The iPad is set to illuminate the limits of the browser based LMS. The user experience through iPad optimized Apps is going to be far superior than the browser experience.

We have something like 10 years now of a model in which the learning management system has run through the browser. This has worked well for many reasons, as a non-client approach avoids the need to download, install and update an application. The LMS should run on any computer that has a browser. But I'm wondering if the browser model is getting a bit creaky. The newest versions of the LMS may be moving closer to the promise of a client like experience, with AJAX enabled advanced features (such as drag and drop and site updating without re-loading), but the experience is still pretty clunky. For a while it seemed that the LMS might migrate to an RIA (Rich Internet Application) framework like Adobe AIR, but that model seems to have stalled.

Rather quickly we will see the LMS re-written as an app, first for the mobile device and then for the iPad. The Blackboard purchase of TerriblyClever is a strong signal that the company understands the importance of mobile. The unexpected windfall for LMS providers who invested in competencies to build apps for the iPhone will be the ability to port to the iPad. The app, whether for the iPhone / iPad or Android device, will grow in importance. Living somewhere between the browser and full-client application, the iPhone/iPad/Android App offers advantages over both.

What are the signs that we are running up against the limits of the browser based LMS? Somewhat ironically, one of the emerging limitations of the browser application is a loss of certainty that the LMS can reliably deliver its content. As the browser world has split between IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, we are seeing different behaviors in each browser. Four browsers and numerous versions are just too many to test all features, or to make sure that rich media content always plays as it should. This week I was testing a streaming QuickTime file for some curricular media, and was frustrated that the video did not play consistently across all browsers.

A second limitation of the browser based LMS is the inability to download and sync content. I love my NYTimes iPhone/Touch app because it automatically downloads all the content each time I connect to the Web, stores everything for 7 days, and is available at processor rather than bandwidth speeds. Go ahead and compare the experience on your mobile device between the app and the mobile browser for the same content - the app is always superior. Concern about the app being a limited or closed platform seem overwrought to me. As long as an app for the iPhone and Android exist, I don't worry too much about Blackberry's or feature phones not being able to play. Others have worried that Apple's restrictive licensing and total control of the App store economy is a problematic foundation to build a new class of service and products on. (Listen to the NPR story from 3/13/10 "Is Apple Entering An Age Of Empire?" for more on this perspective). Again, I'm not so concerned about an Apple controlled universe as I'm betting the goodness of the iPad experience will outweigh the downsides of a closed (and proprietary) ecosystem.

I'm betting that we will quickly see amazing LMS apps for the iPad. Our rate limiting step will not be the companies that produce the LMS platforms, or Apple and their control over the app store and the device, but rather the content polices of higher ed. We have a model of curricular content delivery built half on control and half on an uneasy dance with the copyright holders. Our colleges and universities seek to skirt the edge of copyright laws (and hostile lawyers) by locking away articles and media behind authentication and streaming. Articles from library databases are displayed in the browser frame rather than downloaded to the students computer. Curricular media is streamed to avoid students having any ability to share or distribute. But a quality LMS iPad app experience will rest on an ability to download and sync. What we'd want is for all of the curricular content associated with any given course to be available through the iPad app.

The danger is that our models for delivering education will fail to keep up with changes in how consumer and entertainment content is delivered. Books, movies, TV shows, magazine articles, newspapers - they will all move to the app. This is not to say that all content they will exclusively migrate to the app. People will continue to consume content on many platforms, from paper to the Web. But we will want choice and flexibility in how and where we consume content, and providers that do not offer flexibility will loose relevance. Sometimes I read the NYTimes on my Touch, sometimes on the Web, and sometimes I spring for a Sunday paper. A failure to have our educational and course content delivered through an app, whether it be an iPad, iPhone or Android app, will mean that our course content is a little less relevant to our students. A loss of relevance equals a loss of attention, and a loss of attention equals a loss of opportunities for learning.

