"Interpreting the CDW-G 2010 survey summary report, Campus Technology magazine concluded: 'Faculty members and campus IT staff aren't exactly in agreement on the necessity of some technologies in education.'"
In a move that could shake the e-learning industry, Pearson today unveiled a new learning management system that colleges will be able to use for free, without having to pay any of the licensing or maintenance costs normally associated with the technology. Pearson's new platform, called OpenClass, is only in beta phase. By providing complimentary customer support and cloud-based hosting, OpenClass purports to underprice even the nominally free open-source platforms that recently have been gaining ground in the LMS market.
"I think that the announcement really marks another, and important, nail in the coffin of the proprietary last-generation learning management system," says Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.