Administrative Capability Evaluation Criteria for LMS

32 Learning Management System

C. Problems and Trends with LMS

There are some problems involving the reserching and selecting LMS. Beshears 1999 quoted Bates 2000 from his “Managing Technology Change” several problems, such as: 1. Free Style Course Websites vs. Learning Management Systems • Some instructors or lecturers always want to use their own personal home page to interface their courses instead of using LMS provided by university. • The campus may select a favored LMS, but lecturers should not be forced to use the favored LMS. This problem may result in integration problem if university wants to integrate the e- learning system with their academic system, such as student database, administration database, and so on. 2. Make vs. Buy • Some institutions may favor incrementally developing an in-house Learning Man- agement System e.g. by expanding the on-line class schedule. • Why not both? The contra is that it would be cheaper to support one enterprise level LMS. However the pro argument is that if the campus decides to link one or more commercial packages to the registration system etc., this doesnt preclude the option of also incrementally developing a LMS in-house. The option of doing both may avoid conflict. It also gives lecturers more options. 3. Use one LMS or use different LMSs together? The pro reason for campus using a single Enterprise Level Learning Management Sys- tem is that students could have a unified portal view of all their course websites on the system. However, the contra side is that instructors would have a limited set of op- tions to choose from. The compromise solution is having a favored LMS, but also of- fers a select number of other systems that can also be connected to backend registra- tion databases. Of course, more than one LMS could be integrated with the registrars databases, but probably not hundreds of separate LMS e.g. one for each department. Although easy to use and widely installed, LMSs pose a few challenges for their users. Some other issues regarding the use of LMS are see e.g. Curliner, 2005; Wikipedia, 2006: 1. Course Design Flexibility Problems Challenges in customization Each training organization manages its operations in a particular way — and most LMSs are designed to manage operations in a different way. For example, most LMSs provide instructors with a limited flexibility in designing course. LMSs typically come with standard sections that instructors must provide, and the section names are not easily altered. However some open-source LMSs support multilingual interface that enabling course designers to use sections or menu in their own language. Although LMSs can be customized and this has become easier with time, many cannot handle every unique need of a training organization. Organizations may have to do commission custom programming to achieve their goals. 2. Transferring course content problems