By Margaret Byrne
Director, Center for Learning Technologies

In the previous column from this series, we situated course management tools within the current societal and technological context. As part of this societal shift, business in general, but the technology sector more specifically, has recognized the need for a literate workforce. They have stated publicly and repeatedly their need for workers who know how to learn, who know how to do creative problem-solving and who know how to work in teams. And they will pay top dollar for them.

With the exponential increase in rapidly changing information, business continues to remind education that the nation can only remain competitive if it can hire workers who have learned how to learn, who can discriminate what to learn and who can do it rapidly. Bottom line: business has become interested in the business of learning. Learning Management Systems (LMS), some of which have been developed by academic colleagues and some by businesses, are in part a response to this recognized need.

LMS includes all of the functions of course management products, plus more. It actually begins to build and to integrate tools that foster learning. It works like this: If Web page builders are like portable FM radios, and if course management systems are like boomboxes, then an LMS is like a set of components forming an entertainment center. Learning management systems have a wide range of pricing options, increased flexibility for mix and match, plus choices regarding degrees of functionality. They can include multiple formats and multiple modes of delivery (Web-based, streamed, via satellite); they can include or interface with a portal; they can integrate or hook into student information systems; and they can serve as the basic system framework or merely enhance existing architectures. They can support learning objects. They can track and report on transaction-level learning activities.

The idea behind LMS is first that it takes a whole-systems approach. The other difference is that, as compared to a course management system, the LMS allows the focus to be placed on the student. The student becomes accountable for his or her own success. The system can be built so that the focus is not so much on whether students are satisfied with an instructor as much as whether or not the student is learning. Reporting features allow the student to discover how he or she is doing almost immediately, to correct his/her concepts or behaviors, and to repeat the same or varied activities until there is demonstration of mastery.

A well-designed LMS also improves the integration of the infrastructural, administrative and academic parts of the organization. For example, downloading class rosters in a timely fashion into a grade book and then keeping it updated becomes much easier for an instructor.

While an LMS is an improvement over a course management system or a fragmented collection of disparate tools, there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to take advantage of its power and potential. Let's remember that over the last 10 years in higher education, somewhere between 65 and 95 percent of the technology budgets were dedicated to infrastructure (the network, for example), while somewhere between 10 and 30 percent was invested in improving administrative practices (the Banner system). Less than 5 percent came to the administrative aspects of instruction, even less to instruction. As part of infrastructure and administrative changes, many administrative work processes had time and resources to be reconsidered and changed. On the other hand, few, if any resources have been dedicated to learning systems and the work process changes needed to bring the academic side of the house up to the same level as the administrative side of the house. So there is a great deal of work before us.