On Friday, I had the chance to talk with Daniel McKelvey (VP of Business Development at CourseMaster). CourseMaster is positioning itself as an edX service provider. edX is open source, so those with both the technical resources and the inclination can download and install their own instance of the software. Alternatively, organizations can turn to a third party like CourseMaster.
In our conversation, Daniel positioned CourseMaster as having three distinct advantages (i.e. elements added by the company):
- LMS core (branded, fully serviced and supported)
- Faculty dashboard
- Social collaboration and gamification
Support is for both faculty and students.
The business model is based on users (defined as interacting with 20% of course content) and duration of the course.
This looks interesting, and I intend to investigate further. Working on getting some colleagues to collaborate on a pilot.
The faculty dashboard and collaboration modules are what I am most interested in. Currently, Learning Management Systems are still pretty much Web 1.0. Most educators use the LMS as a publishing platform, and student interaction gravitates towards discussion, quizzes, and the uploading of files. Hopefully we will soon see Learning Management Systems approach Web 2.0 interactivity.
For example, services like Doodle allow me to quickly (and automatically) negotiate the best time for a group of colleagues to meet. Imagine if a LMS allowed for that type of automated decision making for the composition of student groups (based upon skillset, timezone preference, and/or project preference). Affordances like this are what is needed in a LMS, particularly as we see increasing time demands on both students and faculty. I still have yet to see true collaboration tools built into the leading LMS providers that come close to the power of Google Docs, Skype, or Facebook. WordPress is a model that I would like to see Learning Management Systems follow here, where you could browse for plugins that add the collaboration functionality you need (that being said, WordPress can be used as a LMS).