[Athen] FW: EduTools / MIT Survey on Course/Learning Management Systems, Course Materials Life Cycle, and Related Costs

Ron Stewart stewartr at adtech-nw.com
Mon Mar 12 10:46:12 PDT 2007


Some of you may find this to be of interest.

Ron Stewart

-----Original Message-----
From: Russ Poulin [mailto:email at wcet.info]
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2007 1:22 PM
To: stewartr at adtech-nw.com
Subject: EduTools / MIT Survey on Course/Learning Management Systems, Course
Materials Life Cycle, and Related Costs

Hello WCET Members and Friends -

The results of a survey that WCET's EduTools performed for MIT on
Course/Learning Management Systems, Course Materials Life Cycle, and Related
Costs are available at:
http://www.wcet.info/services/publications/MIT07-19-06.pdf

MIT selected ten peer institutions to be surveyed on their use of these
products and how much it cost them to operate and support these products.
See how your institution compares. Key findings include:

Course/Learning Management Systems
- Institutions use a variety of C/LMS products: commercial, open source,
and locally developed.
- There appears to be large scale growth in the use of C/LMS.
- There is a trend toward supporting one centralized C/LMS.
- The most frequently anticipated feature to improve in the future was
"ease of use" in doing common tasks quickly.
- Other anticipated improvement include: more support for pedagogy needs,
support from multiple platforms (including cell phones), and support for
collaborative authoring (blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.)

Course Materials Life Cycle
- The birth-to-death materials life cycle, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare
(http://ocw.mit.edu/), is foreign to the culture of most institutions
surveyed.
- Surveyed institutions (other than MIT) are not yet using repositories
(such as DSpace and Fedora) for use or reference beyond when the term was
offered.

Related Costs
- Institutions did not have a good handle on cost data and (for many of the
respondents)
costs are not a principle driver in decision-making.
- There was a wide variation in cost per student for C/LMS on-going
operating costs.
- The costs of publishing course content are distributed and mostly opaque.
- Annual costs of course materials (for non-C/LMS costs such as third party
content) can
exceed the cost of the C/LMS by millions of dollars.

While the above indicates overall findings, examining the report for the
differences in how these institutions tackle these issues is most
informative. There is definitely not a "one-size-fits-all" solution. The
full report includes an institution-by-institution list of responses to each
question in the survey.

Happy Reading!!

Russ

Russell Poulin
Associate Director
rpoulin at wcet.info
303-541-0305
WCET-The Cooperative advancing the effective
use of technology in higher education
www.wcet.info

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