E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Educause just release a new edition of the 7 Things you should know. This one is about the new directions for the LMS. The abstract:

Most of today’s learning management systems were developed in an era when virtually all of higher education was organized around courses and credit hours. Changes in pedagogy, new models of learning, and new opportunities made possible by technology have outpaced developments in LMSs. In response, LMSs are beginning to evolve toward being platforms on which a college or university can build a learning ecosystem. By being learner focused, future LMSs are more likely to meet the needs of institutions and students and to accommodate the new structures of higher education, including developments such as competency-based education, prior-learning assessment, badging, and others.

One of the things is the name. Currently we have started a project to select a replacement for our existing system. We called the project Collaboration & Learning Environment (CLE). This name better reflects what we expect in our new system than the traditional names such as CMS, LMS, and VLE.

The changing requirements at TU Delft are based on our activities to offer online education in the same system as campus and blended courses.