“A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can
communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” — Lars Rasmussen, Lead Developer on Google Wave
Yesterday I gave a reasonably factual, if admittedly opinionated, rundown of different Learning Management Systems (LMS). I've used most of them in one capacity or another, and Blackboard the biggest, with the problems that suggests, a few other commercial competitors are out there, the biggest left probably being Pearson eCollege, and there are a few open source alternatives, the most important of which is Moodle, which also happens to be my favorite.
Usually it's not a great idea to make predictions. If you do, then when you turn out to be spectacularly wrong there's evidence out there of what a terrible prognosticator you are. But this case there's something that I've been predicting for at least a year now, and that is that sooner or later, Google will be entering the fray of the LMS marketplace.
The reason I think they will is that they've made a very strong push to become integrated within as many schools IT infrastructures as possible. They do this by offering schools the ability to connect students accounts seamlessly with Google's email and applications services, Gmail and Google Docs. Especially when it comes to email, this is an enormous burden that they're lifting off of the backs of schools' IT departments. By doing this, Google accomplishes a number of things. They get students hooked on Google's email, one they're likely to keep using even after they graduate. They earn considerable goodwill from school IT departments. And they conveniently position themselves as already a friendly and reliable part of the schools IT plan, so that when they do release their LMS, schools are much more likely to feel confident about switching to it.
Interestingly, their latest offering, Google Wave, is already being called a possible LMS by some, such as Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education. This new service includes a variety of different ways to communicate, to store information, and to control access that might make it useful as an online classroom. But it doesn't include the sort of student records infrastructure that would be necessary for most schools to consider it as a replacement for mature systems like Moodle or Blackboard.
So time will tell whether Google really gets into the LMS market. Even if they don't, however, Google Wave has a plugin architecture that supports third party expansion of its capabilities. Perhaps if Google doesn't move fast enough to build an LMS, someone else will use their own service to do it for them. Stranger things have happened!
Next up, a related post that argues that open educational resources should be designed to be easily tied into open learning management systems.