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The Selection Process

An LMS will save money when compared to the increased travel required for classroom training.

LMS can provide measurable results, where classroom training might not.

A properly-maintained Learning Management System will cost very little to operate, and so on.

The LMS of choice, at my school, is e-College. That has been the choice for the 7 years that I have been teaching online. I am not certain how it was chosen initially, but I know that we work very closely with e-College to continually improve the product. It, in my experience, has been a solid and stable teaching platform.

I have used a variety of LMSs including Outlook Express (a free, threaded discussion platform), Blackboard, Moodle, and proprietary platforms. The University that I am currently with has a proprietary platform, but has a broad based University committee providing input on the next generation.

Mark York

We chose BlackBoard and looked at expandability, cost, ease of use. It was a small team of us that made the decision since very few others had any experience with LMS systems.

-Chris

As may have been mentioned before, our corporate office has a team that looks at, researches, and decides what will be used. Those who want to be trained in it are, and are either instructors or people on the ground campuses that are able to help the students taking both on-ground and on-line classes.

I'm not sure at this point but my best guess would be a board from corporate. Hopefully all instructors/staff from all schools will get the chance for input.

I am not sure either on this subject, but it has peaked my curiosity to do further investigation of this.

It has been "home grown" as it were...by adopting best practices from other leading platforms including Desire2Learn, eCollege & Blackboard/Angel.

My theory goes like this:
Use an open source system to get a feel of how it works. Committing to paying a license fee without fully understanding what is involved in the decision does not make sense to me. I am sure that even open source SLMs will begin accruing costs after some point.
That is the point, I am thinking, I will have to decide to research and compare other systems.
If the needs of the school are met prior to the beginning of fee paying then great; we got a free system until the school needs change!

do you agree?
If not please comment.

We orginally outsourced the content, but found we had absolutely no control over the content at all. We then purchased that content and different software to present it in. Now we have full control over updating/correcting anything within the content. We are able to change exams and projects as seen fit as well.

Ours was decided upon due to those in charge wanting a personalized system. So we created our own. We have the ITM team in place, and our server is working fine. The issues that still need to be resolved are no longer IT related at all, but personel.

Some of the things that were considered when choosing and CMS/LMS was:

1.) Ease of use for both faculty and students
2.) Of course cost(s)
3.) Training
4.) Upgrades and updates
5.) Help & Support
6.) Growth potential

Should be selected upon cost, ease of use, and training. Last but not least upgrades and tech support are also important.

We will select the LMS based on our needs, after we study the different systems and meet with our Program Advosry Board. Ease of use, phone tech support, updates, and price are my main concerns.

We are in the process of choosing an LMS, preferably one that is free or low cost. The task is overwhelming with the increasing number of open-source vendors. There are nice to have features, like e-portfolios, that we feel are necessary for our courses, but these extras can change free to costly. Would it be unweildly to maintain two different open-source LMSs - one that has the need to haves and one with nice to haves?

We choose Moodle after review some of the LMS available; we found that some institutions well stablished in e-learning were switching to Moodle.

This course can provides measurable results and It is security .

I was not involved but I know they used to use WebCT. Then when a new LMS needed to be chosen, they had representatives give presentations and I believe a vote occurred between Blackboard and Sakai. Sakai is open source so the financial benefits there and ability of in-house tech personnel probably helped with the decision. It's not flashy but it does the job!

Our school is going to moodle for off sight assignments and snow day activities. We are still currently using blackboard to post assignments and provide alternative activities for students to work on independently off site. We are one of a system of 4 schools and 2 of the other sites are up and running on moodle and have found it very user friendly for both students and staff.

For the institute our selection will be based on my recommendation. One of the reasons for taking this online class - to learn about the systems that other schools are using. What is successful and what is not. I have been speaking with two off-site consultants, and I found that I needed to be better educated on what was available because when they spoke it was like Greek to me.

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