[ed. note: This had been posted privately in 2013, and now that sufficient time has passed, I’m making it public.]
I am a non-voting member[1] of our Learning Management System (LMS) investigation committee[2], which is charged with two “basic” questions:
- Is there a single LMS which the school should support?
- If so, should all teachers be required to use that same LMS?
Currently the school supports Moodle, Finalsite’s LMS, Google Sites, Blogger-based courses, Edmodo, Schoology, and Adobe Contribute-edited webpages on the school’s web server. Most of those are “free,” in so far as there is no line item on the budget, but cost time and energy to support. In terms of financial costs, we pay $7,500 for Moodle hosting, and $11,000 for the LMS module from Finalsite.
After investigating numerous LMS options, the committee decided that Schoology and Canvas were the top two contenders. Both were “brought in” to present to interested faculty at a faculty meeting[3] via WebEx.
One committee member presented the findings of three separate surveys of faculty, students, and parents. Following the presentations from Canvas and Schoology, faculy were given a link to a Google Form with which to vote on their preference between the two.
Our final committee meeting is in two days. At that meeting, the committee will vote on its recommendations for the two questions enumerated above, and pass those recommendations along to the school Administration, which will make its own decision.
As this is my personal blog, I’ll post my guesses as to how the committee’s vote will come down:
- Canvas
- Yes
So, how will the Administration vote? That is always an unknown… but I’ll make a guess here too: the Administration will endorse the recommendations of the committee.
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As the Educational Technologist, my job requires that I work with faculty on integrating technology into their teaching. Since I will help faculty with whichever system we end up with, we felt it was important to the process that I not vote on which system we’d end up with. Similarly, the IT Department representative on the committee would make sure that whichever system was decided on would work, and so he too is a non-voting member. ↩
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Following the committee’s presentation of survey data to the faculty, I heard that there were criticisms amongst the wider faculty about the make-up of the committee. Those criticisms from faculty included the remarks “there are too few tenured faculty members on the committee,” and “too many of the committee members have been on staff for less than five-years.” ↩
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One point of dissatisfaction amongst faculty which I heard about was confusion over whether the meeting was mandatory or not. The committee wanted all faculty to show… but couldn’t actually make it mandatory. The invitation was therefore phrased in a way that only resulted in more confusion — and irritation. ↩