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Get your LMS faculty heroes to pair with your friends at peer schools: The best way to use your heroes is to have them sit down with well-informed and passionate teachers who use and advocate for other platforms. These peer-to-peer conversations will help them develop perspective on the guts of the platform alternatives that will be very valuable to you. It may also help them come to terms with the inevitable grieving process they will be going through at the prospect of having to give up the system they have invested so much into mastering. Unfortunately, the migration process is probably harder on your LMS faculty heroes than it is on anyone else, even including the support staff.

LMS are an answer to a question begged by an outdated business/educational model

Tom is a lecturer at Strummer University in French Language. He wants his students to get used to engaging in online audio/video discussions, capturing mobile input. He has distance as well as campus based students so wants something asynchronous. Seesmic seems to be ideal. But rather than tell his students to sign up there and swap ids, he just wants them to be able to use it as a suite of tools. If they decide to go there, it will be already configured for them. So he speaks to his IT services dept. who tell him that Seesmic is one of the 2138 applications that are listed in the Uniglu directory. This means they are trusted and are capable of accepting university data. They pass the secure data to the Seesmic API which automatically creates accounts for all the students, using their OpenID and preferred user names. It adds in all the students in the cohort as Followers and Following.Similarly, in the course wiki, Tom is using Wetpaint. This also adds in all the students, and also sets up Tom and the two course assistants as moderators. The access to the wiki is set to registered only (ie the course cohort only, not public) which is the default option when it is available.

The interface between Web 2.0 and existing campus systems, including the SIS, the ERP, the LMS, and the ePortfolio assessment system, and others, is still, in large part, unexplored country.

PlugJam is a solution for schools, colleges, and universities looking to bridge the gap between existing campus-based tools and Web 2.0 services, allowing students to use their favorite social networking environment or Web Service to access their campus-based resources

But like much on campus these days, ePortfolios are morphing to reflect the far-reaching trend in higher ed of relying less on technology delivered by the institution itself and more on the use of user-centric technology, including Web 2.0

At some point in the evolution of ePortfolios, however, those initial goals of reflection and assessment begin to feel "inauthentic, another hoop for the students to jump through,"

students are becoming very disengaged from [the process] of maintaining their own identities as learners."