LMS Governance Final Report
For most of the past 9 months, I have been working with my colleague James Quealy on a Melbourne Monash Colloborative Project on Learning Management System governance.
The final report was posted on the Melbourne/Monash Committee for Collaboration in Educational Technologies website for 18 months and was available for download as a PDF. This website had disappeared in the new-look University of Melbourne website, so I have taken the liberty of posting it here.
The major conclusion from our research was that enterprise LMS software is primarily an administrative tool for delivery of subject-based content and for communication rather than a vehicle for pedagogical transformation of tertiary teaching. Therefore an LMS, as a piece of software, doesn’t require any particular special governance so long as good IT governance practices are already in place.
Most of the governance issues relating to LMS are either academic governance issues, IT governance issues, or derive from the mistaken belief that “new technology” has so radically transformed the educational world that old academic principles no longer apply, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial and/or a dinosaur, and is not worth arguing with.
In our report. we have attempted to outline issues of IT governance in higher education, and we have tried to outline an online future (“Elearning 2.0″) where LMS is largely irrelevant, and online tools are so much part of the furniture that they don’t need governance.
The Annotated Bibliography is a work-in-progress. It was originally housed at http://www.mdhsonline.unimelb.edu.au, but given that the server has been decommissioned, I have taken the liberty of moving it to my own wiki site (Aug 2007). Maybe James and I might find some time to continue working with it …
[...] It’s that time in my thesis work (trawling through references for the lit review) when I have finally come back to the “LMS Governance report” written by Lisa Wise and James Quealy. This went through the blogosphere a while back. You can access the PDF of the report and a MediaWiki based annotated bibliography from this blog post. [...]