Note: This wiki has been taken down...
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My goal was to create a collaborative resource that can be utilized by eLearning decision-makers, instructional technologists, and anyone in the process of choosing a learning management system for their school or workplace. This was take the form of a Wiki (specifically the MediaWiki package) and basically anyone could edit it provided they set up a user account and “sign” the guestbook provided on the site. Having gone through a difficult process choosing an LMS for our own school, I found that there was a major lack of resources online that provided an unbiased look at LMS and CMS packages from a developer’s perspective. I was tasked with working out the budget with the team and in order to get a simple answer, I had to schedule vendor demos. No one wants to give you a price, much less a fair view of the value for the price. Having been at the mercy of sales desks and conference or IM hearsay for too long I was discouraged, but we eventually made a decision after two years.
Hosted web server through IX Webhosting with a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration (most web hosting services would be able to support this, IX is an economical choice.)
I sent out emails to professional listservs and posted on ed-tech industry discussion boards. It was a standard posting that I tweaked a little depending on the audience, I tried to cater to people like me: professionals or teachers in schools that are involved in eLearning administration mostly.
Hello there, my name is Dave Melone and I am a graduate student working on a project setting up a distributed networking project. We were given broad latitude in the topic of our project, and I have had a particularly recent, long, and painful RFP process in selecting a new LMS platform and hosting vendor. Everywhere I turned it was difficult to get a straight story between flourishing vendor demos and bits and pieces of hearsay at conferences. Online resources were difficult to find. I am looking to bring fresh opinions into the game and ask some questions about Open Source choices like Sakai, Drupal, and Moodle. An experience in all major and even minor platforms is welcome. And above all I want to have a lasting resource that can compliment the others out there.
I set up a Wiki called the LMS/CMS Wiki which is now open and available at http://www.withaq.net/wiki/ I am asking for any educational technology professionals that have a spare moment to come populate this Wiki which an relevant thoughts, specs, or warnings about different LMS and CMS packages. These thoughts can range from customizations (we all make them), usability, learning curve, everything from techie to pedagogical in nature is welcome. So please come visit and contribute if only for the community's good. As it is a Wiki, you can create an account and edit most pages save for a few template pages I created to keep it loosely organized. I aim to include screenshots, have discussion, and slowly work on a nice matrix for quick comparison purposes. I chose a few of the most popular packages to start with, but we can add more. The LMS/CMS Wiki is very much in its formative stages and there are some loose ends here and there that I am sure we'll work out. If you are interested, feel free to go ahead and check out http://www.withaq.net/wiki/, and please send me an email with your thoughts about it.
Thank you for your time in reading this,
Dave Melone
dmelone2 -AT- uiuc.edu
The resources that I posted to were:
This was a major learning experience for me. I didn’t learn much at all about LMS systems as I had hoped. I did learn that I should:
The Wiki software I installed did not work correctly the first time around and this delayed the project launch two or three days. The latest version of MediaWiki required PHP 5 and my host did not support this. I was able to recover and locate a slightly older but still stable version of MediaWiki 1.6.7 which allowed PHP 4.x. I sent the technical support contact an email but have not heard back. I haven’t heard of Wiki getting attacked by mailicious users or hacks before, but I still worry about the level of support for the newest technologies with my hosting company, as I would like to upgrade my blog software soon.
I was quickly rebuffed on one of the websites as they publish another 300 page guide to 50 different LMS systems for $500. The abstract is available, and it is full of graphs and statistics. It discussed and cross compared different tools and configurations and is very informative in its own right. I told the discussion board admin I was trying to start and maintain a collaborative effort and have it be free, as a supplement to their own materials. He backed down and made a couple of suggestions on what to include and whom to contact. Other sites I contacted referred to yet more resources that I already link to and mention in the Wiki, but did not quite match what I had envisioned. I wanted discussion and honest case studies rather than facts and figures. It took some time convincing people that this can be valuable.
I did get some interest and four users began contributing. I plan to follow up and ask if they have any other colleagues who wouldn’t mind contributing, only two of the users emailed me their contact information, I did not build in a mandatory email contact as I figured it would turn people off, but users did not create their own profile page in the Wiki, so I don’t have a way to contact them. The pattern was that they came in, filled out some data, and then disappeared. I was able to keep track of users here: http://withaq.net/wiki/index.php/Special:Recentchanges
I only really and truly realized the scope of an effort like maintaining a Wiki when I began to populate it with the tables and categories and tried to imagine the entrie structure. This included researching the most important features that are included in all LMS systems and trying to build a way to tabulate this without being repetitive with copying other resources. I also had to reflect on what was important to me in selecting a LMS system, not just the tools, but the quality of tools was important as well. I was hoping to generate some discussion about these things via the Wiki but no one stayed around on the site to post anything.
Maintaining this project is going to take some effort and time. I believe that the fact that since there was not a lot of information on the Wiki to begin with, it wasn’t deemed “worthy” enough of the time to dedicate to helping build it. I did not have adequate time to post the all the Specification Tables myself, which should have given the site a little more credibility to the casual web surfer.
I felt like the teachers trying to launch technology projects in Yong Zhao’s (2002) report on Conditions for Classroom Technology Innovations. We reviewed this study in our last course EPSY457, Zhao, et al. found that there is a complex set of variables which all contribute to the success of a technologically innovative project whether it is a classroom resource or a professional one in this case. I ran into obstacles such as my own inexperience with the Wiki platform, initial lack of interest and resistance from others, and conditions at my own web host (an entity I take for granted) delaying my project.
I still believe in the value of a resource like the LMS/CMS Wiki that details case studies and real live usage scenarios alongside technical specs. I think I need to put more work into it to really attract interest from others. More activity would improve Google rankings and give the site a more “filled” look rather than a transient graduate school project.
Dave Melone
07/31/07