Opening Up Online Education

New standards will make sharing online education software easy and inexpensive.

Say "online education" and most people imagine taking an occasional professional development course via the Web or studying at a dedicated nonresidential school such as the University of Phoenix or the Open University in England. But on the campuses of traditional universities such as MIT, more and more educators and administrators are using the term to describe something more comprehensive: the advent of Web-based learning-management systems. These software-based systems, also known as course management or virtual-learning systems, debuted about five years ago and are designed to leverage the Internet to reinforce what happens in brick-and-mortar classrooms. Professors can post lecture notes and other course materials online, provide links to important resources, create class calendars, hold online discussions with students after class hours, and assign, distribute, collect, and grade homework, all on protected university sites. In the last two years, advances in computing technology have led to more user-friendly interfaces and higher-speed processing that have made the systems even more attractive. As a result, faculty are flocking to the systems in droves. At MIT, for example, the number of professors registered to use the Institute's learning-management system, Stellar, has skyrocketed from 50 in 2001 to 260 this year. Another jump is expected next year, here and at other universities not just around the country but around the world.

But while such systems may make life easier for faculty and students, they are causing major headaches for university information technology personnel and budget administrators. The problem is that, for the most part, each system was built around the unique information technology infrastructure of a single university. If a professor wants to update a particular function-say a tool for creating a course calendar-with software from another school, or that she wrote herself, it's not simply a matter of installing a new program on her office computer's hard drive. Theoretically, she or one of the university's information technology staffers would need to hand-code a patch to get the new software to work with the existing system. But in fact, it has become so costly to create these patches that administrators no longer consider it a reasonable option.