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Main Body
Chapter 8 – The Evolution of Course and Learning Management Systems at The Ohio State University by Steven Nagel, Christy McLeod, and Dave Hooker
What have been the major influences that have shaped the evolutions of Course Management Systems/Learning Management Systems at OSU and how have these influences changed over time?
Chapter Introduction
Many changes have happened at Ohio State over the past thirty years with respect to learning technologies. Some of these changes had immense impacts on the deployment of course management systems, and later, learning management systems at Ohio State. To see some of the major highlights and milestones of course management and learning management systems, view this timeline.
Internal Institutional Drivers
At this time, Carroll Notestine was the director of the academic computing center. These mainframe academic computing experiments were expensive, and the terminals were expensive, therefore he wanted the machines to be used to the fullest extent possible. Notestine, an OSU graduate, created an early incubator space where this technology could be tested and utilized by departments that otherwise would have trouble paying for mainframe time. He also broke ground by thinking differently about what a mainframe could do, besides business computation. At the time, there was no network on the campus besides mainframe terminals, and mainframe connection charges were levied for each terminal within a department. In order to encourage the use of the mainframe for academic pursuits and experimentation, the price charged per connection to the university mainframe computer was reduced by 1/3 or by 1/2 if the department used Course Writer for classes. Notestine also ensured the mainframe rates were priced low enough so as to not discourage experimentation in this emerging educational technology field.
In 1977, one IBM mainframe ran these three applications for the university:
LCS was the Library Control System, an electronic card catalog for library holdings
CICS was the Customer Information Control System, used to access ledger and human resources data
Course Writer III was drill software used in mainframe connected computer labs
In early experiments, the value of computer delivered drill coursework and exercises was unknown. This called into question the worth of faculty who were interested in using Learning Technology. According to Bate, faculty who were creating valuable software, like a hugely successful German language drill, had trouble getting tenure because they spent time playing with computers instead of publishing. That stigma has continued until Dr. Drake’s administration at Ohio State, which wholeheartedly supports technology for teaching.
Changes in Technology
In 1979 a Columbus company, Goal Systems, rewrote and optimized the code from Course Writer III and branded the new software Phoenix. At the time, a few lab sections running Course Writer III were using 60% of the processing power on that mainframe, and Goal Systems, a Columbus company, saw an opportunity to optimize the software to save time and money. At that time, the concept of copyright protection for software was sufficiently murky to prevent IBM from filing a patent suit, and within a year, IBM had lost most of its market share to Phoenix.
The success of Phoenix was short lived. In the fall of 1981, the IBM PC was released and by 1982 these powerful new machines, which carried no ongoing charges for mainframe time, were the devices that Bate and his fellow programmers had begun to experiment with. The cost was substantially lower for the PC’s and the graphics were far ahead of the text displays of the mainframe terminals, however the new machines lacked the networking connections the old terminals contained as a matter of course. By 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, which had a graphical interface, fonts, and a color palate that was unimaginable before. Floppy disks replaced the missing network connections of the mainframe with ‘sneaker-net’ and the technology moved forward. By 1983 or 1984, the mainframe was shut down.
The first network for the new personal computers began to appear on campus in the mid-1980’s. The network, called SONNET, was a centrally supported network and modem pool that allowed users to connect with other university systems and external bulletin board sites. SONNET could be put into a building if a group would host it and pay for it. Bate recalled sharing a SONNET connection with the English Department by running a connector line through the steam tunnel between Denny Hall and Lord Hall, and he remembered having to unplug the connection if rain was expected, because water in the tunnel would short out the equipment. In general, campus computing in the 1980’s could be summed up as a mix of software offerings and coding you could do better on the cheap PC, but with no connectivity to speak of, and when it was available, file sharing or moving was the priority, rather than moving data as is done today. (Bate, 2018) These connectivity challenges on campus continued until 1993 or 1994, when the World Wide Web began to appear.
Steve Acker joined the faculty of Ohio State University in the Department of Communications in 1981. Hired to teach courses in TV, radio, and writing for the media, Acker’s interest in computer technology inspired him to teach a class about Computer mediated communication using Compuserve in 1985. By 1996, Acker began splitting time between his appointment between teaching and the University Technology Systems group that later became the Office of the CIO, an arrangement that continued until he left the university in 2008.
