At a recent meeting of the UNL Information Technology Leadership Group, Mark Askren, UNL Chief Information Officer and Heath Tuttle, UNL Director of Learning and Emerging Technology & Analytics, discussed the University’s plan regarding the ongoing licensing of a learning management system (LMS). As you know, the University of Nebraska has long used Blackboard as it’s standard LMS.
Because of faculty and staff interest in new learning technologies, the University issued an RFI to several LMS companies seeking information about their products. While there was support for various technologies, the University has decided to pursue a new 3-year license agreement with Blackboard due to dependencies between Blackboard and other University student-related data systems.
Unfortunately, Blackboard has not been an option for supporting non-credit student education, the issue being the ability to authenticate distance students. As a result, many in Extension have used Moodle to support LMS-based non-credit offerings. In the past, EdMedia and eXtension have provided Moodle support; however, given recent changes to EdMedia, eXtension appears to be the best choice moving ahead. Not only does eXtension support a number of Nebraska Extension courses and modules, a reduction in their overhead rate makes them an even more viable provider (for more information please see http://bit.ly/1yrcZgp).
Meanwhile, Extension has communicated to the University the need for a common, secure and standard LMS platform to support distance education students. With the expected growth of University non-credit offerings in the future, Online Worldwide, the UNL Office of Online & Distance Education and Information Technology Services believe this is a priority moving forward.
-- Dan Cotton