There are a number of Course Management Systems (CMS) for running courses via a website. These are also sometimes called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

I use Moodle to look after the Organic College’s distance learning courses.  This has been fantastic but I often find myself looking around at other services which would be easier for course participants to use to get things done. For example:

• Wordpress or Blogger would allow participants to create rich blogs more easily than they can in Moodle
• Picasa desktop and Picasa Web Albums would allow easier uploading and displaying of photos
• Wikispaces has a much richer and easy to use wiki system where participants could work collaboratively on documents.

There are lots of other examples of where a free web service that has been designed to do one job does that job better than the CMS. In an effort to improve the experience of participants on our courses it’s been challenging to make decisions about using these other services. Stepping out of the ‘walled garden‘ of the CMS means that they will have to learn new systems, create new accounts and potentially get confused as to where they are on the web. The extent to which these things are a problem very much depends on the individual.

Matt Crosslin has an interesting series of articles called ‘Death of the Learning Management System’ over on EduGeek journal that address some of these issues. In part 5 he looks in particular about how to connect users of the CMS with other services. He says:

We need to start seeing the LMS as the control panel of a subway system. As trains go all over the place, the relay information back to the control panel so that the head conductor can know where they are going and what they are picking up on the way. In other words, use the tool to make the instructors job easier while also launching students out on to the web to learn.

This is similar to the approach I’d like to take; Moodle is a fantastic way to look after the course content, but it would be good to make using other web services part of the course experience whilst still connected to the ‘control panel’ - i.e. Moodle in our case.  The beauty of using an Open Source CMS is that plugins can be written to adapt functionality. In the above article Matt mentions that he will look at writing some plugins for Moodle to provide more of this kind of functionality. If Susweb gets time that will be something I’ll look at as well.