At present, Learning Objects software works and integrates only with Blackboard course management system (CMS) versions 6.3 and above. However, Hamner said the company’s social applications "will be available for integration with WebCT, Moodle and other select course management systems in Spring 2008. By next summer, anyone will be able to use our products, either off-the-shelf or through custom integration with existing systems on campus."

To get a closer look at Learning Objects, Inc., Educational Pathways (EP) interviewed Hamner and several other management-level employees. We also interviewed one of its customers - Baldwin-Wallace College (B-W) out of Berea, Ohio - where we talked with two faculty members and one educational technology manager who have been working with Learning Objects software.

Campus Pack^TM is the company’s primary bundle of applications. It consists of Teams LX^TM, Journal LX^TM, Expo LX^TM, Podcast LX^TM and Search LX^TM. Product Manager Zahra Safavian and Chief Financial Officer Susan Laws provided EP with an overview and online demonstration of Campus Pack. Our bottom-line impression: If you have basic computer literacy skills, Learning Objects software is easy to use, intuitive and seamless within the CMS. (In fact, the two B-W faculty thought they were using Blackboard software when they created blogs and wikis.) Computer and web-savvy faculty and staff should have no problem picking this up on the fly to incorporate blogs, wikis, podcasts or ePortfolios into their courses and programs.

Teams LX is a wiki-creation tool that enables online group collaboration in ways that are limited only by the creativity and insights of its users and the faculty who administer and monitor the overall wiki-building process. Wiki members post their own content, as well as have the ability to edit and delete each other’s content, essentially creating a collaborative website.

Marni Manning, B-W lecturer, foreign languages (French), uses Teams LX in both her Beginning French 101 and French Conversation 221 courses. Manning wanted to offload a portion of her face-to-face class to the creation of online wikis that would report on the cultural highlights of Francophone (French-speaking) countries. "I liked being able to make an assignment for the culture portion of the class that did not have to be incorporated into classroom time," she said. "The classes go so quickly, and the content from the textbooks is just so dense that it’s difficult to incorporate culture time."

Manning called the assignment "Wikiculturia" and made it 10 percent of each student’s final course grade. Students chose a country to conduct research on and then posted related content and artifacts, such as images, audio and/or video files, links, etc. to the wiki. For the 101 class, students were put into teams of three that created a wiki-based website in English. For the 221 class, students did this same assignment in French, but individually as opposed to being put into teams.

For both classes, Manning required that students post to the wiki at least twice each week. Postings had to be well organized and include visual and audio elements. She also requested that students post a variety of information - such as population demographics, notable people and traditions - and that all content be "easily understandable."

She based each student’s wikiculturia grade on the frequency and quantity of their posts to the wiki. She used an "Assess Wikis" administrative function that is built into the software to track how often and how many lines of content students worked on. "I told them, especially when they are working in groups of three, that it is kind of easy to sit back and let somebody else do it all," Manning explained. "So, I announced that they have to understand that I can go into the background and see how many times they have been there. I can see if they added something or if they did not add something."

At press time, Manning was at midterm in the classes. She added that some students who were typically apathetic in the classroom were very active and insightful participants in the wiki environment, while other students were apprehensive, lacking computer and information literacy skills, and not very active wiki participants.

DiGennaro explained that B-W decided to use Expo LX for this kind of student documentation because "we wanted a seamless integration into the Blackboard course management system." In addition, B-W wanted to have the ability to create and share templates with the students immediately. "We deploy the templates and set the sharing rules up," he said.

Other features that helped drive their decision to adopt Expo LX included that the software was "nothing more complex than using Microsoft Office. We really did not want there to be a big learning curve for using this software. It had to be as easy as using Facebook or MySpace.

"Then, from the faculty side, it needed to have a directory structure that made sense to them," DiGennaro continued. Faculty told him that they did not want to click more than twice to find a student. "The faculty members go to their directory, find their course, click on a drop-down menu, and there are their students. It is an incredibly easy tool to navigate. The other (ePortfolio) tools out there were much more sophisticated in terms of things like assessments and evaluations and artifact gathering and dragging. We did not want that level of complexity. We said ‘here is what the faculty and students are asking for;’ that’s why we chose this tool. It met the criteria for usability and integration."

"Basically it is an academic and personal growth tool where Baldwin-Wallace students track their growth throughout their academic careers," added Learning Objects, Inc., Product Manager Zahra Safavian. "They (B-W staff) have a very specific way in which they want students to reflect on their academic careers, and there is very specific content they want students to add to their action plans. They created these default templates that are automatically available to students to start entering content during their freshmen year. We are seeing more and more schools wanting to do something like this."

Search LX is a fairly basic tool that allows users within the Blackboard CMS to expand their search options across all of their courses. As noted on the company website, "Search LX empowers users to perform full-text searches of all content in courses in which they are members and have access rights to. The application searches all types of uploaded files, including DOC, PDF, and HTML, and respects user access rights."

In relation to cost, "Learning Objects licenses software on an annual subscription basis. All product enhancements and fixes released during the term of your subscription are included in the license fee. Support for two technical contacts is included in the license as well.

"For higher education institutions, pricing is based on the full-time equivalent student count. For other institutions, pricing is based on the number of users reached by your course management system."

CEO Hamner said that a small-sized institution can purchase an annual license of the bundled Campus Pack (all five applications) for about $4,000, or an annual license of a single application for about $2,000. Larger institutions can purchase an annual license of Campus Pack for about $15,000 and about $7,000 for a single application. "Almost all of our institutions license the entire suite," Hamner said, adding that the company currently has a 95 percent renewal rate among all of its customers. "We include all of our support, maintenance and upgrades in that base fee, so there are no separate support contracts or charges for any upgrades. As long as you are a subscriber, you get the latest and greatest of what we build."

Hamner added that Learning Objects, Inc., is "focused on the education market" and is in the process of hiring more instructional designers and product managers. In addition to expanding its integration with other CMS platforms in the near future, the company is building a community website where users can share their experiences and best practices. Other future updgrades include building rubrics into the software that faculty could use for organizational and assessment purposes, as well plans to create peer-grading tools.