Okay Heath brothers, here's one for you. I'm tremendously enjoying your new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard and I'm wondering how you would recommend a change in the academic cultural status quo that would encourage the inclusion of popular nonfiction in courses?

Placing popular nonfiction at the core of your syllabus is a practice somewhat frowned upon in most departments. Obscure books from university presses and densely written journal articles are signifiers of insider knowledge. A course with a liberal dose of popular books may be looked upon, well, as less than academic.

The "switch" we need is to create a culture where the popular nonfiction book can have a role alongside primary documents and academic journals. Each has its strengths, and in many ways they will complement each other.

What sort of books and courses could make sense for popular nonfiction? Some basic criteria would be books that synthesize academic research for a popular audience, are well-written, and have made an impact on our culture. Daniel Kahneman should get a royalty for maybe half of the books in my list (below), his research (with the late Amos Tversky) being featured so prominently. Assign the original articles from the master in addition to a book that popularizes his theories - and watch retention and enjoyment increase. (Go check out Kahneman's TED talk: "The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory).

The following list could fit well into a range of courses in economics, sociology, history, psychology, marketing….what else?

--Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein

--The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

--Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

--Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

--How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

--Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

--Supercrunchers by Ian Ayers

--False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World by Alan Beattie

--The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

--The Omnivore's Dilemna by Michael Pollan

--The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

--Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

--Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen

--Kluge by Gary Marcus

--The Ape in the Corner Office by Richard Conniff

--The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook

--The Numerati by Stephen Baker

--Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

Why should popular nonfiction make it into the curriculum?

1) Creating Lifelong Learners: A goal, certainly one of the goals of higher education, is to create lifelong learners. A great way to accomplish this goal is to "nudge" our students into becoming lifelong readers of nonfiction. A well written book, one that relies on stories and narrative as well as data and analysis, may be remembered months and years after the course in which it was assigned ends.

2) Participation in a Community of Learners: Popular nonfiction has two advantages. The first is that it usually synthesizes the best of the academic work. The books are accessible gateways to scholarship. The second advantage is a critical mass of other readers. Students can engage other people interested in the books and the ideas explored. Student created video projects, blogs, or accessible online articles may find a readership and a community.

3) Multi-Platform: What all of the book above have in common, besides the pithy short titles and a focus on behavioral economics, is that I listened to them as audiobooks. Assigning popular nonfiction as part of the curriculum allows students to buy and consume the book in whatever format works best for them. I'd love to see experiments where students are given audio, e-book and paper copies - and told to use the platform that they like at the times of their choosing. I'd bet students would mix and match, and end up reading more.

What popular nonfiction books would you like to see taught in higher ed? How would you go about nudging a switch to this practice? Is this even a good idea?

Every job is a technology job. Technology is baked into each aspect of work. Social media means that everyone in an organization is a communicator, everyone is a salesperson.

As the technical infrastructure continues an inexorable movement towards a service, sourced from without, skills to utilize technology higher up the value chain will be the only ones that pay a professional wage. Just as the word processor replaced the secretary, lightweight authoring tools and social media publishing platforms will replace Web and media specialists for all but the highest fidelity (and revenue generating) tasks.

I'm not saying the media and Web jobs will disappear, rather we will all be expected to create multimedia work in digital format and share / interact with digital tools. Today's NYTimes reporter who writes, but also podcasts and creates short videos, (think David Pogue), provides a glimpse into all of our futures.

What would you choose as the 10 competencies that every college graduate must bring to the job market?

I'm going to shamelessly steal from Mindy McAdams, a professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, and her "Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency". I'll share my favorite 10, modified somewhat from the original list.

1. Start a Blog

2. Buy an Audio Recorder and Learn to Use It

3. Start Editing Audio

4. Post an Interview (or Podcast) on Your Blog

5. Learn How to Shoot, Crop, Tone, and Optimize Photos (And Add Them to Your Blog)

6. Learn to Create Effective Voice-Over Presentations with Rapid Authoring Software

7. Tell a Good Story with Images and Sound

8. Learn to Shoot Video

9. Edit Your Video with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker

10. Publish Your Video on Your Blog.

What percentage of our institution's graduates could check-off all 10 boxes? Would this vary by major? Would it be possible to spread these skills throughout all courses, so they are learned in conjunction with the curriculum, or would we need to offer separate "skills" based courses? (My preference is to integrate, as we know that we learn better when we learn skills and content together). What skills would you add to this list?

