I was saddened to hear about the death of Steve Jobs last night. I have been a user of many of the Apple products from day one like many of you are. Steve was one of those rare visionaries who revolutionized the usability of computing devices by anyone. How many iPhone or iPod users ever used a manual to start using the device? I was also one of those folks who were in love with the NeXT operating system and I remember installing it and using it for a long time in the early to mid 90’s.  He will be missed very much.

Yesterday, I spoke at the Academic Council regarding the two major projects that we are currently engaged in – Sakai and Google Apps for Education. I showed the current state of affairs, such as how many courses are using Sakai, to what extent and which tools of Sakai are being used the most. It turns out that the resources and forums are the two mostly used with tools such as Assignments and Gradebook usage picking up.

I have been involved in supporting WebCT, Blackboard before and am very familiar with them. It is no secret that I prefer open solutions. Blackboard is a very closed system. It is closed to the point that until recently, contracts prevented you to access the institutional data such as the extent of use of the system. Go figure!

The very name Learning management System is relatively new. These tools used to be called Course Management System (CMS) early on. Since CMS collided with the Content Management System, LMS became a convenient alternative. The name, like all marketing ploys, is overblown. These tools don’t really “manage” learning, especially in certain institutions like ours.

Whether it is an ERP like PeopleSoft or Banner, or LMS like Blackboard, the issue is that they are trying to produce products for a marketplace that is inherently diverse. No two institutions have the same administrative processes nor teach and learn the same way. This is why, agility, modularity, open architecture are all very important. These concepts don’t work in corporate mode – they are always trying to protect their intellectual property, seeking uniqueness and unwilling to give up control (all for defensible and good reasons).

One of the key weaknesses of all of the LMS is the lack of email integration. Yes, they all have ways to send email out, but no mechanism to take the emails in. Many of them have an easy way to email to the class from the course space. Thanks, but, the email sent out is either saved in the course space or not saved at all! Also, to participate in the forum, you need to be in LMS.

All of these point to frustrations – we pay good money to buy a product to help us do what we want to do. Instead they deliver a product which dictates how we should do business, spend resources to learn how to change etc. etc.

However, Steve Jobs taught us that you can have a closed system (almost all Apple products) that people loved and didn’t complain about changing their “business processes”.  iPods revolutionized the way we all listened to music. I only saw people flocking to buy them and radically change the way we used to do things.

Which leads me get back to Steve Jobs and ask “What would Steve do?” to help organize the teaching and learning activities? Given that Apple’s initial target audience was K-12 and Higher Ed, he probably would launch an iLassi (Learning Assistant) (would have chosen a MUCH better name than this). Newer versions will come along, lighter and easier to use than ever before and we will all be joining the midnight madness to click and download it (or buy it) before anyone else did. And above all, Steve would have done it right (or he would have made us believe so).