LMS Project

Goals and Success Criteria

• To select the best LMS for Dickinson
  • As good as it needs to be, but not less so
  • As cheap as possible, but not less so
• To select an LMS that
  • Goes beyond file sharing and integrates LIS services
    • E.g. a content system to integrate Library Services subject guides and information literacy
  • That faculty like, can use easily
  • Whose advanced features faculty can and will use
  • That will improve the student learning experience
  • That will fit with LIS's infrastructure of hardware, software, and system admnistration

Summary of Pat's quick outline

• Quantify attributes of LMS options such as Blackboard Enterprise, Angel, Moodle and Sakai and present findings and recommendations to the ITS Committee LMS Stakeholder’s group (could be a memo). At the very least this process should rule out one (preferably two) of the options (in October)
• Demonstrate the remaining options in some public forum(s), perhaps using your idea of a bake-off. Maybe before a faculty meeting? (November)
• Select limited pilot group for LMS testing in the Spring of 2009. (early November)
• Oversee the pilot implementation of selected LMS in November/December 2008.
• Assist faculty in developing reusable content and migrating courses to selected LMS (by January, 2009)
• Monitor faculty progress throughout their pilot implementation.
• By March 15th, 2009, complete the evaluation of the piloted LMS and prepare recommendation for transition.
• Prepare report for presentation to the ITS Committee and inclusion in the April administrative report to the faculty.

Milestones (Fall 2008)

Define the purpose of the project

This has been accomplished, more or less, through the Stakeholders meeting held in September. The idea is pretty simple: we want something better than Blackboard Basic, with at least the following features:

More detailed criteria

• Integration with Banner's registrar data, to automatically create courses and populate with students
• Integration with ActiveDirectory
• Ability to import existing Blackboard courses
• Ability to export courses to a non-proprietary format
• Less expensive than Blackboard Enterprise (although we are considering it)
• Close wikis and blogs (to complement our open versions, and to support collaborative group work currently supported by Agora)

Define a realistic field of choices

We are pretty much committed to the following choices:

• Angel
• Moodle
• Sakai
• Blackboard Enterprise

We need to provide explanations for this field. Among the reasons are the following:

• The field can't be too big.
• We want to consider open source options, and NITLE provides two options -- Moodle and Sakai -- by virtue of our membership.
• We need to consider Blackboard Enterprise because we already use Blackboard. It's expensive but also the path of least resistance (which isn't always a bad thing).
• That leaves 3 options -- already quite a bit for a comparison involving faculty input, etc. Angel has emerged over the years as a great choice. Ryan Burke and Rafael Alvarado have done research in comparison to other options and have found it to be a leader. But this needs further justification.

Create a Comparison Matrix

• The terms for this matrix have already been defined.
• Members of the project team have already researched the info to populated this matrix.
• We need two matrices:
  1. A presence/absence matrix that shows if a product just has a feature
  2. A more detailed one that compares features. Maybe this is just an expansion of the first. For example, both Sakai and Angel have a wiki -- but Angel's is a lot easier to use.

The questions (as phrased by D. Kelly, re BB Enterprise)

• What is the initial cost, and subsequent annual costs, of hosting our own LMS servers on campus?
• What are the system requirements if we host on campus?
  • What LMS remote hosting options are available?
• What are the associated setup and maintenance costs?
• Can a remotely hosted system be integrated with our local SIS (Banner)?
• Are there any restrictions on what faculty can post to a remotely hosted system?
  • Are there established pieces for connecting the LMS with a Banner SIS system?
• Is it unidirectional from Banner to the LMS for populating courses?
• How “live” is the synchronization of data?
• Can grades be pushed back from the LMS to Banner?
  • Can the LMS use Active Directory for authentication?
  • Can the LMS export courses and materials in standard formats (e.g. EMS)?
  • Is there a cost for using the Building Blocks API tools?

