From Stand-alone LMS to Integrated Systems

One topic of this year’s International ILIAS Conference in Göttingen, Germany, will be the integration of the ILIAS LMS into bigger IT structures of universities and companies. The question of running a LMS all alone as a single service or integrating learning management systems into t general IT services like authentication, student’s management or mail service is a top issue at german universities at the moment.
In the first years of practising e-learning at universities, learning management systems were often installed for pilot projects and by teachers and institutes rather than by the computing service centers. This is why learning management systems have got a special status within an university. One reason for this was the teacher’s desire for a certain independency from the sometimes sluggish and over-evaluating IT experts at the computing centers. Most of the first used learning management systems were installed and maintained by faculties and institutes - not by the computing centers. Teachers and professors could test and evaluate those systems and run them quite independently. And because LMS are autonomous systems and usually offer all necessary features like an integrated user administration and authentication service, there was no need to connect them to other IT services provided by the computing centers themselves. This is why you find several LMS within one german university today - even if there is one general maintained LMS for the entire institution. And this is one reason why institutes have changed systems every two to three years without having big migration problems.

Today running a LMS as stand-alone system becomes more and more problematical. For a lot of universities in Germany e-learning is no longer a scientific research or pilot project but a basic service for improving teaching and learning. With the upcoming BA and MA degrees (Bologna process) a general reorganisation of the teaching takes place and e-learning is more and more important to handle the teacher’s higher workload for tutoring and assessment within these new study paths. This produces new requirements to a LMS like importing users from student directories, remote course creation from university management system or exporting user information to the university’s examination office. Another increasing requirement is the integration of a LMS into the university’s web portal.

The change from stand-alone LMS to an integrated system is mainly an organisational problem. Getting data from examination offices or student’s enrolement is a very difficult and highly political process. But even the technical realisation is not that trivial. An integrated LMS needs interfaces for connecting services and exchanging data. For some services standards are already existing - but not for all. And some of these administration systems used at universities are not standard compliant but highly proprietary.

Initialised by Novell a webservice interface has been developed for ILIAS since 2004. This SOAP interface has been extended in the last ILIAS versions and offers now a variety of services like remote user creation in ILIAS, course creation or remote role assignment. This SOAP interface has already been used to import users from the worldwide Novell user e-directory to their ILIAS training courses or for coupling the university administration system StudIP with ILIAS offering single-sign-on and single-look. At the time being the ILIAS open source team is participating in a project for developing a multi-system interface to a system called HIS-LSF used by a lot of german universities for administrating their lectures and life-courses. This interface will allow to connect HIS-LSF to a certain number of different LMS and support the remote creation of a course from HIS-LSF in ILIAS for example. A first version of this interface will be available end of the year.

This loose coupling of different systems will become essential for realising and supporting integrated e-learning services. Only those LMS will survive the next years that offers those interfaces and can be integrated in a broader IT architecture of an university. But we can think even one step beyond. Will there still be learning management systems in five year that can be seen as autonomous running applications? Or will the current systems migrate to something like “learning management services” that can be part of an administration system offering only those features and services that are need for realising e-learning? The advantages of such a concept are evident. Different from today where every LMS is a bit of an all-round software every service would focus on what it is made for - and this perfectly. LMS developers would no longer need to re-implement functionalies that are already existing in other tools (like mail or user administration).

But unfortunately learning management systems would become more or less invisible thus only the functionality is left on the user’s frontend. And the cost of re-designing the current systems would be high. This might not be a problem for Blackboard but maybe for open source tools like Moodle and ILIAS - and also for a lot of commercial systems as well. And therefore such a trend would be dangerous for the variety of LMS products on the market because only big players might have the resources for such a development and a further concentration of vendors would take place.

This process of full-integration is only a vision. But facing other changes in software development of the last decades it is not absurd. If this happens or not, it mainly depends from the user’s requirements for in e-learning. And this means, we all have a certain influence in this process.

Add comment September 15th, 2006