When the CD-ROM revolution came to education about ten years ago, tremendous attention was placed on creating dynamic user interfaces with highly interactive, multimedia-rich instructional design components. Dedicated teams worked on compelling interfaces and learning experiences that could be ranked in focus groups. Ironically, with the advent of the web, inherent limitations in the technology changed the learner experience and lowered expectations of what designers could put on the screen. Just as e-mail is a far cry from a beautifully penned letter, online learning has become a limited palette for quality interaction, creative design and dynamic learning experiences. In most cases, the web-based instruction is much less stimulating than a well-designed textbook page.

When the promised high-bandwidth did not appear, the more static web versions of electronic learning solidified. In the ensuing years, millions of dollars have flowed into less exciting, but more predictable, text-driven interfaces and experiences that have become the norm. As a result, an evolution that had once placed the learner in the center has been put on hold.

What the CMS (course management systems) and LMS (learning management systems) products do have, that the CD-ROM did not, is the dynamic nature of the web. Today’s CMS/LMS products are driven by web-page text and images and dynamic links to the other web content or other web-based systems. The purchasers of the CMS/LMS products are no longer individual learners or instructors. They are purchased, increasingly, by central administrations in higher education and, more slowly, by high schools and school districts. These systems are purchased the way finance software or e-mail systems are purchased, for the sake of institutional efficiency.

These powerful and efficient systems that emulate or supplement teaching and learning environments are now part of the institutional infrastructure. But, as the demands to teach more complex subject matter increases - along with the advent of a growing virtual high school movement - the question becomes whether today’s CMS/LMS products will be sufficient to compel good teaching and learning? Additionally, will these products be flexible enough to accommodate different kinds of learners with different capabilities?

The strengths of CMS and LMS products are the management of data and the provision for constructing courses with only acceptable, fairly static, user-interface options. Because of this, both the user and instructional designer are largely left out of the equation. The case to be made now is how to integrate the user and designer back into an interactive-rich environment that has all the culture-mimicking attributes to make the CMS/LMS compelling. And even more importantly, the ability to tailor design interfaces around the type of learning and the learners themselves is going to be the key to mainstreaming online learning.

At the intersection of the CD-ROM/instructional-design-rich era and the beginning of the online learning or eLearning world, there was still an emphasis on trying to have both the screen flexibility of CD-ROMs and the data-intensity of the Internet. Higher education providers, governmental project funding arms and university extensions put tremendous energy in linking highly interactive interfaces and instructional-design-rich products together. These CD-web hybrid projects led with design and followed-up with non-standardized data management. The outcomes were very high costs and an inability to scale, but a very nice combination of graphic richness and web nimbleness.

Is it possible for the CMS vendors (Blackboard, eCollege, WebCT and others) and the LMS vendors (Saba and Docent) to link their data-driven systems to a palette that allows creative, learner-centered interfaces to evolve? Is it possible that the course content, calendars, chat, grades and assignment engines could take the same underlying content and reconfigure it on the fly for different learners and different settings? While this may seem a luxury not worth the expenditure for higher education, it may not be a luxury at all for K12 or for the textbook publishers. For them it may be a necessity.

While the ripple in the pool is hardly seen yet, virtual high schools are wading into the deep waters. The Los Angeles School District, the states of Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, and California are all either planning or operating, and even expanding, their virtual high school systems. This is not a case of if, but of when and how.

On the sidelines, the senior executives of the textbook industry are looking in, trying to decide how and when to enter with more digital product. As states like Texas consider digital delivery of textbooks for K12, and for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix only contract for textbooks digitally, an important question is raised: How can we raise the bar on learning in general, measurable by grades and by dollars, with technology?

It is only a matter of time when it will be necessary to put the learner, instructor, and designer in the center. This new bubble of development can bring rich interactions, social benefit and pedagogical tailoring of education to the student. It will hopefully emerge from a combination of federal, state and textbook dollars aimed persistently at a change in the education model at the K12 level. This revolution is just beginning and will require the technologists and the designers to work on equal footing once again.