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Charter Document

Enterprise Level Course Management System Evaluation

1. Executive Summary

The purpose of this document is to explore various build or buy alternatives for the Ohio State University Course Management System and propose a method of evaluation.

Upon completion of this phase, the case for building or buying a Course Management System (CMS) will be presented to the Executive Sponsors for approval. Upon approval, evaluation of the alternatives and recommendation to the CIO will be the next steps. A final step is a charter for the implementation project that details the implementation and maintenance of the CMS.

2. Introduction

The Ohio State University's Course Management System, WebCT (version 3.8), operated by the Office of Information Technology, with separate systems operated by the Ohio State Medical School and the College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, has served faculty and students since 1998. The system provides faculty with syllabus, email, chat, and grade book functions; it provides students with course material, communication functions, and online evaluation; it provides the University with student enrollment listing and grading functions.

While the system is currently in place and familiar to many students, faculty, and staff, there are pressures to change the system: the office of the CIO and OIT would like to move the system to an "enterprise-level," that functionally integrates with a Student Information System. At the same time, WebCT has announced a new enterprise-level system (Vista) with significantly increased costs.

In the fall of 1998, Ohio State University invited ten or more CMS vendors to demonstrate their products on campus. About 50 people came to the demonstrations. Of the systems represented, WebCT seemed to meet faculty's needs best; in addition, early adopters of CMS systems on campus were generally using WebCT. Since 1998, Ohio State University has supported use of WebCT and Course Sorcerer, a home-grown Ohio State product that provides enrollment and grade book functions.

Over the years since 1998, Ohio State University has supported use of WebCT and provided adequate human resources to support faculty use of the system. The university has also paid for premium level support from the company. On the other hand, the university has provided less funding for professional training of those working with faculty in learning WebCT.

For a year or more, six colleges bought their own licenses for WebCT and ran their own instances of the CMS. In 2000 (?), the university moved to a campus-wide license, although some colleges still run their own instance.

Currently, the university has 28,000 users of WebCT enrolled in 300-500 courses. The largest WebCT courses are in the departments of biology, statistics, chemistry, and theater. The WebCT functions most often used are updating class rosters, posting class materials, linking to external resources, and email. There is less usage of the chat or drop box features.

Ohio State University is one of a very few very large institutions that has one course management system. The current version of WebCT for the university (not individual instances such as the College of Medicine) runs on one central server.

The main advantage of WebCT 3.8 is that it provides flexible instructional strategies (at the expense of user interface). The disadvantages of WebCT 3.8 include scalability problems, difficult user interface, and organization that does not allow for easy control or management of learning objects.

The new system should be easily scalable to numbers greater than 50,000; it should have an easily learned user interface; it should allow for organization at the learning object level.

3. Drivers for Change

The goal for a CMS is to provide the best functionalities possible to Ohio State faculty and students, the best infrastructure to the administration and staff of the University, and to meet anticipated future needs of the University.

To determine how best to deliver this goal, it is important to:

4. Requirements/Success Factors

5. Stakeholders for CMS Evaluation

Constituencies we have identified include:

5.1 Stakeholders/ Governance (see appendix):

  1. Executive sponsors -- Ilee Rhimes (CIO), deans and vice-provosts
  2. Primary executive --Susan Metros
  3. Advisory team -- TELR Coordinating Council, program directors, students, other constituencies

6. Approach for CMS Evaluation

Phase I: evaluate various CMS alternatives and
Identify the top several buy alternatives
Identify a top build alternative
Investigate a wait for a specified period of time alternative
And document the decisions made

Phase II:

Phase III

Phase IV

6.2 Alternatives to Evaluate

Build Alternative:

Buy Alternative:

Wait Alternative

6.3 Evaluation Criteria

The various alternatives will be evaluated based on the following factors: