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History of Learning Management Systems (LMS) at uWaterloo

Current LMS: Desire2Learn, the Waterloo LEARN system

In March of 2011, Desire2Learn was selected as the new LMS for Waterloo, to replace UW-ACE, based on ANGEL software, with migration occurring during the fall 2011 and winter 2012 terms. Desire2Learn is a local Kitchener-Waterloo company.

UW-ACE History: 2004 - 2011

UW-ACE used the learning management system (LMS) software called ANGEL, originally from Angel Learning Inc. In the spring 2004 term thirty (30) pilot courses ran with some online course components in UW-ACE, growing to 240 courses and just under 12,500 students in the fall 2004 term. As in LEARN now, students used the system for various course activities, such as accessing course notes and resource links, reading course announcements, communicating with fellow students, and submitting assignments to online dropboxes. Professors and instructors used UW-ACE as their course home site, to distribute marks, and to communicate with students. Some instructors used more advanced activities such as pre-class preparation quizzes, weekly discussion topics, and project group work. UW-ACE easily brought all these types of activities together.

By 2009, about 1300 courses ran in UW-ACE in the fall and winter terms, and around 700 in the lighter spring term. Roughly 27,000 students were in the system at any time, and on average they had 3 or 4 courses present in the system. About 110 fully online courses (from the Centre for Extended Learning, CEL) were running in the system per term.

In May of 2009, ANGEL was acquired by Blackboard Inc., a competitor LMS vendor. A project to review the market and select the next LMS system was struck soon after, in recognition that ANGEL as we knew it would disappear and features would be absorbed by the Blackboard Learn system, and so it was appropriate to review the LMS market.

Leaving UW-ACE and ANGEL was not a happy prospect for most support staff and many users, since the partnership with people at the orginal Angel Learning Inc. (previously called Cyberlearning Labs) had been very good. However, the selection of a local company also promised a close partnership to which the campus could look forward.

UWone History: 2001 - 2004

Previous to adopting ANGEL as the campus LMS, a home-grown system called UWone had been in development and had limited use. UWone was based on a pedagogical model for online teaching, called "T5". The five Ts: Tasks, Tutoring (feedback), Topics (content), Tools, and Teamwork. UWone was comprised of a front-end system that helped instructors to design their online course components according to the model, and a back-end set of tools were provided by a commercial LMS. The front-end was written at Waterloo, primarily by co-op students with oversight initially from the Learning and Teaching Through Technology centre (LT3) and then from IST. For the Tools component, the system pointed to activities in a LMS, such as for discussions, quizzes, and assignment uploads. Initially Blackboard was used (2001 - 2002) but it was difficult to adapt for this type of integration. Cyberlearning Labs, the vendors of ANGEL, was a new company and its leaders, David Mills and Christopher Clapp, were very enthusiastic to have their LMS "turned upside down" to work with UWone.

By fall of 2003 it was (painfully) obvious that the front-end could not scale for extended use across campus and that the T5 model would likely need to expand for different approaches to online learning. A decision was made to move to ANGEL as the LMS, removing the UWone front-end, and to have the company build in tools that had become important to the model, specifically better tools for group creation and group tools management (locally referred to as "the replicator"). A pilot of ANGEL courses was in place for the spring 2004 term. The rest is UW-ACE history.

For more terminology on the model and UWone, see the following link.
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~chappell/projects/uwone/terminology.html