The Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) recently launched a web-based tool called EduTools that helps educators analyze and compare course management systems (CMS).

EduTools is an early phase of one of three projects which are part of a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grant awarded to WCET to lead a three-year initiative that is "designed to develop specific tools for the higher education community to fully integrate online learning and the World Wide Web into teaching and learning."

The EduTools web site is basically the continuation and further enhancement of a project initially started by Bruce Landon, a professor of psychology at Douglas College in British Columbia, Canada. In late 1996, Landon was commissioned to build a CMS comparison site by BC’s Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology (C2T2), a non profit agency that was trying to help a group of BC community colleges select a CMS.

A lot has changed since 1996, when Landon started building a CMS comparative analysis site called Landonline that initially featured about six major CMS vendors and not nearly as many of the CMS product features and functions available today.

The EduTools site of today currently lists 33 CMS products, including open source, and 55 CMS features, all with pop-up glossaries written in easy-to-comprehend terms, says Karen Middleton, WCET senior project coordinator. Visitors to the site can compare and search for a CMS by selecting product features within an easy-to-navigate web interface.

A handy "EduTools Decision Engine," providers users with a five-step process in which they can select products, choose features, apply weights, assign scores and see the final results.

EduTools was created by a 10-member project team with a seven-member advisory board. Much of the site’s content was developed by Landon and two researchers who gathered data about CMS products by combing through CMS vendor web sites, trying out product demos and going through the list of features to see what was inside or not inside each CMS. The researchers also wrote product descriptions in neutral terms. "We would then go back to the vendor with what we had gathered and try to get their concurrence on whether or not we missed anything," says Landon. "Some vendors were more cooperative than others."

Middleton adds that the EduTools site can be good for contract negotiation purposes. "If you have a CMS, and you are going through budget agreements, and you are determining if you want to maintain a contract or seek additional functions within the same contract, you can use this to do a comparison and work with vendors."

http://edutools.info