NEIU Center for Teaching and Learning
Thomas J. Tobin, Educational Technologist & Instructional Designer

FSI Workshop: Choosing an LMS in Five Complex, Exhaustive, and only Somewhat Painful Steps

May 15, 2012		9:00 – 10:15 a.m.		Illini Hall 27

Description

Campus leaders typically make no larger expenditure than on the Learning Management System (LMS) that hosts their e-course content. To increase the efficiency and transparency of the process of selecting, testing, and adopting an LMS, NEIU followed a phased approach, using the structures and processes of formal project management (PM).

Project Process Groups

The activities within each major process group help the project manager to stay on top of what is happening now and what needs to happen in the future. Estimates of resources such as people, time, money, and work begin as educated guesses and get narrowed down as the process continues. In order to select a new LMS, NEIU initially put out a Request for Information (RFI) in 2011.

Initiating: We developed a charter based on the RFI experience (it became our Request for Proposals, or RFP). We identified the stakeholders to be involved: faculty, instructors, the faculty union, students, university administrators, tech staff, the purchasing office, and external clients.
Planning: The plan was created by defining the scope and activities to take place. It quickly became clear that the process we envisioned would take place in distinct stages: review of the RFP responses, testing of sandbox environments, checking up on references and company viability, a cost analysis, and a final campus visit to resolve issues and showcase highlights.
Executing: The project is designed to be cumulative: earlier activities must take place before later ones because they feed into those later activities (the PM term is outputs/inputs). During each phase, we carefully managed the LMS Task Force and communicated with the stakeholders as much as possible within the constraints of the state procurement guidelines.
Monitoring & Controlling: Throughout the project, we performed “pre-mortem” exercises (e.g., “imagine it’s two years from now, and the project has failed. Why did it fail?”), risk management (e.g., building slack into the schedule, tracking stakeholder vacation time), and reporting tasks (e.g., saving agendas, notes, workflows, and other outputs into a secured shared-drive folder).
Closing: The end of the project—negotiating with the selected vendor and agreeing on a contract—isn’t actually the end of our tasks. The implementation of the new LMS, training of faculty and students, and interim-period phased rollover to the new LMS will be a new project, with a new defined start and end date, and a new value to add to the campus.
Project Management Planning Chart

 	Integration	Scope	Time	Cost	Quality	Human Resources	Communications	Risk	Procurement	
Initiating	Develop Project Charter	 	 	 	 	 	Identify Stakeholders	 	 	
Planning	Develop Project Management Plan	Collect Requirements
 
Define Scope
 
Create WBS	Define Activities
 
Sequence Activities
 
Estimate Activity Resources
 
Estimate Activity Durations
 
Develop Schedule	Estimate Costs
 
Determine Budget	Plan Quality	Develop Human Resource Plan	Plan Communications	Plan Risk Management
 
Identify Risks
 
Perform Qual/Quant Risk Analysis
 
Plan Risk Responses	Plan Procurements	
Executing	Direct and Manage Project Execution	 	 	 	Perform Quality Assurance	Acquire Project Team
 
Develop Project Team
 
Manage Project Team	Distribute Information
 
Manage Stakeholder Expectations	 	Conduct Procurements	
Monitoring & Controlling	Monitor & Control Project Work
 
Perform Integrated Change Control	Verify Scope
 
Control Scope	Control Schedule	Control Costs	Perform Quality Control	 	Report Performance	Monitor & Control Risks	Administer Procurements	
Closing	Close Project or Phase	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	Close Procurements	
 (chart adapted from PMStudy Process Chart, © 2009 PMStudy.com)

LMS Evaluation Criteria

Here is a “chop list” of the primary criteria that we used to assess LMS vendor candidates:

Functionality: Accessibility, Admin Tools, Assignments, Content Management, Communication, Development Tools, Grading, Groups, Help, Mobile, Portfolio, Reporting, Testing, Training, User Interface.
Technical Features: Archiving, Browser, Database, Disk Storage, E-Mail, Integration, LDAP, Redundancy, Testing, Updates.
3-Year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Data Storage, Hosting, License, Per-User, Performance Bond, Tech Support, Third-Party
Vendor Viability: Awards, Adoption, Finance Audit, References, Similar Customers, Statement of Work, Users, Years in Business.