LMS? SIS? SIF? LTI? Alphabet soup and blended learning

Summary: What do your teachers and students really need from systems supporting blended and e-learning?

Photo: Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson writes, "On Monday, I'm headed to New Orleans for the BBWorld DevCon. This is Blackboard's annual conference for partners and developers on their various information systems that proceeds the LMS giant's user conference, BBWorld. I was originally scheduled to give the keynote, but then Blackboard went and bought Moodlerooms and Sakai, shocking just about everyone involved in the e-learning space. Not surprisingly, my keynote slot is now going to be a roundtable with executives from all of the companies."

However, this got me thinking. The average school technologist, let alone the average teacher or administrator, has a lot to wade through in terms of selecting systems that support blended learning initiatives. Sure, most principals know that their school needs a platform where students and teachers can share information, assignments are readily accessible, and teachers can curate resources for students. But if the Blackboard-Moodlerooms-Sakai deal was suprising and confusing to those of us who follow this for a living, how can educators be expected to sort out a much larger market?

Photo: ZDNet

BIG market

That larger market impacts both K12 and higher ed and includes not just learning management systems like Blackboard Learn, Moodle, and Instructure Canvas, but also student information systems, lesson capture systems, library managements systems and many others. Many learning management systems don't even brand themselves as such but offer services that look and feel a whole lot like those in a learning management system. SchoolTown, School Loop, and HotChalk are just a few examples. Others, like the awesome Edmodo, have evolved from social media-like beginnings to become nearly full-featured learning management systems (when I first wrote about Edmodo in 2009, I called it what Twitter would have been if it had been designed by a teacher). And speaking of social media, Facebook's Groups for Schools is pretty darned LMS-like itself.
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Source: ZDNet