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by Sally Hritz

Recently, the university community had the opportunity to contribute feedback on the Web-based course management systems (CMS) of four potential vendors to Ohio State. The event, sponsored by TELR for the Office of the CIO, was designed to inform the selection process for the university's next generation of CMS software.

After viewing the demos, attendees were asked to complete surveys that will help determine standards for tool sets, feature sets, technical considerations and ease of use. From this and other meetings, such as followup feedback sessions that will give faculty and students hands-on experience with CMS products, the CIO Office will be able to develop a rubric of needs for an RFP.

The CIO Office began a formal evaluation because Ohio State will soon need a more advanced Web-based, enterprise-level course management system. Victoria Getis, project director of the CMS evaluation, enumerates the reasons: we need a CMS that can scale to a growing user population, be easy to use, provide content management capabilities, better serve the eLearning needs of the academic community and also functionally integrate with current and future student information system applications. She notes that major CMS vendors offer new enterprise-level systems that meet these criteria, but at significantly increased costs.

In addition, use of the campus's current Web course tools system, WebCT, is projected to increase at the rate of 80 percent a year (see "WebCT Update") with as many as 83,000 student accounts in the system in 2003-2004 (some students are enrolled in more than one WebCT course). The choice of a new CMS impacts more than the students, however, for it is faculty who develop digital course content using the software and staff who provide technical support.

Purchasing one of the commercially available CMS systems is only one of the options the CIO Office is studying, Getis says. The alternatives are to build and support a CMS system in-house or wait to build or buy while continuing to use the Campus Edition of WebCT.