Minutes of 11-14-06 Meeting
Present: James Fadden, Helen McCullough, Linda Bills, Susan Fenton, Matt Engel
We started by each speaking a bit about the LMS we researched since the last meeting.
Angel - Helen got a guest account and played around as a student and as an instructor. She found she could make the pages look nice, and as an instructor appreciated the graphical representation of what students had done on the first page. She thought it was easy to use and that the sales rep she worked with was very responsive.
Desire2Learn - James is concerned about the Blackboard lawsuit against D2L, as well as the fact that most clients seem to be big university systems, with few small colleges adopting it. He liked that he felt connected to educators when looking over the site, and that the features seem user centric rather than course centric. For example, it has a blog that can be fully open or fully private, or something in between. Other tools, like Briefcase, seemed good because you can share files between courses. D2L has standards compliant import/export and foreign language capability. The Quizzing tool can be bought as a stand-alone tool.
Moodle - Susan expressed concerns about the modularilty of Moodle, particularly that it's easy to fall into the trap of installing a third party module to solve an immediate need, even though this action may lead to problems down the road. On a positive note, many of our peer schools are using it and faculty reviews seem to be quite positive. Most of the features faculty expect are present. Moodle is open source, which has advantages of potential cost savings (at least down the road, when we may not feel a need to pay for support) and a large community of developers.
Sakai - Linda noted that Sakai also has the open source advantages of Moodle. She thought Sakai seemed deeper and more complex than Moodle but that it's not ready for prime time. She didn't feel it's a complete package right now, and gave the example of the manual not being finished yet. She felt it was more powerful and likely to advance than Moodle. She noted that it seemed to be used mostly by large universities with some small colleges using it.
Matt raised the issue of Blackboard, and a discussion followed of the cost of Blackboard and the reasoning behind our initial choice of WebCT over Blackboard.
Linda raised the issue of open source development, and in particular how it's decided which features can added to the core product. We felt this was something we needed to look into for each open source product.
James and Susan are going to work on a list of "must haves" - features that faculty are now using and that must be present in any LMS we adopt. We will use this list when evaluating the products further, but should not limit our examinations to just these features.
James reported a conversation with Tim Hunter concerning open source solutions. Tim was fine with us pursuing open source as long as the software works out of the box, without tinkering with the core.
Linda agreed to determine what library services need to be integrated into an LMS. Susan asked that she also define "integration", as it could mean simply adding a link to a library resource, or it could mean having a common logon, or anything in between.
A discussion was held concerning how to go about looking at these products in more depth. It was decided that each week we would pick one product that we should all take a quick look through. At the following meeting one person will present a short demo of the product and a discussion will follow. Linda suggested that the person in charge of leading the demo of each product should also get usernames and passwords for the others to use when taking a look, and should act as a resource when others have questions about the product.
We agreed on the following dates for demo/discussion of the products. These meetings will be held in Murray 116.:
- Moodle - Nov 28
- Desire2Learn - Dec 5th
- Angel - Dec 12th
- Sakai - Dec 19th
James asked that we also start thinking about what faculty to involve in this process and how to involve them. Also that we start thinking of some schools we'd like to contact as part of our investigations.
We briefly discussed the timeline, and concensus was that it's difficult to have a firm timeline more than a month out. It was suggested and agreed that we spend 5 minutes at the start of each minute with a quick review/adjustment of the timeline, to be sure we are staying on track.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:03 pm.