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"Many universities are currently, or have recently, reviewed their enterprise LMS including my own employer. Unfortunately we haven't made our review process public but many universities have been generous enough to provide information about their reviews. The following list are some of the publicly available LMS reviews that I have found. These were really useful in developing and informing our own review and I hope that by bringing them together in one place it will be useful for others. I have provided links to each institutions review documents and a quick summary of their process. I have included the eventual choice of LMS but of course this is a very small sample and shouldn't be taken as being indicative of any particular trend in LMS selection. The list is not presented in any particular order. If you know of any other publicly available LMS review documents please let me know and I will add them."

As a follow on to the discussion of social learning and formal learning in Long Live … great post by BJ Schone - Have LMSs Jumped The Shark? I constantly hear people (across many organizations) complain about their learning management system (LMS). They complain that their LMS has a terrible interface that is nearly unusable. Upgrades are difficult and cumbersome. Their employees' data is locked in to a proprietary system. Users hate the system. It's ugly. (Did I miss anything?) We've recently seen LMSs shift to include more functionality, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, etc. I think they're heading in the wrong direction. I don't really understand why LMS vendors are now thinking they need to build in every possible 2.0 tool. If I want a great blogging platform, I'm going to download WordPress (it's free and has a huge support community). If I want a great wiki platform, I'm going to download MediaWiki or DokuWiki (also free and they have huge support communities). And when it comes to social networking, as a co-worker put it, "Do they really think I'm going to create a 'friends' list in the LMS? Seriously?"

"I suppose it was inevitable. At a time when even The Chronicle is asking whether Blackboard can be replaced by WordPress, a slick demo of a super-cool product like Wave was bound to trigger breathless speculation about the demise of the LMS. Equally predictably, the most enthusiastic predictions that the LMS will be replaced are being made by people who have already replaced their LMS. It is not terribly shocking to read Jim Groom predicting that this time the LMS is REALLY doomed!!!! (I mean that to be taken affectionately.) If you are comfortable teaching a class using WordPress or PBWiki or [insert hip and free Web 2.0 technology du jour], then there is a good chance that you will be comfortable teaching a class with Wave."

"The Delta Initiative, a consultancy group, just did a terrific webinar in cooperation with the Cal State system on the state of the LMS. This is not one of those predict-the-demise or predict-the-next-flux-capacitor presentations, though. It's just an excellent, down-to-earth institutional view of how LMS adoption is going in the real world and what the challenges are, especially for large university consortia."

"As Casey Green said in my recent interview with him, the LMS space is a "market in transition." In 2005, the year that Blackboard acquired WebCT, the two platforms had a combined total of 75.6% U.S. higher education market share, and the next closest competitor had barely cracked 2% market share. Today, the situation is substantially different and changing rapidly. But the narratives around exactly what's happening tend to be off. Typically, I hear the frame as being a contest between Blackboard and "open source." Has "open source" (by which we mean Moodle and Sakai, the two open source LMSs with significant market share in the United States) made inroads into the market? If you read what the majority of sell-side financial analysts1 are writing, you may see the claim that "open source" is not putting a major dent in Blackboard. If you talk to Moodle or Sakai advocates, you might hear that they are crushing the company in sales. Neither account is really capturing what's happening in the market, so I'm going to try to explain what we know about what's really going on in a two-part series. In this post, I'll talk about what the data are telling us so far about the recent shifts in the market, describe how colleges and universities come to decide that they need to go to market for an LMS, and assess the degree to which we may see an uptick in the number of schools that decide to look around and evaluate our options. In the second post, I'll describe how the next four years of market transition may be different than the previous four and what signs we should be watching for to see which way the market is going to break."

"Sakai is an alternative Learning Management System, similar to WebCT. Brock evaluated WebCT and alternatives such as Sakai for use as Brock's primary Learning Management System (LMS) starting in the 2009 academic year. A Pilot of Sakai with 50 courses and 27 instructors was conducted for the 2007 academic year. Instructors had the option to include the course that they were teaching in this pilot. Sakai is a free and community source based product that offers a different take on learning on-line. Moodle, which was also being evaluated in a smaller scale is a free open source option. A representative advisory group was struck to co-ordinate the pilot and help shape the decision. Please feel free to leave informal feedback below. This group conducted a pilot and submitted the results (below) to the University Senate and the Provost and Vice-President. A decision was made by the Provost and Vice-President based on this information to implement a Sakai-based system as Brock's Primary LMS."

"I have just read Lisa Lane's article in First Monday entitled "Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching". I really liked her paper, not least because it raised some issues that I hadn't considered before regarding default settings in an LMS and the idea of opt in and opt out learning management systems. It also described the way many academics use (or don't use) the web in their work or play and how this effects their ability to use some of the more 'advanced' features of an LMS that go beyond an instructivist model of delivery. Perhaps most importantly of all it discusses the importance of emphasising pedagogy before 'features and tools' when working with web novices."

I liked the opt-in opt-out ideas. The issues raised about the contstraints imposed when customising or installing a cms are timely for us in terms of our new cms and in the light of the impending VLE review. Good food for thought here! The terms novice vs advanced instructors would make some for good debating. Who decides?

"A PLE (personal learning environment) is: a system that helps learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning. In contrast, a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS), such as Blackboard or Moodle, is: a software system designed to help teachers by facilitating the management of educational courses for their students, especially by helping teachers and learners with course administration. The system can often track the learners' progress, which can be monitored by both teachers and learners. Notice the difference? A VLE/LMS is all about controlling how you learn. A PLE is about giving you control over how you learn."

"There has been lots of discussion this week about whether Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or Personal Learning Network (PLN) are the right terms to describe what this is all about and some recognition that this a semantics issue. According to Rita Kop PLE is a UK term and PLN an American term. Dave Cormier questions whether the term personal should be used at all. Stephen Downes points out that personal is an OK term if you think about [Personal Learning] Network as opposed to [Personal] Learning Network - and similarly for PLE. I like that - but for me, the words are not as important as the process - although I can see that the process needs nominalising for ease of reference. If I am going to think about introducing the idea of PLEs/PLNs to my colleagues or students then I will be talking about the process and the implications of this process for learning rather than what we should call it, i.e. why it might be preferable for students to learn in environments/spaces of their own choice rather than be confined to an institutions VLE/LMS."

"With each new wave of technological innovation, the traditional way to explore the evolution of the educational model is to focus on how to best integrate the new technology into the learning process without influencing the traditional pedagogical principles and policies imposed by formal educational institutions. Recently, with the rise of new Web 2.0 tools and services (e.g. blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups, social tagging), many researchers are going the same way by exploring how to best include these tools into the traditional academic and corporate learning process. I believe however that in doing so, educational Web 2.0 technologies will go the way of previous technologies (e.g. LMS, LCMS, CMS, LO, LOR); i.e. much hype followed by a slow death. "

Science fiction novelist William Gibson is attributed with the quote, "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." He was speaking of course about the science facts upon which much sci-fi is based, and learning professionals also know something about understanding the realities of right now such that we can begin to support the organization of tomorrow. The fact is that the business of learning and development is about always looking forward. Whether gaining awareness about Millennial generation talent, the future of the LMS, or the promise of more successful remote collaboration, the realm of knowledge is very often tied to the practice of thinking ahead. We spoke with leaders and thinkers in the learning industry to get their insight into what the next decade holds for workplace learning and why we should be paying attention now.

"A full-featured web site-creation package solely for the academic community. Scholars create web sites in seconds and can easily manage everything themselves (for free)"

"An e-Literate reader comments on my post about Blackboard owing Desire2Learn money: The amount [that Blackboard will have to pay Desire2Learn, including the original award plus interest] will probably be over $3.8M USD from my rough estimates which is higher than the expected writedown Blackboard took. This should result in additional expenses that will have to be recorded by BBBB. What's also interesting is that Blackboard's top execs made record bonuses before this writedown, at the same time they took away any salary increases and the 401K plans for the regular staff. I think that is the bigger story."

"The following is a reflection on and response to a paper by Lisa Lane (2009) in First Monday titled "Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching". I've been struggling with keeping up with reading, but this topics is closely connected to my thesis and the presentation I'll be giving soon. The post starts with my thoughts and reactions to the paper and has a summary of the paper at the end."

Course management systems, like any other technology, have an inherent purpose implied in their design, and therefore a built-in pedagogy. Although these pedagogies are based on instructivist principles, today's large CMSs have many features suitable for applying more constructivist pedagogies. Yet few faculty use these features, or even adapt their CMS very much, despite the several customization options. This is because most college instructors do not work or play much on the Web, and thus utilize Web-based systems primarily at their basic level. The defaults of the CMS therefore tend to determine the way Web-novice faculty teach online, encouraging methods based on posting of material and engendering usage that focuses on administrative tasks. A solution to this underutilization of the CMS is to focus on pedagogy for Web-novice faculty and allow a choice of CMS.

"The main scientific problems investigated in this article deal with technical evaluation of quality attributes of the main components of e-Learning systems (referred to here as DLEs - Digital Libraries of Educational Resources and Services), i.e., Learning Objects (LOs) and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The main research object of the work is the effectiveness of methods of DLE components quality evaluation. The aim of the article is to analyse popular existing LO and VLE technical evaluation tools, and to formulate new more complex tools for technical quality evaluation of LOs and VLEs based on requirements for flexible DLE, as well as to evaluate most popular open source VLEs against new more complex criteria. Complex tools have been created for the evaluation of DLE components, based on a flexible approach. The authors have analysed existing tools for technical evaluation of LOs, and it was investigated that these tools have a number of limitations. Some of these tools do not examine different LO life cycle stages, and other insufficiently examine technical evaluation criteria before LO inclusion in the repository. All these tools insufficiently examine LOs reusability criteria. Therefore a more complex LO technical evaluation tool is needed. It was considered that this new more complex LO technical evaluation tool should include LO technical evaluation criteria suitable for different LO life cycle stages, including criteria before, during and after LO inclusion in the repository as well as LO reusability criteria. The authors have also examined several VLE technical evaluation tools suitable for flexible DLE, and it was investigated that these tools have a number of limitations. Several tools practically do not examine VLE adaptation capabilities criteria, and the other insufficiently examines general technical criteria. A more complex VLE technical evaluation tool is needed. Therefore the authors have proposed an original more complex set of VLE tech

"Today Blackboard announced that ANGEL's Ray Henderson will be the new President of the Blackboard Learn division. This is great news. Ray is one of the best executives in educational technology today, known for his competence, his integrity, and his leadership in supporting open standards and openness in general. Does this mean a new beginning for Blackboard?"