COURSE MANAGEMENT AND LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Course management systems (CMS) are being used more and more in education. According to Campus Computing 2002 (Green, 2003), over one-third of college courses used a CMS/Learning Management System (LMS) tool in 2003 and almost half of the institutions participating in a 2003 survey reported strategic plans for deploying a CMS/LMS. The spread of these platforms raises two interoperability questions for authors and users of content:

• Can content be ported between course management systems?
• Can content be developed that will run in any course management system?

These questions are addressed by “standards” produced by the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS, 2004) and by the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) that has been produced and is maintained by the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative (ADL, 2004).