A quick visit to the Sakai Project led me to an interesting article in which Syllabus Magazine interviewed Ira Fuchs the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's vice president for research in information technology. The Mellon Foundation supports the Sakai Project to the tune of USD 2.4 million so Fuchs' views on the future of learning management systems makes for interesting reading. I think the following few Ira Fuchs' quotes from the Syllabus Magazine article Learning Management Systems: Are We There Yet? (1 July 2004) speak for themselves.
“… it's going to be hard to move away from the proprietary systems they may be running today and to begin using open, collaboratively developed and maintained systems. I think open systems are going to prevail, but it's going to take time.”
“It's my hope that proprietary course management systems will, over time, be supplanted by open systems that facilitate collaboration and sharing of both course materials and content, with software designed to extend the CMS itself.”
“… the notable, visible success of some of the open source projects - the big ones like Linux, Apache, or MySQL - have proven that it's possible to develop something in the open and get people to commit to maintain and enhance the software.”
“The proliferation of learning management systems suggests that no one system is sufficiently feature-rich, or adequately flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone's needs or even most institutions' requirements.”
“… we need to make all of this distributed information available in the learning management system without the user having to learn so many different interfaces. ”
“The LMS of the future will be a distribution point for the digital textbook. Electronic course packs, I think, will also be distributed via the LMS.”
“I think there’s still going to be plenty of room for commercial firms to develop and sell modules that fit into the open framework. I also think there will be a significant demand for services related to course management systems, including maintenance and custom enhancements. However, a new business model will be required.”
Any major VLE vendor after reading this article should perhaps be contemplating how to revise their business model?
If we accept the Fuch's view then we all need to start thinking about how distributed information and resources will be found and delivered. We also need to start weaning ourselves off the concept of learning management systems being the sole vehicles and repositories of information and content. My Auricle articles of the last few days have attempted to address this issue.
I've waxed lyrical about these themes in several previous Auricle articles. You can revisit these articles by selecting the 'View by Category' from the 'Archives' section of the right-hand menu and choose any of the articles in the MLE/VLE/Portals category or, for issues related to distributed learning resources, you could try the 'Resource Discovery' category.
