Call for Participation
IMS GLC Adoption Standards for LMS and CMS RFPs
The Challenge
The broad use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) across K-20 education has become an embedded component of most schools’ and campus’ “Learning Enterprise” strategy. This process started in the latter part of the 20th century and has accelerated rapidly in the last several years. The need to deploy and maintain an LMS has become as standard as email or network connectivity, with the need for Content Management Systems (CMS) to manage learning materials at the school, district, institution or system level becoming equally vital to providing a robust learning environment. At the same time, the list of delivered and expected features available with these platforms has also grown dramatically in both breadth and relative complexity.
While the LMS and CMS marketplace has continued to mature, campuses find themselves in need to move from first generation LMS and CMS platforms to newer generation systems that provide the newest teaching resources demanded by an increasingly more sophisticated faculty user community. Although competitive pressures to differentiate has driven innovation within the commercial and open-source LMS and CMS developer world, there are indications that broad areas of the LMS (and CMS) features are converging to a common list that all educators are seeking and all vendors are supplying in varying ways.
When campuses embark on procurement exercises to select a new LMS or CMS platform, an objective method of examining and comparing available product platforms is paramount. Requests for Proposal (RFP) are a common mechanism employed by organizations to objectively select products from the open market. Education providers frequently use RFPs as part of the LMS/CMS selection effort. Therefore, creating a standardized, reusable template of commonly-accepted LMS (and CMS) features is an activity that IMS GLC finds very important to support educators in managing their Learning Enterprise and relates directly to IMS GLC efforts associated with creating Adoption Standards for managing and enhancing the Learning Enterprise. Additionally, defining the key interoperability requirements (essential, desired, future, other) for LMS and CMS in a common RFP is of interest to IMS GLC interoperability project groups, which include educational institutions, LMS, CMS, and associated system providers.
IMS GLC Adoption Standards for LMS and CMS RFPs could be used by any campus or school launching a product selection effort and would provide educators (and LMS/CMS providers) with an invaluable tool (common LMS/CMS RFP) to:
- Minimize the effort of a K-12 school or higher education institution in preparing an insitution-, school- or district-specific RFP for procuring a LMS or CMS platform; and, minimize the “reinvention of the wheel” as it relates to creating these documents.
- Provide educators who are embarking in LMS selection and procurement with a quality LMS or CMS RFP template, developed by schools and higher education institution learning technology leaders who have led successful LMS and CMS procurements and have tremendous background and expertise in this area.
- Provide vendors with a clearer picture of what customers are expecting from their LMS products (functionality and interoperability); and, provide a tool to level-set product functionality expectations amongst vendor and customer.
Call for Participation
IMS GLC proposes to undertake the development of a common RFP template for use by K-12 and higher education institutions for use during the selection and procurement phase(s) of a LMS or CMS platform. This effort will be led by IMS Contributing Members, including: Tennessee Board of Regents, Miami Dade College – Virtual College, Lone Star College Online, and Florida Virtual School.
Additional Information
In October 2008, IMS GLC Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC) and Tennessee Board of Regents hosted an LTAC Workshop aimed at identifying the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating learning management and content management systems. This workshop included K-12, higher education and learning technology product and service providers. These LMS stakeholders provided their perspectives on integrating these systems and the challenges that education providers are faced with when procuring these systems. The development of a standard template for LMS RFP (procurement) was identified as a key challenge facing K-20 and directly aligned with IMS GLC’s efforts to provide learning technology leaders with adoption standards to better manage the Learning Enterprise – the learning technology landscape (LMS, SIS, ePortfolio, etc.) that supports a school or institution’s unique administrative and learning environment.