Hold a "Bake-off" event

Select a place

• We will use the old ATS space (aka "Digital Scholarship Center")

Select a date and time

• Looking at November 14th
• This means announcing on October 31st

Install or set up versions of each LMS

• Moodle
  • http://itechdev.dickinson.edu/moodle
  • Contact Ryan Burke to get an account
• Sakai
  • http://sakai.nitle.org
  • Contact Rafael Alvarado to get an account
• Angel
  • http://angellearning.com
  • Contact Angel directly to get a course. (Note that Ryan and Rafael have "sandbox" sites set up with additional features enabled than the initial default you get when you sign up for a sandbox.)

Select test faculty

• Following Pat's advice -- one from each division -- how about these?

1. David Glasgow
2. Jim Hoefler
3. Dave Richeson (?)

Create worksheets

• Add course content
• Create an assignment
• Use the drop-box
• Use the grade book
• Use the blog or wiki

Experiment with Course import/export

• I have exported my ANTH245 course, but we need others.

Information

Moodle

Local Installation

• http://itechdev.dickinson.edu/moodle

Testimonies

Albion

• "Tested in the Trenches", a PowerPoint presentation from Albion College.

Westmont

• Have been using it for 3 years
• integrated with openLDAP, soon to be transferred to eDirectory/LDAP
• hosted locally on Linux/mySQL
• How many staff? I usually spend a couple days before each semester testing out scripts, it takes about a week each summer to upgrade versions and test conversion of the old database, and one of my computer support staff answers the occasional question from faculty and the very rare question from students. Perhaps 1 hour every other week?
• Custom programming: Westmont staff have written about 4 scripts that pull demographic, course and enrollment information from the MSSQL 'data mart' from our student information system (Datatel). One of these scripts is run each night to update enrollment information.

Macalester

• Starting its fifth year
• For authentication it is integrated with our eDirectory/LDAP environment
• It is hosted locally on Linux & mySQL
• Our networking and enterprise staff have also done excellent custom work to integrate it with Banner (through Luminis) to automatically create classes, enroll students, etc.. This takes a couple of days to set up before each semester, but then runs without much administration for the remainder of the term.
• See above.
• More: "it has gone well, it is a very robust platform. ... That said, there are a growing number of outsourcing options. I have heard good reports about MoodleRooms. They offer hosting and consulting. I've had several great discussions with Michael Penney, who was a CMS lead at one of the Cal State schools before joining MoodleRooms as a director. I'd recommend going with a company who is an official "Moodle partner." This will likely signify that they have a stronger connection to the core moodle team."

Occidental

• We moved from Blackboard to Moodle at the beginning of this academic year and have it hosted through Remote Learner http://remote-learner.net/ We have been very pleased so far with the service – very responsive and knowledgeable.

Sakai

Contact Info

• NITLE's Sakai Portal
• NITLE's info page
• Service Details
• Contact: Karen Davis, Managed Technical Services, NITLE

Usage Info

To create a course, click on Site Setup on the left > New at the top and enter the appropriate information on the pages found there. Look for small, blue buttons with question marks to access Help along the way, and there is full online help and search available in the instance; look for Help in the links on the left.

Your campus may create up to 10 courses with up to 100 users (combined faculty and students) in the Basic Service. This shared Sakai instance requires NITLE to add all of your faculty and student users. Please send me the first and last name of each user, and his or her campus email address. Please send as many as possible at one time showing the three separate fields, perhaps as an Excel or CSV file. I will indicate when they have been added and then you can notify your users they have access to NITLE’s Sakai Basic Service, to change their temporary passwords of <OMITTED FOR WIKI>, and they may join courses that have been created.

You will be added to the NITLE-Sakai listserve email list, and we are gradually transferring all of this collaborative interaction to our Sakai Community Project Site where you will find tips, techniques, forums, messages and eventually training material.

https://sakai.nitle.org/osp-portal/site/65545717-f7e0-41b3-00bd-1e838c272b60

Angel

Contect Info

• http://angellearning.com