"Inchmale, she guessed, was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading the Economist, a magazine he reads exclusively on airplanes, swearing that on arrival he promptly and invariably forgot every word."

--Spook Country, by William Gibson - page 172.

note: I found that quote in like 2 seconds in Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature - awesome.

Do you still prefer to read anything by paper? The Economist is about it for me. I don't want paper anymore. I don't like the environmental load. I don't want paper cluttering up my house. I'm happy to get almost all of my books from the library. The books I buy are almost exclusively audio books.

Sure, the daily local newspaper is good in paper - as I take joy in seeing the kids divide it up (and share the comics section). But the NYTimes I read on my iTouch or online. Same goes for almost all my news.

But The Economist - I think I'll stick to paper. I like how they pile up, waiting for weekend windows and vacations. I read from back-to-front, lingering over articles on East Asian finance that I barely understand (and soon forget), but which never fail to relax the mind. In digital format I only read what I've searched for, sometimes browsed. But with The Economist I read almost everything on offer, perusing articles outside of my search patterns. It takes me a while to read an Economist. I page instead of skim, turn and absorb rather than click.

I'm willing to let The Economist drive because I trust that the articles will be smart no matter what the topic. Perhaps I'll disagree with magazine's conclusions, but seldom am I suspicious of the analysis. The paper form factor changes the experience of reading - somewhere beyond consumption and just short of savoring.

And The Economist is expensive. Even if I could read it full-text online I'd still subscribe to the paper version. Proof, at least in my economy of 1, that strong analysis and writing will continue to find a market.

Will the iPad change all this? I wonder, as I could see the iPad being a really wonderful lean-back reading device. Will the iPad bring a little "creative destruction" to my Economist reading preferences?

What do you love on paper? Are you also wondering if the iPad will change how you read? And will there be an iPad Economist app?

In our LMS (Blackboard 8), instructors have the following drop-down options in a content area (in the order they appear): Learning Unit, Survey, Assignment, Discussion Board, Group, Tool, Document Package, Syllabus, Offline Content, Podcast Episode, Google Scholar Search, Google Scholar Content, Wiki, Blog.

All these choices are good, right? Instructors can use the drop-down menus to easily insert a range of different content and Web 2.0 items, making their courses richer while finding the right tool to meet their teaching goals.

The problem lies in the paradox of choice. Turns out that having too many choices often limits our ability to choose anything. A range of options channels us into the default. The Heath brothers, in their new book Switch (which I'm reading now and enjoying), call this "decision paralysis." They tell the story of an experiment in which the likelihood that physicians would stick to a default plan (a previously decided up on surgery) increased from 28 to 47 percent when the possible alternative drug treatments went from 1 to 2. As the Heath brothers wrote in a Fast Company article on the same topic:

"What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us, leading us to stick with the "default" plan, which in this case was slicing open someone's hip. This clearly is not rational behavior, but it is human behavior. Similar tests with different groups have revealed consistent results."

The paradox of choice is an idea originally proposed by Barry Schwartz in a book by the same name. You can check out Schwartz's excellent TED talk on other implications for this theory.

In the above mentioned LMS example, what we really want our instructors to think about is utilizing the tools that encourage collaboration, active learning and engagement. In my experience, the 3 most important tools in the LMS to meet these goals are the Discussion Board, Wiki, and Blog. Courses that use these tools to promote engagement, and use them properly, are almost always superior to courses that do not.

Yet, the design of our LMS discourages the use of these interactive tools. By giving so many choices the instructor is less likely to experiment with any one of them. By having so many options the instructor is less likely to try the interactive tools that make the biggest difference for learning.

