"Monoliths," APIs and Extensability - A presentation on the past and future directions of CMS. http://ubcestrategy.ironpointv7.net/
AssetFactory.aspx?did=1992
I was very fortunate recently to deliver the above talk to a CMS
task Force at UBC on the overall lay of the CMS land. It seems relevant
to share it here, especially in light of a recent post by James Farmer on integrating open source pieces with WebCT, and the great follow up by Michael Feldstein.
I think Michael's read is mostly accurate. As I try to lay out in
the presentation, CMS have evolved as a series of "wrappers" around a
set of applications, and there were good reasons for this innovation
(it was an innovation when it began 10 years ago) in terms of
handling scale and providing some stable service across all or many
departments in a post-secondary institution within a limited budget.
But this model, which does tend towards monolithism, is now 10 years
old; in part because of rapidly maturing alternative models (service
oriented architectures and distributed applications development
environments in general), in part because of pressure from customers to
allow more pedagogically-driven choices in their tools, and in part
because of challenges from Open Source and elsewhere, all of the CMS,
be they commercial or open source, are moving, some slowly, some more
quickly, towards increased extensability and interoperation with other
tools. This is in my mind an undeniable trend, and the issue for
organizations is not if this will happen, but instead a question of how
best to obtain the core services and acceptable level or "service"
while increasing the amount of flexbility and choice for instructors
and students, and at the same time not increasing the cost (and
hopefully decreasing it if you're really adept).
I don't think the commercial CMS companies are going away, at least
not anytime soon. There are still many organizations (often small ones,
but not always) for whom more sophisticated 'elearning architecture'
approaches, "best-of-breed," or the choices (and demands) facilitated by open source are not (yet, maybe ever?) realistic choices. There is value in providing a set of tools (however limited you
might feel these tools to be) in an integrated environment that can
with relative ease tie into other parts of your infrastructure and for
which you need to hire application administrators, not developers, to
run. But even those customers want more freedom to make choices, and
the CMS companies know this and are trying to mediate it without
cutting off their own nose. But it's also clear that they are under
fire, and that many institutions will have the wherewithal to adopt or
create what Michael terms a "Learning Management Operating System" into
which they can insert, or on which they can build, different
application choices and approaches. As I read it, the impetus behind
OKI, and to the extent to which it embodies openly agreed upon APIs,
Sakai, is a step in that direction. Michael's predicition of a timeline
(about 5 years) also seems about right; it will take a while for the
implications of this approach to flow through and for the various
systems needed to implement it to mature to the point where each
implementation is not a large software development initiative of its
own. But it is coming, and it will change the landscape of these
systems considerably. - SWL [EdTechPost]
5:31:46 PM Google It!.
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