In 2009, the University System of Georgia was utilizing Blackboard as its system learning management system (LMS). It was an older system and one that I was very familiar with as I had overseen it at West Point during my time as academic CIO. I met with the account representative and spoke candidly. He held the system account and it was his account to lose. Changing an LMS is very hard to do but will be done if the features significantly lag the competition. Blackboard at this time had not really innovated in ten years and had spent the last decade suing all of their competitors out of business. Their lawsuit against Desire2Learn had failed and there was a new upstart called Canvas out of Utah experiencing significant growth. I gave the account rep a list of challenges articulated by the faculty and was promised all of these issues would be addressed by the time of contract renewal in six months.
When changing enterprise systems, insist on evaluation sandboxes so that EVERY interested party and can evaluate and provide feedback on the new system. Make an informed decision. Make everyone feel part of the process.
Blackboard did nothing and in six months, we formed a committee to evaluate other options. Changing an LMS is like changing religions and is something not to be taken lightly. Barry Robinson lead the project and did a fantastic job amplifying the voice of the faculty and ensuring that everyone across the system could have their voice heard. Barry ensured that sandboxes were built for every finalist system. When it came to the final recommendation of the system, it was unanimous. The religious war had been averted. The University System of Georgia was moving to Desire2Learn.
If you are changing learning management systems, discourage automatic course conversation. You can’t stop it but taking this opportunity to innovate all courses using the new functionality of the LMS.
Making a decision to move is not the same as executing the change. While a subset of the community considered the job, most of us got ready for the real work. We had to make some architectural decisions:
- Hosting model: We decided to take advantage of our local private cloud to improve performance and lower costs. It would be the largest private cloud hosting model in the world using Desire2Learn.
- University Participation: All universities would utilize Desire2Learn for their courses except for Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech won the battle to go with another LMS. In retrospect, this was a short-lived win and eventually Georgia Tech joined the rest of the universities with Desire2Learn .
- Convert or Not to Convert: When you change learning management systems, you can easily migrate all existing courses over or you can ask the faculty to reinvision their courses given the new capabilities of the system. We chose the later approach and perhaps because of all the good press we received on the project or perhaps the faculty experiences in the sandboxes, many faculty recreated their courses from scratch.
Barry Robinson, John Scoville, and Beverly Norwood led their various teams in this massive implementation and completed the private cloud implementation on time and budget, By the time we finished the implementation, the statistics surrounding Desire2Learn were staggering.
- The private cloud hosted 160,000 courses;
- 250,000 students accessed courses more than 50,000,000 times a day; and,
- New functionality was being added all the time with 60 external applications added and the addition of three new applications monthly.
It was the largest private cloud implementation of Desire2Learn in the world and the USG faculty were experimenting, innovating, and improving student success on a platform that was always there.
Chancellor Huckaby commented at a board meeting in 2011 that the Desire2Learn selection and implementation was exactly how he intended shared governance and technology to work under his administration. In 2014, Desire2Learn recognized me as one of their five global Leading Educators.
If you are progressing through these webpages sequentially, the next chapter is A Peach of a Net. It discusses the growth of PeachNet from a state network to a private cloud as well as the expansion of PeachNet to Georgia’s 183 K-12 districts.