EDAD660 (2010)

There are a host of course management / learning management systems available to teachers and administrators.  Most need to be downloaded and installed locally at your school, though they are slowly trending towards a “cloud” model where the management system exists separate from your campus IT infrastructure.  Here’s a listing of popular and emerging CMS systems that I have found useful [besides SOCS ]

1. Moodle (http://moodle.org/): Moodle is an open-source course management system that can be downloaded and used by your campus free of charge.  It boasts an impressive array of services that are comparable to what I demo’d during my SOCS presentation.  The online Moodle community is very strong and very willing provides advice and assistance to schools that may be interested in adopting Moodle for their own campus.
2. Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org/): Sakai is another open-source course management system that is focused mainly on the higher education market.
3. Social Syllabus (http://socialsyllabus.com/): Designed to help individual instructors manage their online content and connect with other faculty members, Social Syllabus is an emerging tool that boasts an impressive array of tools, including audio commenting of student work, class blogs, wikis, robust presentation tools as well as a “social search” tool that lets you search dozens of academic websites at the same time.
4. ClassChatter (http://www.classchatter.com/): ClassChatter is a fantastic web-based system that helps teachers implement private blogging frameworks into their classes.  Developed by a prior alumni of TCNJ’s educational technology program, ClassChatter is becoming quite popular in New Jersey and around the world.