Towards a new generation of Learning Management Systems

In this paper we argue that a centrally governed Learning Management System (LMS) still has ample legitimacy in an information society that is ever more adopting cloud computing services in daily life. We argued that control over services and produced data is essential from the perspective of an educational institute for reasons of accountability, quality control, legislation, privacy and reliability. However, the current generation learning management systems are primarily geared to provide ‘additional’ online learning. In ‘real’ online learning teachers and students almost never need to meet face-to-face. All instruction, tests, communication and collaboration is organised using internet and mobile technologies. We propose a paradigm shift for the next generation LMS, discarding the course as key concept in favour of the social learning network concept. We argue that a generic social collaborative portal platform is a good foundation for the development of this next generation LMS. We support our arguments by presenting a real world case and we conclude that we can reuse 80% of the standard code