The LMS seems particularly vulnerable to a kitchen sink approach to features. Someone thinks, "this tool is great, this feature is wonderful", and more and more options are added. What is lost, however, is a decision architecture that encourages good course design (and hence learning).

My advice is that before we think about implementing new features in our LMS systems that we should do some pruning. What are the features that are most important and what can go? How can we simplify our LMS tools so that the most important features are prioritized?

The paradox is that we've succeeded in increasing the options for teaching with our LMS while diminishing the probability that the tool will be used effectively.

Mobile learning and copyright collide at the download. Consuming, not producing, is where the mobile platform shines. The form factor is simply too small to allow easy inputs. Until the day when speech-to-text runs natively and robustly on the mobile platform, the small keyboard makes creation impractical.

Where consuming works best is on the download and sync. TED talks lose none of their fidelity on my iPod Touch. Downloading to iTunes and then syncing with my Touch is efficient and painless. The TED talks sit on my Touch, waiting until I have a few moments to view. Since my Touch is with me wherever I go, these moments regularly occur. Hence I watch a lot of TED talks.

The NYTimes iPhone/Touch app is another great example. The content is synced (downloaded) each time I start the app - with 7 days of content stored on the device. The syncing/download model insures that performance is excellent - both in terms of speed an usability. The app experience paired with downloaded content is far superior to the mobile Web.

What we'd want is an LMS mobile app that downloads all the LMS content, dynamically syncing new content via WiFi or when plugged in. This content must include all the media, as well as articles, assessments, discussion posts, blogs, wikis, announcements, etc. etc. All of this is easy save the media.

Most institutions have struck a balance between student access to curricular media and copyright by streaming the video behind LMS authentication. If is far from clear if this approach will be able to withstand legal challenges from the media industry. The problem is that students will increasingly want to consume their media on their mobile devices.

The streaming/Web/LMS model has many advantages, but it lacks the portability and convenience of the mobile platform. Curricular consumption must compete with media consumption, a fact we might not like but one that our displeasure fails to make any less true. The attention economy applies to students as well us. If we want to be where our students are we need to be mobile. If we are not including curricular media in their mobile course content than we are falling short of the potential of the platform.

What is to be done? The first step is to think hard about the scale of the problem. The question about the degree that we need to our course content to compete with pop culture content is at least debatable. We might decide this is a fight we can't win, and shouldn't even try to join. I think that this would be a bad decision, but I look forward to the discussion. The next step is to find opportunities where curricular media can be downloaded into a mobile LMS app - a task that will surely involve further development of the available applications.

Perhaps their is some curricular media that is not under copyright, or under a more flexible copyright, and can be utilized for mobile learning. The demand for these more free and open curricular media content sources should increase. The final stage should be a change of business models and legal frameworks that allow our curricular media to compete. We should be working to accelerate this outcome.

I'm a huge believer that as many people as possible involved in higher education should teach. Administrators should teach. Librarians should teach. Technologists should teach. People who work in companies should teach. Journalists, editors, and publishers covering higher education should teach. I think more companies should follow Wimba's lead in encouraging their employees to teach.

Getting more of us into the classroom will result in a better understanding of the challenges faced by our faculty and students. For technologists, our tools and platforms (and how we support them) will improve through the process of "eating our own dog food".

Students will also benefit from a great range of instructors. They will get to learn from people who have other full-time jobs beyond faculty members, seeing that the facts, concepts, and ideas covered in our courses are applicable to a range of jobs. More instructors also means smaller courses and more experimentation. This approach also has an economic logic, as I'm betting that for many people the professional development opportunities that would come with teaching would amount to equitable compensation. As long as teaching was built into their regular jobs, and not structured as extra work, than I don't think there would be a need to pay them.

The thing is, good teaching can be synthesized. As we learned in Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas, the median time to receive a doctorate in the humanities is 9 years. Nobody needs 9 years of graduate training to teach a course. What is needed is faculty development, mentoring, peer review, assessment, and continuos improvement. Bringing administrators into the ranks of instructors would have the side benefit that this group is likely to be amenable to being required to participate in structured training, supervision and evaluation.

