Tufts LMS - A New Platform for Teaching, Learning, and Collaboration - Tufts LMS

Project Overview

UIT Academic Technology has been charged with facilitating a Tufts University LMS project to recommend a next-generation platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration across Tufts schools, programs, and communities. Visit the Get Involved! page to learn about ways you can participate in this process.

The primary goals of the project are for the LMS Project Team to lead a highly participatory process:

	To define selection criteria based on the university's goals and the requirements of faculty, students, and administrators.
	To evaluate leading LMS platforms to determine which best meets Tufts' criteria
	To articulate a robust, coordinated support model to ensure an effective migration process, as well as excellent continuing outreach, education, and service for faculty and other community members who will use the LMS to enrich their teaching, learning, and research at Tufts.
	To recommend a comprehensive next-generation LMS strategy for Tufts University.

Get Involved! to share your educational and collaboration goals and requirements as we review options for the next-generation Tufts LMS strategy. The Tufts University LMS Project Charter offers more information about the project model.

Current Project Activities:

8/09 - 10/09	The LMS Service Model Design Working Group has begun its work. The group includes representatives from all current LMS service groups across Tufts, as well as from support and training teams that have interest in next-generation LMS service at the university. The goals of this working group are to collate information about current support models and best practices, to identify areas where support colleagues recognize opportunities for sharing expertise and leveraging benefits for Tufts faculty, students, and staff who use learning management systems at Tufts; and to articulate the components of well-coordinated, robust transition support and ongoing service for LMS.
8/09 - 9/09	Planning for the LMS Financial Cost Analysis process has taken place, and initial analysis begins in August.
8/09 - 9/09	The Core Team has begun to articulate viable strategy scenarios for next-generation Tufts LMS. These scenarios will enable the Advisory Team to consider two significant questions under consideration in this project: relative merits and risks of open-source vs. commercial approaches for our context, and relative merits and risks for local vs. external hosting of the platforms. In addition, the scenarios begin to address potential models for development and integration of Tufts-specific functionality as part of ongoing LMS operations into the future.
Ongoing	Research on leading platforms and deployments at peer institutions has continued through educational technology community survey, phone calls and in-person conversations with colleagues, presentation and participation at regional LMS conference event in May, presentation and participation in the Sakai conference, participation in the Moodle & Open Source LMS conference and webinar in July, test platform exploration, reading community publications, etc.

Past Activities & Accomplishments:

8/09	Initial request for information (RFI) sent to vendors / professional service providers of Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai. Advisory Team will review responses in late September.
6/09 - 8/09	The LMS Architecture Working Group has conducted initial research and reported on initial findings for our context in August. Building on the initial research of the Architecture Working Group, we are shaping technical integration discovery efforts to understand possibilities and limitations for integrating Tufts and third-party tools and systems with the leading LMS platforms.
7/09	Functional requirements prepared and prioritized by Core Team and integrated into Request for Information (RFI). Will also be used to inform continuing technical evaluation, usability testing processes, and Request for Proposals (RFP).
6/09	High-level criteria of evaluation and values statements refined and approved by Advisory Team.
4/09 - 8/09	Requirements gathering in School of Dental Medicine, School of Medicine, and Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine completed, including Tufts University LMS Survey and focus groups with students, faculty, and staff.
6/09 - 8/09	Meetings and discussion with university information security colleagues to discuss goals for security input at key junctures in process; the security team's liaison provided narrative questions to be included in RFI.
5/09 - 6/09	The Student Information System (SIS) Integration Working Group provided a discovery report and high-level map of current SIS-LMS feeds/situation, as well as potential future ideal scenarios for SIS-LMS integration and workflows. Meetings and discussions with SIS discovery project leaders to share information about our two projects and to discuss significant points of interconnection. Ongoing dialog between project leaders.
5/09	Discussion of Blackboard Inc.'s acquisition of ANGEL Learning and its implications for the Tufts LMS project: we now have three leading alternatives to consider: Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai.
5/7/09	Functional requirements drafted. To be used in request for proposals, technical evaluation, and usability testing.
3/30/09 and 4/6/09	LMS Advisory Team met. Reviewed project approach and major questions to answer through process. Discussed high-level guiding principles for project.
2/12/09	Endorsement of revised project charter by all stakeholders. Tufts LMS project moves forward via Advisory and Core Team meetings and working group activities.
11/19/08	LMS Advisory Team meets to review community requirements and to articulate high-level criteria of evaluation for next-generation platform.
Oct/Nov 2008	Faculty, students, and staff in the School of Arts & Sciences, School of Engineering, The Fletcher School, and the Friedman School provide LMS project team with requirements and wishlist input for the next-generation platform through focus groups, survey, email, and in-person interviews. Requirements and desired elements compiled by LMS Core Team.
10/20/08	Focus groups for community requirements-gathering begin.
10/17/08	LMS project announcement sent out to the Medford community.
10/14/08	Initial LMS Advisory Team Meeting.
9/18/08	LMS Advisory Team established.
9/1/08	LMS project site launched. Thanks to Ilene Chen, Interactive Media Designer, UIT, for this beautiful and functional project site design.