Phoenix was still in limited use when he started, but the early computer labs were difficult to maintain, expensive, and couldn’t serve the increased use by the student population. According to Acker, Microsoft Front Page was a better example of a precursor to WebCT at Ohio State, because it served information to Distance Education students and Remote Learners outside the lab. Acker referred to Front Page as a Content Creation and Management System, rather than a course management system, and it was used beginning in 1997. The Front Page system didn’t scale well, and would have had difficulty serving the number of faculty and students who eventually utilized WebCT if its use had continued.
An Overview of WebCT
As Front Page was being used and tested on a small scale, WebCT was gaining the interest of a number of Big 10 institutions. Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, University of Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa all began piloting WebCT and utilized inter-institutional technology groups to compare their experiences and and learn better ways to use the system. At the same time, The University of Michigan and Indiana began building their own Course Management System, which was originally called Chef Tools during development, and would eventually become the LMS called Sakai. Other Big 10 schools were experimenting with Blackboard at the same time, and colleagues were able to learn about other systems through these institutional organizations.
A CMS, such as WebCT, allowed faculty to manage course and student information through a web browser (Daniels, 2009) and to keep those materials from facing copyright protection scrutiny (Acker, 2018). Essentially CMSs supplemented face-to-face course content (Simonson, 2007).
A Learning Management System, by contrast, allows users to progress through customized modules, in which learners have the opportunity to assess their knowledge and mastery of content (Daniels, 2009). However, the definition of CMS may have begun to include elements of the LMS definition during the late 2000’s as CMSs were described as being particularly useful to house the “Unit-Module-Topic approach” for course organization (Simonson, 2007).
Acker argues that WebCT wasn’t an LMS at all, but rather a CMS, or Course Management System. Acker said “WebCT stands for Course Tools, and it always described itself as a Course Management System…. It was essentially adopted by Ohio State and other colleges and universities to provide ease from the perspective of the Registrar.” The WebCT system made the process of enrolling students and conducting adds and drops much easier, and, perhaps more importantly, allowed faculty to put copyright protected material behind the CMS login to protect the university from the infringement cases that Kinko’s Copy service was experiencing at this time. This differentiated access was also beneficial for instructors interested in using OhioLink materials, which could only be used in Ohio classes, but had to be protected from access by the general public.
The grade book was another critical feature of WebCT. Acker said “Students were constantly saying ‘how did I do on quiz A, how did I do on test 1? And eventually the faculty could say ‘Go look at the grade book.’” Faculty also benefitted from the system’s ability to host the course syllabus online, so they didn’t have to bring stacks of syllabi to class not only the first day, but for the first week or so as students added and dropped the course. In spite of these benefits, the WebCT system was difficult for inexperienced users to navigate, and some faculty questioned the value of the system. When WebCT was re-written as Vista, the result was catastrophic. The new software was slow and unreliable, and the interface was less intuitive than WebCT. According to Acker, the Vista system was unusable.
View the full interview with Steve Acker below:
WebCT to Desire2Learn (D2L)
What caused the change?
Trends in Higher Education & Changes in Technology
How do Course Management Systems and Learning Management Systems differ?
Initially, when Ohio State implemented WebCT, as Steve Acker described, The Ohio State University used WebCT as a course management system (CMS).
The differentiation between CMS and LMS becomes even more difficult as some scholars posit that a CMS and LMS are synonymous and, essentially, LMS provides the same functionality of materials for course storage plus course enrichment (Coates, James, and Baldwin, 2005; Lonn and Teasley 2009). Indeed, much confusion existed about the differentiation between CMSs and LMSs, but an LMS “is the framework that handles all aspects of the learning process” (Watson and Watson 2007). Two features that seemed to make an LMS stand apart from a CMS was the use of LMSs in the corporate world and SCORM (i.e., sharable content object reference model) compliance (Coates, James, and Baldwin, 2005; Watson and Watson, 2007).
The Rise of Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)
SCORM emerged from from the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative from the Department of Defense and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1997. The goal of SCORM was to allow for the standardization of e-content delivery. For example, before SCORM, The United States could not share e-content between the various military branches in their own courses due to the fact that there was no set standard. SCORM compliant courses need to be reusable, accessible, interoperable, and durable (Jones, 2003).
In the Higher Education setting, SCORM compliant CMSs and LMSs made it possible to share learning objects and to be reused multiple times and in various different courses, if necessary (Yang, 2003). Additionally metadata and interaction data with learning objects could be shared with faculty and instructional designers to inform further revision of those learning objections (Bohl, 2002).
Nonetheless, at the time that OSU began considering Desire2Learn, the need for something resembling more of a learning management system (LMS) became clear.
Internal Institutional Drivers
The Ohio State University first adopted WebCT in 1998 with a campus-wide license purchased in 2000. (Enterprise Level Course Management System Evaluation: Final Report, 2003). A Lantern Article from January 2001 describes WebCT as a toolkit for instructors to supplement their classes with the following features: course information storage, course notes, self-tests, and class discussions (Sobotkowski, 2001).
By 2003, WebCT had changed their platform to Vista 2.0. Unfortunately, Vista 2.0 was completely unusable because WebCT’s newly rewritten platform was extremely clunky for end users (Acker, 2018). Additionally, WebCT was not SCORM compliant and could not handle many more users. Because of this change, Ohio State’s Office of the CIO and OIT had to evaluate its options for a new enterprise-level CMS. Ohio State faced three choices: build its own CMS, purchase an enterprise level CMS, or wait to purchase an enterprise level CMS. Each of these options had considerable risk. The building of an in-house system requires supporting costs, waiting would only work so long as the current system could support Ohio State’s needs, which would be only about 12 to 18 months, and buying an enterprise level system would entail a painful process of migrating materials into a new CMS (Acker, 2018; Enterprise Level Course Management System Evaluation: Final Report, 2003). Nonetheless, the Office of the CIO and OIT deemed an enterprise-level system essential because this would allow for integration with a Student Information System (SIS) (Enterprise Level Course Management System Evaluation: Final Report , 2003).
Out of eleven vendors, the main contenders for Ohio State’s new CMS were: CyberLearning Lab’s Angel, Blackboard 6.0, WebCT’s Vista, and Desire2Learn. Based upon features alone Vista and Desire2Learn led Angel followed by Blackboard. When compared based on usability for faculty, designers, and students, Desire2Learn came out ahead followed by Blackboard with Vista and Angel trailing considerably.
Even though Desire2Learn started to emerge as the winner, Ohio State did have concerns that because of the company’s small size it could either get bought out by another company or face challenges in keeping up with the demands of its new account acquisitions. Nonetheless, Desire2Learn did win out, as its future evaluation was strongest.
On July 20th, 2004, the initial project charter was outlined for the Desire2Learn Course Management Implementation. With Desire2Learn chosen as Ohio State’s new learning management system, Ohio State could now bring course data together in one system. Additionally, Desire2Learn would allow for growth for the foreseeable future and increased adoption of a CMS at Ohio State.
Read more about the process of implementing Desire2Learn at Ohio State from the Desire2Learn Course Management System Implementation Project Charter: D2L CMS Implementation Project Charter.
An Overview of Desire2Learn (D2L)
Carmen, Ohio State’s branded version of Desire2Learn, was deployed by Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR) in the summer of 2005. New features available to students included virtual chat and office hours, personalized profiles, and preference options for the way in which users would view course e-mails or discussion pages. The consensus regarding Desire2Learn was that it was far easier for people to use than WebCT (Jackson, 2005, Acker, 2018). In addition, Desire2Learn contained “Learning Object Repository” and allowed for “the transfer of information across course management systems, worldwide” (Jackson, 2005).
Desire2Learn, ultimately, became the learning management system for Ohio State and hosted the face-to-face and online courses for Ohio State. To learn more about the functionality of Carmen (D2L), view the video below from Ohio State IT:
Nonetheless, as Steve Acker explained, “This stuff never lasts forever, but our goal was not to have to change for at least six years”. While Desire2Learn served as Ohio State’s LMS for a little over a decade, the rise of mobile technology began to put pressures on the capabilities of Desire2Learn. In 2015, Ohio State had to begin an evaluation of changing LMSs yet again—this time a new player had emerged: Instructure’s Canvas.
The Canvas learning management system was created in 2008 by two Brigham Young University computer science graduate students, Devlin Daley and Brian Whitmer. In his blog Whitmer states that the idea began as a mock startup project as part of a software business class. As partners in the group project and as (frustrated) student and TA instructor users of Blackboard at BYU; Daley and Whitmer wanted to simplify the learning management interface and integrate third party web-tools such as google docs, YouTube videos and other communication tools. After their research showed there might be a market for it, they decided to make the start up, real. (Whitmer, 2010.) Their focus was to make the interface easy to use for student and instructor. In an interview in 2010, Daley said “A teacher or a student is not necessarily a technologist. They need to be able to focus on what they’re trying to do, not the tool itself.” (Israelsen-Hartley, 2010.)