It is also true that people should teach only in areas in which they are qualified. A graduate degree is a necessity. Demonstrated expertise in the subject matter that they would be teaching is a prerequisite. This means someone who is participating in adding value to the knowledge in whatever discipline they would teach. This could take the form of writing professional articles and presenting at professional conferences. Participation in social media around the discipline should also count. Good teaching and research are bound together - we just need to expand our conception of research to include actively participated in the conversations in various disciplines.

Schools should also be open to expanding the types of courses are offered. Perhaps not all courses need to have a theoretical foundation, but can be more practically oriented. This does not mean that we are moving towards vocational approach, only that there should be room for courses connected to professional jobs beyond the professoriate. Learning design, project management, and mobile application development are three examples that come quickly to mind.

Is anyone experimenting in offering 1 credit courses, or hybrid courses, some other format that can accommodate an expanded instructor base and a more diverse set of course offerings? Are there any examples of institutions that have developed programs to train, supervise and support a wider range of instructors drawn from professionals throughout the university?

A colleague sent me an article from The Washington Post, "Wide Web of Diversions Gets Laptops Evicted From Lecture Halls."

The article described the banning of laptops in various courses, including David Cole's Georgetown Law class. According to the article, laptops in the classroom have " .....evolved into a powerful distraction. Wireless Internet connections tempt students away from note-typing to e-mail, blogs, YouTube videos, sports scores, even online gaming -- all the diversions of a home computer beamed into the classroom to compete with the professor for the student's attention."

While I understand the impulse to ban laptops from your classroom, I'd argue that you'd be giving up far more than you gain. Laptops are a tool, and all tools need to be utilized correctly.

Faculty have a total right to control what happens in the classroom. If a faculty member says "lids closed", then her students should close their laptops. The minute faculty lose the ability to control the behavior in the classroom is the point at which teaching and learning effectiveness stops. With this authority, however, comes the responsibility to use it wisely.

A total ban on laptops is a bad idea because laptops can be a marvelous learning tool within the classroom. There are many instances where having your students utilize their laptops will accomplish the active learning that faculty would like to promote. Students want to use their laptops, and you can turn this desire into opportunities for learning.

Times When You Should Say "Lids Down":

a. When you want your students to listen and absorb.

b. When you want your students to participate in conversation.

If you are going to say "lids down" on a regular basis (and you should), you should think about using a lecture capture system. Recording your lectures and sharing the recordings with the class will remove the student rationale and desire to take notes with their laptops. They can take notes later with the recorded lecture. You should make clear to them why you don't want laptops during listening or conversation times, and also be clear about why you are providing them with your recorded lectures.

Times When You Should Use the Laptop:

a. For instant team research and authoring assignments.

b. To provide real time feedback for student presentations, lectures or guest lectures.

c. For in-class blogging about the subject matter you discussed.

One method is to lecture for 20 minutes (with lids closed), followed by a quick "laptop" assignment where students need to quickly answer a question you have assigned (that may require some Web research), and make and post a quick PowerPoint to your LMS. You will be amazed how quickly students can produce a rapid presentation in 10 minutes. If you read John Medina's Brain Rules, you will discover that retention falls off dramatically after 20 minutes, and that you need to break your lectures into chunks and allow your students time to reset their brains. A quick Web research and instant presentation project is a great way to prepare your students for the next round of lectures, as well as an opportunity to give them a chance to consolidate the information in the lecture materials.

Another idea is to have students blog (using the blog feature in your LMS) a quick set of follow-up questions to your lecture material. You can next display these questions using the projector, circling around back to your lecture. The built in blog feature in a modern LMS is a wonderful tool to allow rapid student authoring and sharing. Having your students write up quick blog entries is a great way to allow them to surf the Web for a few minutes in the service of learning the concepts and facts that you are teaching.

