In a thoughtful commentary published in Inside Higher Ed earlier this year, my friend and colleague Lev Gonick, vice president and CIO at Case Western Reserve University, proclaimed that “course management systems are dead; long live course management systems.” This was one of his eleven IT predictions for 2009.
At a time when the Course or Learning Management System (LMS) has become an embedded, if not indeed an essential, element of the college experience for students across all sectors of American higher education, Gonick’s proclamation seemed, at face value, contrarian. But Lev focused his assessment primarily on the fate of proprietary systems (read Angel, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn):
