The Future of the LMS: A Software Lifecycle Perspective

This report, prepared by Sage Road Solutions for the E-Learning Guild, describes the current status and future direction of Learning Management System (LMS) use in e-Learning.

The product lifecycle diagram shown suggests that LMSs, as we have known them until today, will likely start to fade from the learning ecosystem scene by 2012. Evidence suggests that over the next five years LMSs will look more like portals and less like platforms. They will feature Web 2.0 collaborative tools, including connected modular functionality, which organisations will select as being most rele­vant for the management needs of the learning organisation doing the purchasing.

Social and Mobile Learning

The clear buzzwords for the first day of DevLearn2009 were: social and mobile. Both topics have a dedicated breakout area and a host of sessions covering various aspects of these topics. These are two of the key areas learning professionals should be paying distinct notice to. Until now, we’ve been so focused on other areas that we may not have given mobile and social learning the attention it deserves as two of the hottest educational frontiers to be faced in the near future.