What is important is that you are chunking the delivery of your lecture content and giving your students a chance to "re-set" their brains. After 10 minutes of doing something active on their laptops you can again say "lids down" and deliver the second (20 minute) part of your lecture. A 50 minute class will go much faster for everyone, and I'm betting you will have much higher levels of retention.

It is always better to leverage a tool as opposed to banning it. If you ban laptops today you will find students surfing the Web using smart phones tomorrow. Much better to utilize the tools that students want to use in a way that contributes to your teaching goals.

Matt. Very much enjoyed your Views column "Switching Sides" on your preparation to teach online.

The fact that you will be teaching online speaks well of you, speaks well of Wimba, and speaks well of Holmes Community College. The wall between those people who work in companies (like Wimba) that sell ed tech solutions and those who work in colleges/universities and teach with technology has always been too high. By teaching an actual course, hopefully using the tools your company sells or integrates with, you will learn a ton about what works and what can be improved. You will also gain a much better understanding of where technology in learning works and where it does not, and this new knowledge will help your company and your communications efforts.

If I were on the board or management of an ed tech company one of the first things I'd do is encourage all employees to teach. It was fascinating to me that some of the comments to your Views column were so critical about Holmes' decision to hire you. From where I sit you'd be the ideal candidate to teach online, as you are both qualified in the discipline you are teaching, passionate about the potential of learning technology improve learning, and experienced with learning technology. You've also done a great deal of synchronous teaching through your Webinar experience. It is true that we want faculty who are actively creating new knowledge in the fields that they teach - and you are a perfect example of someone doing just that along the lines of leveraging technology to improve teaching and learning.

In my last gig I developed and taught online courses, and trained new online faculty members. Your new teaching role gives me an excuse to boil down some advice I'd give to all new online faculty. It was interesting to me that your institutions faculty training program required you to fly to their campus. In my experience faculty training for online faculty should be done online, using the tools and methods that the instructor will be teaching with. So I'm curious as to why your institution uses this methodology?

The Advice:

1. Presence: The most important thing you can do as an online instructor is to be present. Set it as your goal to be a constant positive presence in the asynchronous course tools such as discussion boards and blogs. Post new messages everyday. Respond to all of your students' posts. Your goal is to model behavior that stresses robust communication. Make it clear that you expect your students to be present as well, but that you do not expect them to invest any less time in communication than you do.

2. Time Management: If you get the opportunity to design the reading and assignments be sure to think about the time factor. You should know how many hours you want your students to spend each week on the course, and set-up all the readings and deliverables to conform to those hours. In my case we expected students to spend 15 hours per week. Each reading had a time estimate, each assignment had a time estimate. Students were required to use the journal tool (in the course blog) to report on their hours and productivity each week. If students were spending too much time than that was was an issue we'd work on. Too little time was clear if they were not fully engaged in collaborating with their peers and were not producing quality work.

3. Strengths: My philosophy has always been to play to the strength of your students as opposed to trying to correct their weaknesses. In a creative writing class I think this would mean being flexible in the types of stories they produce. If some of your students are wonderful at characters, and others are amazing at plot, than praise (and grade) around their strengths. This does not mean you should not work on all aspects of writing, but in my experience once students feel rewarded and understood for their strengths they will be willing to work on other aspects without fear. Not everyone agrees with this approach, and it certainly results in higher grades, but it has worked for me in terms of the quality of work I see my students produce.

4. Collegiality: Here is another area where people disagree, but I always treated my students as peers. I had them call me Josh, and I set up my classes so that we were in this together for everyone to succeed. Part of their final grade for the course was their degree of collegiality to the other students. Everyone understood that the success of the course and their classmates rests on everyone else, and part of each persons responsibility is to help each other out.

5. Method: One approach that I suggest particularly for you is to take time to talk about your approach to teaching, and in particular the reasons why you are using the various features and technologies in your course. Take some time to talk about teaching, learning and technology. Each time you use a new tool (be it Wimba or a blog or a synchronous meeting tool), spend some time talking about why you chose that tool and what teaching and learning goals you hope to reach. Get your students to reflect on the success of your approach and the tools, and to make suggestions about how things could be better structured.

