We are continuing to make progress with the Learning Management System (LMS) review. Recall that Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) is conducting a review of cuLearn (our LMS) to ensure that it meets the current and anticipated needs of our students, instructors, teaching assistants and staff members.
We are about to wrap up our listening sessions (we have one final session scheduled with the Faculty of Science Chairs and Directors). While these scheduled sessions will end very soon, you can still submit your thoughts and input via the online form.
At the end of April, the LMS Advisory Group (see the list of members here) began to code and organize the feedback that we received. This feedback is being used to inform our scope and our list of requirements for our LMS. We anticipate completing this list of requirements by the end of May and we plan to share this document back to the Carleton community for input.
In the April update, we indicated that we would share some of the mandatory requirements. These are “must haves” and if a tool or platform is unable to meet a mandatory requirement it will be excluded from consideration.
Some examples of mandatory requirements:
- The LMS must be certified AODA compliant (this relates to accessibility of the tool).
- The LMS must support established interoperability standards like LTI (learning tools interoperability) and be IMS Global certified (this ensures that the tool can be integrated and extended with other tools at Carleton).
There will be a number of additional mandatory requirements and these will touch on aspects like data ownership, security, privacy, language support, support, uptime, responsiveness, and the ability to scale.
The project charter for the LMS review will be presented to Carleton’s Information System Steering Committee mid-May. This charter is a request for some additional resources to support the review and to prioritize and allocate resources in ITS (Information Technology Services) to support the review.
Finally, ITS completed a very important upgrade to Moodle (the tool that powers cuLearn) on May 3, 4 and 5. This upgrade took our version of Moodle 3.1.12 to the most current stable version, 3.6.3. This upgrade will allow us to fairly compare and contrast the most current version of Moodle with the other platforms in the market like Instructure’s Canvas and D2L’s Brightspace. Find out what’s new in the upgrade here.