Wednesday, May 05, 2010

LMS Bake off - who has the best tasting cookies?

Recently I am embarked on a suicide mission - er, research project - under the DOODLE aegis on behalf of SLN. In brief, as ANGEL heads towards end of life (EOL) in 2014 and SUNY will presumably contractually migrate to the Blackboard NG platform, we in the SUNY community need to perform due diligence and examine all feasible LMS alternatives.

To that end, a working group within DOODLE has been assembled from our membership. Our first task (nearly complete) is to document current functionality in ANGEL, and then begin the same level of analysis for Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai. Other LMS systems will be kept on our "watch list" for future scrutiny and evaluation.

Some preliminary research by team member and colleague Clark Shah-Nelson can be viewed here:


The EduTools site offers side by side feature/functionality comparisons, but is still somewhat out of sync with the market space (ANGEL 7.3 vs. 7.4 and apparently no evaluation of the Bb 9 series platform). That being said, however ,this is an admirable effort and is what our project team is shooting for.