2006 EDUCAUSE Catalyst Award

Course Management Systems

The inaugural Catalyst Award recognizes a complex, far-reaching web of initiatives that has had broad impact on higher education in less than a decade. Course management systems (CMSs) have evolved from isolated good ideas for using technology to streamline course administration or enliven instruction into essential components of the integrated, IT-enabled higher education enterprise. At their simplest, CMSs have helped us convert paper syllabi, reading lists, and other handouts into coherent online resources that are always accessible and easily updated. They also enable online instructional environments in which students can work interactively with content, multimedia, instructors, and each other. CMSs also simplify the administrative tasks associated with managing a course. Whether they are applied in support of face-to-face teaching, blended courses, or completely online distance education, these functions align with the learning needs and lifestyles of collegiate learners of all ages.

Academic origins: pockets of innovation

Course management systems were conceived and developed among faculty in pockets of innovation throughout the world. They originated simultaneously at a number of institutions, probably most influentially at the University of British Columbia with the work of Murray Goldberg, which resulted in WebCT, and at Cornell University with a popular Course Site Generator developed by student Dan Cane under two economics faculty, Cindy van Es and Deb Streeter, which resulted in Blackboard. A number of CMSs were developed for internal use at other institutions, with fluid movement of ideas and initiatives between academia and the commercial sector as individual limited-use efforts evolved into enterprise-wide systems.

The CMS landscape has expanded to welcome open source initiatives such as Moodle, which originated in Australia in 1999, and Sakai, a community source collaboration begun in 2004 by Indiana University, the University of Michigan, MIT, and Stanford.

A widening spiral of innovation, competition, and collaboration

The widespread adoption of CMSs, in only a decade, is testimony not only to the vision and persistence of a few, but to the fruitful interplay of faculty innovators, persistent commercial entrepreneurs, visionary campus IT leaders, risk-taking faculty adopters, and impatient students—testimony to the value of both competition and collaboration.

The developers of these systems pulled together many strands of technology to create digital educational platforms that could reach mass audiences without requiring more than basic technical skills from either instructors or students. This vision of a network-based instructional tool arose simultaneously in many quarters, and its evolution into a ubiquitous, mission-critical enterprise system is a case study in the way new ideas spring up, coalesce, interact and advance. The evolution of the CMS illustrates the power and influence of innovation energized by the confluence of opportunity and need, our ability to learn from one another, and collaboration among all segments of our community.

Applying IT to higher education's central activity

With this first Catalyst Award, we celebrate both an important innovation and our ability to recognize and implement a significant new capability that now touches almost every institution of higher education and nearly all our students in one way or another, and is expanding its reach to the K-12 space. This achievement is an important intermediate milestone toward our ultimate goal of helping higher education use technology in truly transformational ways, to enhance our ability to support high-quality learning for all.

This award is sponsored by SunGard Higher Education, An EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner.