Learning Management Systems - Love Them or Leave Them!
Kristijan Zimmer, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia

Abstract:

The workshop will present some of the findings of the Reference centre for evaluation of courseware and discuss different strategies of choosing or developing an optimal LMS/LCMS.

For participants not familiar with Learning (Content) Management Systems, some of the features of one of the leading Open Source LCMS “Moodle” will be presented at the beginning of the Workshop.
Good and bad sides of three different, legitimate approaches will be critically discussed: buying and using a commercial solution, adopting an Open Source solution or developing a home-grown solution.

Participant will than go through a part of the list of over 240 criteria for choosing optimal LMS/LCMS and discuss which of those are really important in the context of their institution or firm. This list could be interested in all three previously mentioned cases, probably most creatively as a guideline / checklist when developing a home-grown system.

Different technical, pedagogical, emotional and even ego-related issues will be discussed, including the Teaching Perspective Inventory (TPI) by professor Daniel D. Pratt. Some of the time will be devoted to creating a relationship between designer’s or mentor’s TPI outcome and criteria when choosing optimal LMS/LCMS for a certain course.

Biography

Kristijan Zimmer, B.Sc., is head of information services unit at the Faculty of electrical engineering and computing (FER), University of Zagreb, where he leads a team of employees and students building a dynamic, community-oriented academic web portal. He is president of HrOpen – Croatian Society for Open Systems and Internet and vice-president of HIZ/CITS - Croatian Information Technology Society.

He is currently involved in several e-learning projects, such as implementation of FER's e-learning infrastructure, CARNet's E-learning academy (ELA) and Reference center for evaluation of courseware.

In recent years he has taught workshops and seminars on web applications and design, content management system, e-learning, PHP and Java programming languages, process visualization, VoIP, mobile commerce, Internet2, Next Generation Internet and streaming multimedia.
He is a program committee member of several annual IT conferences including Croatian open systems days (DORS), Information systems methods and tools (CASE) and Communication technologies and standards in informatics (KOM).

His hobbies include billiard, badminton and go-kart.