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Valerie J. Shute, an associate professor of educational psychology and learning systems at Florida State University, believes she has a solution in "stealth assessment"—the administering of tests without students' knowing.

To do that, Ms. Shute and other stealth-assessment researchers have turned to video games, which let educators watch students solve complex tasks while immersed in virtual worlds.

"Everybody likes to play," she says. "And so much could be done using games."

Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room.

The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.

Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.

Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time

Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.

Wikipedia has taught us yet another lesson, that a networked information environment allows people to work together in new ways to create information that can rival (and even surpass) the content of experts by almost any measure.

Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.

It is like continuously working with thousands of research associates around the world.

Unfortunately, many teachers only see the disruptive possibilities of these technologies when they find students Facebooking, texting, IMing, or shopping during class.

We have had our why's, how's, and what's upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether.

All of this vexes traditional criteria for assessment and grades. This is the next frontier as we try to transform our learning environments.

Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have been habitually used to measure content recall.

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.