• 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

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:

© 2018 Instructure. All rights reserved

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.)

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.)

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:

#TBT: Early adopters of Canvas discuss exciting new features that benefit students #InnovateOSU #AdoptCanvas pic.twitter.com/Ugf1wY6K6x

— Ohio State IT (@OhioStateIT) May 26, 2016

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.)

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.