Thanks for sharing this perspective. I think your roadmap is realistic and viable. I might add one that we’re pursuing at BYU. We’re beginning to disaggregate the functions of the CMS into more flexible, open, stand-alone components (yes, that means SOA). The first major step in this process is to build (or implement) a “gradebook” that’s not inside the CMS.

Our intent is to create an secure yet open application in which the full range of student work can be reviewed by instructors and peers. Both teachers and students will be able to enter the gradebook through our institutional portal without entering any other app (including the CMS). We also intend to build it in such a way that it can harvest content / evaluative data from our CMS, our proctored testing environment, faculty spreadsheets (Google Docs!), etc. etc. etc.

I think your hypothesis will hold up well over time. I’d love to chat with you about it further. You can e-mail me a jonmott at byu dot edu.

1. We have to provide everything that they are used to with an expensive solution. That is, they have to know they’ll have a strong SLA (99.9% uptime), co-location, secure and private information, robust functionality, tech support etc. If they know that these things are available, then they’ll be more likely to embrace change.

2. Price is important. The only way these decision makers are going to get on board is if you can save them significant amounts of money AND they are convinced that they are not giving up any items outlined in #1.

3. They have to be able to try the product w/out having to leave their current LMS/CMS/VLE etc. If they can try the product for free, and use it for free, then they’ll be more likely to trust it after a series of months. Then as their renewal date comes, the disincentive of having to pay much much more for the same product will begin to set it and they’ll be more likely to consider alternatives.

4. There has to be a way for people to export material out of their own system and import it into the new system.

5. You have to provide great free tools to their educators and students. If they love it, then they’ll have some influence on the decision makers.

6. The network effects have to be easy for their institutions to capitalize on. That is, you have to solve a lot of their problems; problems that they currently face and are not solved by their LMS provider.

That said, we don’t realistically think that you’ll even to begin to see much of this change occurring for 1-2 years. It just takes that long to build a strong and trustworthy brand. Universities and other large institutions won’t actually start to switch over for 2-3 years (or potentially even more) and that will only be some of them.

What will likely happen in that time between 0-2 years, will be the typical disruptive approach that occurs in any industry. Disruptive innovations compete with non-competition. That is, solutions like we are describing here, will be used by institutions that want a LMS but cannot currently afford one. Similarly, they do not have the resources or technical expertise to host and/or customize an open source solution. Also, educators, trainers, and learners, that are currently underserved in this space (ie., no LMS company is really going out of its way to help students or educators), will also begin to use the platform in the bottom-up ways that have been cataloged in this series of posts.

Probably more information than you wanted in response to the change question, but we feel aligning institutions with the rest of us, particularly those in the late-developing world is extraordinarily important. If a solution solves real problems for decision makers, costs considerably less money, and is a trustworthy provider, then I think you’ll begin to see change. That, at least, is our hypothesis.

I look forward to watching things unfold with Nixty.

Where does my value-added come from? I now look at your Open Courseware comments. I don’t care if the material is open or shut, but… sequenced learning/lessons, SCORM, discussion forums – we’re getting very traditional VLE here. (And I like that.)

Do you envisage using an existing VLE for this part of NIXTY?

The idea of using open-source tools to provide a more relational learning experience seems to answer the need. I look forward to see where Nixty heads with this.