ADTED 531 Unit 5 - Reflections

From our course material this week: "There are three general approaches that one may take to acquiring a learning management system: (1) custom designing from the ground up; (2) purchasing a system off the shelf; (3) assembling a system from commercially available building blocks."

In my work experiences, I've had the firsthand opportunity to design Community of Practice learning management systems two of these approaches: (1) custom designing from the ground up; and (2) purchasing a system off the shelf. I'd like to share some of the benefits and drawbacks of both.

Custom Designing from the Ground Up

Example: https://21stcenturyapprenticeship.workforce3one.org/

Nearly 3 years ago, the e-learning and training consulting firm that I worked for decided to build a customized Community of Practice for our client, the US Department of Labor, Employment Training Administration (USDOL-ETA). We looked at lots of different off-the-shelf solutions, but the government just had too many specific requirements that we just could not achieve by using a ready made solution. So, we decided to build one ourselves. Three years later, we can see the benefits:

• Can completely customize the look & feel, the pages, and everything about it.
  
• Can meet all federal requirements, such as 508 (Disabilities Act) requirements
• Can integrate it with other tools that the government already has built, like their current websites and learning materials
• Can integrate ANY new tool that comes along -- recently we added the IdeaScale crowdsourcing tool as an application on our Apprenticeship Community of Practice
• Can build it so you don't need a programmer to upload content or make basic changes to the site
  

We can also see the drawbacks:

• Need a programmer to make core structural changes to the site, or fix glitches
• Clients often want the same features as various "off the shelf" tools provide (Facebook, etc), but they want them all in their single, customized Community. This often takes us a lot of time to "reinvent the wheel" when trying to program features onto our site, that other sites have. On the other hand, at least we can add all the best features from other sites, all on ONE single site.
  
• It's more expensive for the client to initially bring up a custom Community. We can't just walk into a conference, talk about how great Communities are, and sell 10 of them. It's a big undertaking if a client wants one.
  

Purchasing a System "Off the Shelf"

Example: http://scte2010.ning.com/

Two months ago, my company decided to create a "quick" community for the purposes of demonstrating Communities of Practice for an upcoming cable industry trade show. We didn't want to create a Community using our custom platform, because that would take a lot of time and effort and money to bring up. Instead, we opted for an off-the-shelf solution that I, PERSONALLY designed (I'm not a web programmer) in about 4 hours. After using it for the past two months, we can clearly see the benefits:

• Was quick, easy, and cheap to bring up!
  
• Can make structural changes instantaneously
• There are a lot of available widgets to integrate other programs into your Community, and if you don't see the one you want you can have a programmer design one pretty easily.
  

We can also see the drawbacks:

• Many of the Community's features, such as blogs, are not as advanced as we have come to expect from commercial blogging features such as blogger.com or wordpress.com. For example, there's no way to see upcoming scheduled blogs, until the day they appear live on the site
• Many of the Community's built-in standards, such as the process to sign up and become a member on the Community, are not able to be changed. For example, we had a user who was very upset that the Community asked him to provide his birthday in order to sign up and become a member. I contacted the off-the-shelf Community provider (www.ning.com), and was told that their sign-up process is standard and can't be changed. So, there are limits to what you can/can't change on a ready-made solution.
• There are many things that I wanted my community to do, such as post a Podcast, that I had to find major work-arounds in order to make it happen. Some key features that I wanted my Community to have, just weren't there, and there wasn't a widget that I could add to make it do what I wanted.
  

So, those are my real-life experiences as a practitioner who's tried 2 out of 3 different ways to acquire a learning management system. Has anyone else tried any of these? Does anyone have any experience with (3) assembling a system from commercially available building blocks? I'd be really interested to hear others' experiences!