Needs assessment and design of course management system (CMS) using open and community source frameworks in post-secondary institutions

As computing technology continues to emerge into all levels of education, a course management system (CMS) is expected to be part of the primary system developments, which offers an enormous impact, particularly in today's post-secondary institutions. The adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most educational institutions, yet it often lacks the flexibility to satisfy special needs of the institutions. This is especially true of our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance stand as stumbling blocks in the college's development of a CMS. 

To solve these challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1], a CMS that offers an open and community source framework. In preparation to the system design and development, a needs assessment has been conducted to investigate the project feasibility and functional requirements, which serve as the keystone to our system implementation. In this paper, we articulate the motivations, feasibility study results, functional requirements, as well as the highlights of our current progress, future implementation and evaluation. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 ACM.