And, what everyone is using (in alphabetical order below) is fairly interesting all by itself:

George Washington University - The birthplace of Prometheus still uses Prometheus, which, as everyone should know by now, has been bought by Blackboard.

Michigan State University - A set of home-grown "widgets " and a system called LON-CAPA , which is another home-grown system that is funded by the National Science Foundation, and Blackboard for their on-campus courses.

New York University - Still uses iAuthor, which NYU created but sold to Accenture. Also uses Centra for voice-over-IP and Docent for their Learning Management System.

UC Berkeley Extension - A home-grown system and currently testing Prometheus.

University Extension, University of California-Irvine - Prometheus, but moving to a home-grown system.

University of Maryland University College - A home-grown system.

University of Waterloo - A set of home-grown tools, Blackboard, and WebBoard.

Washington State University - A home-grown system and WebCT.

Matkin: We are going under our own internal system [and thus moving away from Prometheus]. Basically we don’t feel that Blackboard is going to support Prometheus - that they are going to basically take parts of it, put it into their system, make it one system. . . And secondly, something else has happened in the whole [CMS] industry. I can sort of tell you this is a trend. . . The delivery platform is becoming much less important and much less an issue. Home-grown solutions, which used to be a big problem, are no longer such a big problem for large organizations and universities. They continue to be big problems for small universities and small organizations. I believe what you will see is a fairly rapid migration - the large institutions are going to be walking away from Blackboard and WebCT in fairly large numbers, especially if they decide, as everybody anticipates, that the price will go up. And what’s happening is the large universities that have the sophistication and the resources to create an electronic community in their university - these outfits are saying, look we have everything integrated here. We are putting in a fully integrated package, and we want the learning environment to be integrated as well. We are going to provide you with e-mail, chat, whiteboard - all those kinds of things - and it is going to be very customized to your needs and your distance learning center. It’s going to be integrated with the library; it’s going to be integrated with the registration; you are going to be able to change it when you want to; and we will maintain it 24/7 because we have people sitting here maintaining everything else that we have in our computer center. So why should we pay [a CMS vendor] to use a subset of their functionality, a functionality that doesn’t really integrate with anything else? . . . There are suppliers underneath this layer of Blackboard and WebCT who are supplying modules. The three major things are e-mail, threaded discussion utility and learning resource posting. Those are 80 percent of what people use Blackboard and WebCT for, and those are relatively trivial and cheap to create.

Heeger: We have a successful course management system that is home grown, and we are getting ready to take it to its next generation. It’s classroom emulated. We constantly test it against them [private CMS vendors], and our faculty and students tell us ours is better. They are loyal to our proprietary system. I think most institutions can’t afford to develop their own [CMS]. If you don’t use a [private vendor] system, you have to develop one yourself, and that takes a lot of time and money. We are also going to develop [inside our home-grown system], over time, functions that are far beyond any classroom. At some point, to use a favorite example of mine, television stopped being televised radio and became a medium all of its own, and I think online learning at some point is going to do it as well.