, other important benefits are:
65% indicated Blackboard helped them access or communicate with
their students
57% indicated Blackboard helped them try something innovative
with their instruction
38% indicated it helped them provide timely feedback to students
24% indicated it helped them monitor students’ progress
Bowdoin staff have used Blackboard's API to develop building
blocks that serve our community. For example, we created a
building block to make access to the library eReserves within
Blackboard. Also, we created a photo roster of students in a class,
which faculty used to familiarize themselves with students in the
early weeks of the semester.
4.5 Lessons learned during the process
Leverage the roll out of an LMS technology to encourage faculty to
think about new ways students can learn the course material.
Foster champions who will encourage others to use the LMS in
innovative ways.
4.2 Blackboard
Proactively seek feedback from students and faculty.
Within Blackboard's Learning System courses are made up of
Content Modules and Course Tools. Content Modules comprise the
bulk of the instructor-created content for a class. Though we have
set up default Content Areas for each newly created course,
instructors can modify these for their course. Within each Content
Area, instructors add "items" which can be text, images, or web
links.
Collect baseline data so you can see your progress
5. SEATTLE UNIVERSITY (ANGEL)
Seattle U. is a Jesuit university in Seattle, Washington with approx.
7,000 students and 600 faculty. SU offers approx. 1,000 classes
each quarter, 450 of which are web-enhanced. A few classes might
be described as hybrids, in that they replace some sessions with
online activities. To date, there has been one (continuing)
completely online course in the school's LMS.
Blackboard Tools include Announcements , Digital Drop Boxes,
Discussion Boards, Email integration, Tests/Surveys, Gradebooks,
.Journal/Blog (through a third party product, provided by Learning
Objects), and Teams/Wiki (another Learning Objects tool used by
some).
5.1 The Choice
Blackboard Enterprise also has a File Services area, where students
and instructors can store and share files. Each course has its own
File Services directory as does each user. Science courses that are
sharing data files have found this a useful way for students to share
their data files.
In Fall 2003, Seattle University began an evaluation of course
systems. At that time, Seattle U. had been using WebCT for 3 years.
There were several motivations for a fresh look at LMS choices:
upcoming annual license renewal; relatively low adoption rate by
faculty; concerns about ease of use among faculty and instructional
technologists; and a goal of extending SU's efforts in web-based
learning.
4.3 The Support
Bowdoin has skilled technology staff dedicated to the success and
reliability of Blackboard. The Blackboard Project Manager spends
approximately 60% of her time managing and supporting
Blackboard. Our Systems Architect designed a dual-server system
and we are in the process of adding a load balancer. Blackboard is
considered an essential system.. A programmer is available to
develop new building blocks so that important needs can be
addressed in house, if necessary.
The school's faculty technology committee (TLTR) evaluated 3
systems: WebCT, Blackboard, and ANGEL. The evaluation
included RFP's, user tests, vendor presentations and an online ballot.
The University chose ANGEL as it's new LMS based on the
following criteria:
ANGEL was rated best by our campus in terms of ease of use. The
interface offers an intuitive interface for adding and organizing
content. This was the most important factor in the TLT's decision
hoping that a simpler tool might increase faculty use of an LMS.
4.4 The Impact
After the first semester, we conducted surveys of the students and
faculty. The students found that the key advantage to Blackboard is
having all their course material in one place. According to one
student: “All material is in one central location. Gives me access to
ANGEL offers a technical support portal and knowledge base.
Other schools had reported problems with technical support when
using the other LMS.
ANGEL allows faculty to store frequently used content in a central
358
repository to be easily shared in courses. Administrators and
instructional technologists have tools for managing user access,
configuring and customizing the system and collecting data on use
of the system.
from data system administrators, especially for downloading
enrollment information from Datatel.
Design of faculty training: the instructional design of faculty
training was aimed at building knowledge, skills and attitudes for
faculty who had likely not taught online.
ANGEL has a very active listserv and annual conference for users.
The user community shares information about technology, training
and pedagogy.
Develop FAQs, web sites and other support resources.
Communications has been important for creating interest and
keeping users informed.
The committee believed that ANGEL offered the most features and
functionality for the least cost.
Training and consultation are offered continually through the
academic year. 1:1 consultations are particularly important for
helping faculty find more sophisticated ways to use the LMS.
5.2 ANGEL
ANGEL allows faculty to easily organize content into topical
modules, weekly assignments, or other schemes. It has features
common to most LMS. ANGEL offers tools for creating text and
HTML pages, uploading files, discussion boards, quizzes,
dropboxes for file sharing, and a gradebook. Newer versions of
ANGEL also feature tools for creating podcasts, blogs, wikis and
word games.
Data collection: ANGEL administrators have supplied regular
monthly reports on the use of ANGEL. This type of data collection
has been helpful for IT, faculty and administration in decision
making related to the LMS. Instructional technologists have also
surveyed faculty and students to improve support.
The interface for creating quizzes is notable for it's simplicity. In the
other LMS, quizzes and questions are authored over a series of
pages with sometimes confusion navigation. In ANGEL quiz
authoring more closely resembles traditional quiz: questions are
added to a page and delivery settings are chosen from a menu.
System requirements from ANGEL should be strictly followed,
especially with concern to storage space and memory.
5.4 Lessons Learned
Basic faculty training has been offered as a 2 hour session. In order
to more consistently advance use beyond file sharing, additional
sessions are recommended.
ANGEL has Resource Libraries, which allow faculty to develop,
store and link frequently used content to courses. Linked content is
automatically updated in courses when it is changed in a Library.
Faculty can also share content with other teachers by way of the
Libraries.
ANGEL administrators will need SQL skills or contact with
database administrators.
It's important to establish the LMS as a priority with network and
server services. The quality of experience for the community will be
effected by server technology, connection speed and network
maintenance. These factors have a direct impact on LMS courses.
ANGEL Learner Profile was appealing to our faculty. The Learner
Profile gives instructors a graphical view of a student's progress in a
course.
6. CONCLUSION
The SQL Query Manager has also been valuable in studying the
amount of use and type of use. For example, learning technologists
can collect data on the number of discussion boards compared to
other kinds of content in all classes for a term. The SQL Query
Manager has allowed instructional technologists to easily manage
access for different groups of users.
While each school has chosen a different LMS to support and
maintain, the tools that they offer are very similar. The thing that is
different in each instance is the campus culture in which they are
being introduced.
Some of the key questions to consider in choosing an LMS for your
campus are the following:
5.3 The Implementation
Open Source vs. Commercial – Can your campus community
handle the dynamic nature of an open source solution or does it
need the stability offered by the backing of a company? While the
price of open source solution is right, sometimes the services
offered by a commercial solution are worth the price.
Our implementation took place over 4 months, beginning with the
installation of an ANGEL test server. However, the implementation
is really still a work in progress, as we discover new ways to
support, manage and configure ANGEL.
The process included:
What are the key tools desired by your faculty? While it is
important to consider the whole package, make sure that the tools
your faculty use the most are strong in the package that you choose.
Trials on remote systems and a local test server.
Installation of a production server.
Finally, make sure that it is a decision that your faculty support.
Since they will be the main constituency using this tool, if they find
it awkward or cumbersome to use, they won’t.
Staff training in online course provided by ANGEL.
Development of support: enrollment, user access, course creation,
requests, helpdesk support. Some of this work required assistance
359