When online learning tools began to appear in higher education, they were often locally created, programmed, and hosted systems. Many times one campus might be the home to multiple, incompatible systems hosted centrally, some at the college level, and even some at the departmental level. It quickly became apparent to institutions that the exponentially increasing demands put on these systems by faculty and students, required an increasing draw on precious programming and support resources. Additionally, students and faculty became increasingly frustrated, changing back and forth between these software programs with differing interfaces and capabilities.

Soon some universities recognized the commercial value of their nascent learning management software and licensed or sold the code to commercial companies who developed the products into what they hoped would be profitable enterprises. Depending on local information technology culture, some universities continued to develop their own learning systems and shared computer code through the open source initiative. (See Destination 7 for more about open source systems.) At other universities, the homegrown systems fell away as centrally supported commercial products, like WebCT and Blackboard, became viable products. This enabled campuses to put their resources into conducting user training, creating support structures and rather then investing resources in the endless programming, bug fixes and updating the homegrown systems required. Today these homegrown and commercial systems are becoming increasingly integrated into other campus information technologyand database systems and are threatening to rival well established campus data systems, like student or administrative systems in scope and complexity. Just putting the software on a server is not enough anymore. As a mature campus service, learning management systems must meet the same user authentication, security and data back up standards your campus information technology unit places on other campus-wide data and network support systems.

WebCT server

Randy Dalhoff, Iowa State University's WebCT administrator, explains the components of hosting an institution-wide learning management system.

Randy Dalhoff, Iowa State Univesity's WebCT administrator, explains the components
 of hosting an institution-wide learning management system (5:47)

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The next stop is courseware development labs.

Destination 8: 4 of 11