Choosing an LMS or CMS
There are a large number of LMS and CMS available in the public domain, besides the commercially developed systems. The availability of such a large number of systems can confuse your decision making. Whether to settle for an LMS, CMS or whether you need a management system at all to publish and manage your OER objects would be influenced by the goals of your OER project. The most important step is to do a comprehensive requirements analysis – meaning determining what your needs/objectives are so you have a fair assessment of whether you need a system and if yes, what your system should do.
Requirements analysis
The process of gathering requirements involves talking to one or more people who will be using the materials online, or those who would be creating and posting content online. This includes your target audience—learning preferences, locations, and resources available to them. Organizational goals and objectives should also be defined. Also take into account budget constraints.
You could employ any or many of these methods to gather requirements
- Interviews
- Workshops
- Surveys
- Scenario maps
- Use cases
During the course of your requirements gathering you will be able to form a fair idea of the system functionalities/utilities that will be needed. Your list of essential/desirable requirements could include
- content development tools
- being able to link to additional organizational or external information sources – you will need metadata tagging capabilities for this
- being able to support workflows – enabling multiple content creators to work on and complete a task
- component to enable e-mentoring of online learning communities
- online assessment capabilities, creation of assessment/tests
- being able to connect to external communities, such as suppliers or customers
- require multiple language translation support and more
Deciding on a learning/content management solution
Once you are armed with information on what you need and what your organizational and budget constraints are you can start looking at the capabilities of available systems - open source as well as licensed. You could also consider several decision making tools/reports for the education community that are available online. A few are listed below
http://www.brandon-hall.com/publications/lmskb/lmskb_method.shtml
A community driven course management system review-
http://www.edutools.info/item_list.jsp?pj=4
http://www.elearning-reviews.org/
Comparisons of a CMS vs LMS and their limitations
http://www.contentmanagementnews.com/contentmanagementnews-82-20070220CMSandLMSAComparison.html
In addition to the user wish list, you will also need to assess your technical capability. LMS/CMSs are built using technologies such as Java, PHP, ASP.NET. You have to consider whether you have in house strength or ability to customize/adapt the management system. This initial list and your own web based research on a number of tools - both open source as well as vendor solutions; will give you a fair idea of available LMS/CMS.
If you decide on a licensed solution, your requirements analysis documentation will help you communicate with the vendor. Once you have shortlisted your management system try testing the software. You will get to know if it indeed suits your requirement scenarios and whether it will need customization. At the end of this process you will be able to decide which solution to go with.
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