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While many proponents of the CMS hoped that it would yield dramatic improvements in learning, the reality is that it is primarily used as an administrative toolbox. Consequently, we have yet to leverage the potential of the Web to yield the kinds of dramatic improvements that Bloom envisioned.

While improvements in efficiency are certainly beneficial to faculty members and students, the CMS has yet to yield consistently demonstrable, replicable, significant improvements in learning outcomes. Using Web technology primarily for the purposes of content distribution and secure communication between faculty and students in higher education is akin to using a desktop computer for a doorstop. A desktop can certainly work well for that purpose, but it falls far short of its intended use and its full potential.

After billions of dollars invested, we are left to conclude that educational technology has been "oversold and underused."

In his so-titled book, Cuban details his findings of an exhaustive study of educational technology investments in Silicon Valley (2001). His conclusions are not encouraging—he found little evidence that technology has yielded any significant changes in teaching practices (p. 130). On the contrary, Cuban concluded that "teachers used technology to maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize" the way they teach their students (p. 138).

the industrial, course management model has its center of gravity in teachers generating content, teachers gathering resources, teachers grouping and sequencing information, and teachers giving the information to students (356).

There is much evidence to suggest that universities and other educational institutions have failed to perceive the difference between educating learners and simply providing them with information and content. Most institutions of higher education appear focused on . . . content coverage, course structure, and pre-existing time arrangments such as semesters and hours of credit than . . . issues such as learning and performance (365). 

the CMS imposes, or at least reinforces, artificial time constraints on learning and learning continuity. It does this by perpetuating the Industrial Era-inspired, assembly line notion that the semester-bound course is the naturally appropriate unit of instruction (Reigeluth, 1999).

the CMS continues to privilege the instructor as the locus of energy and action in the learning process.

the CMS continues to artificially situate instruction and learning inside walled gardens that are disconnected from the rich and vibrant networks of learners and content in the wider world.

Unless students fastidiously copy the content from their CMS courses and save the contact information of their classmates, the learning network connections they have made (both content and social) are essentially lost. If Facebook operated in such a manner, deleting users' friends, wall conversations, pictures, and other data every 14 weeks, users would be furious. They would leave Facebook in droves for applications that preserve their networks over time.

While perhaps a bit stylized, the typical CMS-delivered, content-centric, lecture-driven course complete with multiple-choice midterm and final exams, does little to prepare students to succeed in a world in which there will always be more new knowledge created every day than they can possibly access, much less assimilate, master, and apply. Given the overwhelming flow of data all around us, our job should be increasingly less focussed on making our students "knowledgeable" and focused instead more on making them "knowledge-able" (Wesch, 2009)

If we hope to prepare our students for success during their time at our institutions and in their working lives, we need to equip them with lifelong learning skills. This necessitates a view of learning that is not confined to discrete 14 or 15-week learning periods, loosely bundled together in what we generously call "degree programs." Lifelong learning is a continuous, not a discrete, phenomenon.

Sclater has argued that the term "learning management system" itself suggests "disempowerment—an attempt to manage and control the activities of the student by the university" (2008, p. 2). The tendencies of the CMS are not, he argues, just "minor irritations" but rather forces that "may overtly or subtly align the institutional processes with the software rather than having the system serve the requirements of the institution" (p. 3).

More than a decade ago, Reeves argued that we should focus on helping students learn with technology rather than from technology (1998).

The center of gravity in the CMS is decidedly on institutional and instructor efficiency and convenience, not student participation and learning. This should not be surprising given Cuban's findings that educational technology is used largely to "maintain existing practices" rather than to "revolutionize," or even change in any substantial way, teaching and learning practices (2001).

instructors have largely employed the CMS to automate the past, using it primarily as an instructional e-mail and content delivery system, bringing greater efficiency to old patterns and methods of instruction and course management.

To progress, the field of instructional design must recognize that learning is a human activity quite diverse in its manifestations from person to person, and even from day to day. The emphasis can then shift to developing pedagogical media that provide many alternative ways of teaching, which learners select as they engage in their educational experiences (p. 59).

Networked learners are beginning to self-organize faster than the schools that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, learners are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most educational institutions.

We may fruitfully update Freire's metaphor of "banking education" to a metaphor of "downloading learning." So much of what passes for innovative uses of instructional technology today, like the OpenCourseWare collections available from MIT and other universities, restricts learners to downloading files.

the paradigm of downloading learning "present[s] learners with one worldview and no opportunity to experience alternatives, hear the stories of others, or ask meaningful questions."

the best educational content—it draws people into arguments, explorations, discussions, and relationships that add depth, meaning, and value to that content.

it seems paradoxical that we would we put hundreds, thousands, or millions of learners in front of advanced communications technology so that they can simply retrieve data instead of interacting with each other around that data.

The OLN model implies a new role for the IT organization. Instead of attempting to provide every application and tool for every purpose, its focus shifts to maintaining the applications and data that are at the core of the institution's business.

This model maintains the "core set of functionality" Sclater suggests should remain within the purview of the institution while facilitating the kind of data exports and imports necessary to allow seamless integration and operation while opening the space necessary for learners to act as co-instructors and for teachers to act as co-learners in a dynamically generated space (9)

we do not predict or expect a move from a CMS to an OLN to result in a more stable, reliable learning environment. Nor do we necessarily think that such a move would result in dramatic cost savings. Neither of these factors should be the most influential drivers in a move toward an OLN. Institutions should transition from a CMS to an OLN because doing so is more conducive to accomplishing the short and long-term learning goals they have for their students.

moving away from the CMS toward a more open, flexible, modular, and interoperable learning infrastructure (Bush & Mott 2009) will help institutions, teachers, and learners more fully benefit from the affordances of the Web

our assertions about the weaknesses of the CMS paradigm should also be taken as critiques of the predominant pedagogical model in higher education. Specifically, we believe that institutions and instructors should aim to do more than just transfer knowledge from the professor, the library, and the textbook into their students' brains.