6. Peer Review: One of the great advances of online teaching is that it is much easier to set-up your course for collaboration and peer review. Use the discussion board to have students review each others writing (with guidelines that you offer them). Be confident in providing your constructive criticism in public (again the discussion board), as modeling how to critique other peoples work is an important skills. Grade in private, but offer feedback in public.

7. Emotional Labor: Finally, don't be afraid to bring your full-self to your class. Invest your emotional labor in your teaching. Talk about the path that got you to where you are now. Let them know why you love the subject that you are teaching. Don't be afraid to talk about your concerns and fears. Let them know about your job, and how it relates to your teaching. Let them know your strengths and passions.

Good luck this semester! Looking forward to your next report.

Part of the responsibilities I enjoy most in academic technology is the opportunity to make recommendations for campus technology purchases. Examples include the opportunity to review and evaluate providers of platforms/products/services for: the LMS, lecture capture, curricular content management, student/faculty collaboration tools, curricular media authoring, synchronous collaboration, mobile learning, simulations, and many more.

In my experience, the role of a learning technologist in product/company evaluation is seldom as the final decision maker, but rather as part of a team that develops recommendations. It is important that your recommendations are based on a strategic as well as a tactical evaluation. This proposed framework is designed to guide the evaluation process (as well as the writing of requirements), with a goal of moving away from features, design etc. (which will change) towards a more strategic method.

This evaluation framework is offered not as a final model, but as a route by which I can think through and share some of my ideas around this goal. Conversation, disagreement, and dialogue about this evaluation framework will only improve it.

The Framework:

1) Core Competencies: To what degree will running the application, platform or service require your institution to invest in skills outside of your core educational competencies?

2) Community of Practice: No matter how wonderful the application/platform/service, how great the company, or how attractive the price -- it is almost always a bad idea to be the only (or one of the few) schools adopting the product. Someone has to be first; it shouldn't be you. A critical mass of schools is necessary as we often rely on each other for best practices and fixes, and out of the user community comes the ability to influence the product road map and company support practices. In cases where your institution is determined to be innovative (first), it makes sense to do so within a consortium of peer institutions.

3) Standards: Is the companies products/services built on industry recognized and open standards? The last thing you want is for the core architecture of the product/service you purchase to become obsolete and unsupportable should your vendor be purchased or merge with another company. A system architected around some proprietary special sauce will be an evolutionary dead-end, as the state-of-the art of development moves along with common standards.

4) Customization: Any product or service that will require high degrees of customization to work with your current systems (authentication, SIS, etc.) is almost always a bad bet -- no matter how much the company promises to ease your integration path. Today's customization is tomorrow's supportability headache. Far better to live with looser integration and less features than a customized solution.

5) Lock-In: What happens when your institution wants to move from one vendors platform to another? Will the data transfer? Are files produced by the system standard files that can be stored and transferred to other systems? Will the content that has been produced by students and faculty still be available if the company should go out of business or you should decide to change companies?

6) Transparency: How transparent is the company in regards to their product road map, operations, and organizational structure?

7) Ecosystem: Is there an ecosystem of other vendors developing for and around the company that you are evaluating?

8) Longevity: How comfortable are you that the company will be around for as long you plan to be around? A great free (advertising supported) Web 2.0 platform might seem wonderful today, but may cause big problems down the road if you adopt the platform/service and it disappears down the road.

9) Business Model: Ask about the business model of the company that you thinking about partnering with. Any company without a rational business model today will not be around to support their product/service tomorrow.

10): Core Business: Is serving the educational market the core business of your potential partner, or is education a sideline?

Your evaluation framework may differ -- I'd be interested to hear what you think is missing from the list. What is important, however, is that you and your team develop a methodology for evaluating companies and products that can be consistently applied (and learned from) across evaluation projects.