What caused the change ?
Choosing Canvas
On April 20th, 2015, after ten years of hosting Carmen, OSU’s learning management system with the Desire2Learn software platform; Vice President and CIO of the Office of the Chief Information Officer, Michael Hofherr and Associate Vice President of Learning Technology, Liv Gjestvang, invited several OSU faculty, staff and students to participate in a short term evaluation committee to assess the current higher education learning management systems and evaluate needs of the OSU faculty and students (Ramos, 2015.) The committee was asked to evaluate two other leading learning management systems; BlackBoard and Canvas, in addition to the currently used LMS, Desire2Learn.
Although the LMS market had been growing over the past few years, (Dobre, 2015) one of the driving factors for the timing of the evaluation process was related to OSU’s new membership in Unizin, a nonprofit academic consortium set up to allow universities to share their online content and analytics (Davey, 2014.)
According to an OSU Office of Distance Education and eLearning (ODEE) March 8, 2016 news update “We were charged to revisit our LMS options because of significant changes in the learning systems market. Educational institutions are teaming up for more influence on the customer side, making way for rapid development of products that serve the needs of today’s schools.” (Ramos, 2016.)
In order to share learning analytics, content and software platforms, the universities in the consortium needed to share the same infrastructure; and the LMS selected by Unizin to deliver the content was Canvas, a learning management software from the company Instructure. (Unizin, 2014.) According to Instructure’s chief technology officer, Joel Dehlin, using Canvas is a critical tool for the members of the consortium. ‘Joining Unizin without using Canvas, is like joining a country club and paying for the country club and not using the golf course.’ (Straumsheim, 2014)
Trends in Higher Education
Another factor in changing and improving the LMS was the desire to expand online learning and distance education at Ohio State. In 2014, The Ohio Department of Education’s College Credit Initiative mandated that every school district provide a pathway to college credit for their high schoolers and that every public institution for higher education to provide equivalent opportunities (Carey, 2014.)
(Carey, 2014)
For The Ohio Board of Regents and Chancellor Carey’s recommendations read more here: College Credit Plus
As a result, incoming freshman were often starting OSU with a semester to a year’sworth ofgeneral education credit. To offset this revenueloss, ODEEcreated 11 online GE courses and four new distance education programs.(ODEE, 2014 p. 18-19)Having a reliable and easy to use LMS was critical to the success of these online and distance education courses.
Changes in Technology
As students’ increasing dependence on mobile devices as a means to access the internet rises, an LMS that works well with these interfaces had become a priority (Smith, 2015.) As part of OSU’s Autumn 2015 pilot survey, of Canvas and D2L, students cited the mobile app feature as a significant advantage of Canvas and 50% of the students enrolled in the pilot program used a mobile device to access Canvas (ODEE, 2016.) The Canvas platform also provided an advantage with its use of Cloud technology. Canvas is hosted on the Amazon Web Service and in lieu of longer periods of scheduled downtime at certain times of the year, the system updates on a regular, three- week cycle with less disruption (ODEE, 2016.)
The Evaluation Process
After a 7-week study period, from April to June in 2015 involving vendor demonstrations, participation in ranking surveys and in some cases opportunities to test sandbox versions of the study LMSs, the 25-member LMS evaluation committee of faculty, staff and students selected Canvas as the LMS to further evaluate and compare with the current D2L software (Ramos, 2016.) The recommenders highlighted Canvas for its ease of use, straightforward interface and its functionality with mobile devices (Ramos, 2015.)
In the fall semester of 2015 a pilot study was launched to further evaluate Canvas. Fifteen courses were selected from a wide range of colleges, fields of study and course levels. The ODEE staff created two surveys, one for instructional staff/faculty and the other for students. The survey was sent out three times during the evaluation process; at the beginning, middle and end of the semester. The results of the survey showed an overwhelming large preference by faculty and instructional staff for Canvas (ODEE, 2016.)
Faculty preferences (adapted from ODEE- Executive Summary Canvas Autumn Pilot Report, 2016)
The breakdown of student results was more mixed, with juniors and seniors preferring D2L, while freshmen and sophomores preferred Canvas; although by the end of the semester the upperclassman increased their preference for Canvas (ODEE, 2016.)
Student preferences (adapted from ODEE- Executive Summary Canvas Autumn Pilot Report, 2016)
Faculty and Students favorite features of Canvas (flipcards)
A second pilot of Canvas involving over 50 courses took place in the Spring of 2016 as well as a technical assessment by ODEE for security, accessibility and functionality. By the end of the Spring 2016 semester, plans were underway to adopt Canvas by Fall of 2017, allowing instructors if necessary to request exceptions until Spring of 2017 (ODEE, 2016.)
As part of the LMS evaluation committee’s recommendations, ODEE communicated to the OSU faculty, staff and students about the overall change from D2L to Canvas through a variety of methods including emails, YouTube videos, and social media.
Testimonials from faculty and students were also promoted via Twitter:
Several instructional videos were created to help students during the transition, especially important as in the beginning, some classes were using D2L and others Canvas.
By the end of the 2016-17 academic year, D2L was no longer available (Cartwright, 2017.)
Although the faculty held the primary responsibility for building or transferring their courses in the new Canvas LMS platform; OSU’s instructional designers and learning technology staff played a critical role in “teaching the teachers” (Shaul, 2018.) Instructional designers and learning technologists were responsible for workshops, and training sessions as well as 1:1 consultations with faculty members. For departments and colleges with their own ID on staff, their role as a point of contact for ODEE as well as a source of information and technical support was vital. (Murphy, 2018.)
Audio interviews with two instructional designers who helped facilitate the D2L to Canvas transition at OSU.
Margaret Murphy. M.Ed. Instructional Design Coordinator The Ohio State University College of Public Health (Murphy, 2018)
Kylienne Clark Shaul M.S. Instructional Development Specialist, School of Environment and Natural Resources, OSU (Shaul, 2018)
Conclusion
Over the past 35 years, the educational technology landscape has changed considerably at Ohio State. From the mainframe uses for courses in the 1970’s, to the rise of the PC Network called Sonnet in the 1980’s, to the adoption of a proto-CMS, Microsoft Front Page, before the first “true” adoption of a CMS in WebCT in 1998. One thing appears clear—change coincides with the advances in technology, as outlined in this chapter.
However, when we revisit the interview with Steve Acker, a particular exchange between Steve and Dave Hooker stands out when Acker questions why Ohio State chose to change from Canvas to D2L. His parallels to the WebCT transition begin to uncover a familiar trend about students and user experience:
“When we brought WebCT into the forefront, the students didn’t have tools to allow them to access the CMS.” Acker then explained that because “D2L got bogged down in their legacy operations and didn’t put enough resources into the mobile environment… as a result the students didn’t, again, have access to the learning management system, which would be a huge motivator to move away from D2L.”
Furthermore, during the D2L to Canvas change, larger institutional factors beyond student and faculty experience drove the change. Ohio State’s membership in the educational institution consortium, Unizin, added to Canvas’s appeal as it had recently been selected as the LMS of choice to share Unizin content. In addition, new regulations from the Ohio Department of Education required that Ohio State University’s general education coursework be available to high school students. In order to meet this new requirement, Ohio State began to create online general education coursework as cost-effective and cogent solution. Canvas’ versatile and user-friendly interface allowed Ohio State to offer this new coursework easily. With access to a robust LMS, Ohio State could also develop new online programming in order to offset revenue losses from students enrolling at Ohio State with College Credit Plus credits earned at other institutions.
When we wonder what might be next at Ohio State in terms of an LMS perhaps we ought to consider many different things: user experience for students and faculty, new educational regulations and initiatives, and overall changes to the higher education landscape. If Instructure begins to drop innovation and becomes engrained in their legacy operations with Canvas, then we should suspect that a new, more capable LMS may be needed or, even more likely, may arise.
Ultimately, it is clear that an LMS is not forever. WebCT ran from 1998-2006 (8 years) at Ohio State. Desire2Learn ran for just a bit over a decade, from 2005 to 2016 (11 years). Perhaps Canvas will be Ohio State’s LMS for at least another 10 years, but in 10 years what will Higher Education look like beyond the walls of Ohio State? We will just have to wait and see.
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Faculty preferences (adapted from ODEE- Executive Summary Canvas Autumn Pilot Report, 2016)
Student preferences (adapted from ODEE- Executive Summary Canvas Autumn Pilot Report, 2016)
