Assessment Process

In August 2009, Penn State formed the eLearning Strategic Committee. The committee, comprised of key representatives from across the university, was charged with developing a strategy for sustaining a common eLearning environment across the university. This included the evaluation of alternative platforms to ANGEL, our current course management system.

To accomplish this charge, the eLearning Strategic Committee formed two subcommittees, pedagogical and technical, to explore the capabilities of several existing and emergent eLearning environments. The sub-committees looked at topics such as features, functionality, the user-interface, scalability, performance, security, etc. and reported their finding back to the eLearning Strategic Committee. The eLearning Strategic Committee recommended ITS pilot three LMS products: Moodle and Desire2Learn (D2L) in the fall 2010 semester and, Blackboard in spring 2011.

The LMS Pilot Team is working with instructors, students, designers, technologists, and support staff to explore the capabilities of Desire2Learn, Moodle and Balckboard within the Penn State environment. The evaluation of each platform will be based on an identical scorecard and data will be collected through direct observation, surveys, and focus groups. To read more about a particular assessment process select it from the Assessment tab drop down menu located in the navigation bar at the top of the page.