Moodle has over 50% of market share in Europe, Latin America, and Oceania.[48]

Course Management Systems (CMS)

Meanwhile some institutions in the USA have created various open source products which are providing an alternative to commercial vendors.

The most significant vendors by volume and size are WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). There are many other vendors in this market place such as desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/), a system in use at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The following table reflects a summary of the previous research we have conducted in which we generated a conceptual framework of major features in order to evaluate and compare the major K-12 LMSs (Watson, Lee, & Reigeluth, 2007).

LMSs are more typically utilized in corporate settings with many available systems on the market, including NetDimensions EKP, Saba and SumTotal Systems (Carliner, 2005), as well as Lotus, Oracle iLearning and Cornerstone OnDemand, among others (Learning Circuits, 2005). A 2006 survey highlights the features most common-ly found in the corporate LMSs currently being utilized (2006 Survey of Learning Management Systems, 2006).

While LMSs can currently perform some of these functions, limitations exist which are hindering the full realization of LMSs’ potential

In an Information Age model of education, an LMS will assess learners’ current knowledge and skill level, work with teachers and learners to identify appropriate learning goals, identify and sequence instruction appropriate for the individual learner, assess learner performance products, store evidence of attainments, sup-port collaboration and generate reports to pro-vide information to maximize the effectiveness of the entire learning organization.

Or as Connolly (2001) puts it, “LMS provides the rules and the LCMS provides the content” (p. 58).

A CMS “provides an instructor with a set of tools and a framework that allows the relatively easy creation of online course content and the subsequent teaching and management of that course including various interactions with students taking the course” (EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, 2003, p. 1). Examples of a CMS include Blackboard, Angel, Sakai, Oncourse and Moogle. However, Blackboard is a good example of the confusion that exists regarding these terms as it is commonly referred to in the literature as an LMS.

The American Society for Training & Development (Learning Circuits, 2005), recommendsthese following functional requirements for a corporate LMS:

Lessons are provided based on the individual student’s learning progress.

Bailey, G. D. (1993). Wanted: A road map for understanding Integrated Learning Systems. In G. D. Bailey (Ed.), Computer-based Integrated Learning Systems (pp. 3-9). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

n LMS is the infrastructure that delivers and manages in-structional content, identifies and assesses in-dividual and organizational learning or training goals, tracks the progress towards meeting those goals, and collects and presents data for super-vising the learning process of an organization as a whole (Szabo & Flesher, 2002). An LMS deliv-ers content but also handles course registration and administration, skills gap analysis, tracking and reporting (Gilhooly, 2001).

The term ILS was coined by Jostens Learn-ing, and LMS was originally used to describe the management system component of the PLATO K-12 learning system, content-free and separate from the courseware (R. Foshay, personal com-munication, October 24, 2006).

LMS has its history in another term, integrated learning system (ILS) which offers functionality beyond instructional content such as management and tracking, personalized instruction and integration across the system (Bailey, 1993; Becker, 1993; Brush, Armstrong, Barbrow, & Ulintz, 1999; Szabo & Flesher, 2002).