Group items tagged

Five findings led to our decision:

Our research suggests that the potential of the LMS to transform teaching and learning is diminishing quickly. While the LMS is vitally important, in the same sense that commodity services such as e-mail, bandwidth, and disk storage are, the LMS by itself can no longer be considered strategic. Rather, it is the mash-up of different types of collaborative technologies, such as blogs, tweets, wikis, social networking sites, online media, and document sharing systems, together with the LMS, that appears to have the greater potential to transform our technology and learning practices.

The LMS is important, but is no longer transformative

Students prefer Sakai

As a part of our planning process, beginning in the summer of 2009, Pepperdine began running Sakai in parallel with our existing LMS.

Greater numbers of student respondents preferred Sakai over our current LMS when comparing the following features: announcements, assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, quizzes and tests, dropboxes, and blogs.

So do our faculty

Faculty respondents preferred Sakai to our current LMS when comparing the following features: assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, and dropboxes.

Our IT staff members find Sakai much easier to support

Overall, our IT staff finds that supporting Sakai is a remarkable improvement over our current LMS.

The financial savings is equivalent to the salaries of two faculty members

Our planning process involved the participation of hundreds of faculty and students, required presentations at dozens of meetings, and necessitated buy-in from our faculty and approval by the provost and deans. Serving as a change advocate regarding the effective delivery and use of technology, particularly in the technology and learning space, is an increasingly important role for our IT organization.

My words of advice for other IT leaders contemplating similar initiatives include the following:

Don't shy away from this type of challenge: Lead

Let faculty be your advocates

Use data to break the ice with difficult change initiatives

resistance to LMS change efforts is often based on closely held myths that sometimes fall apart under scrutiny. Properly used benchmarks and other measures are effective tools in any change initiative.