Evaluation of online learning management systems

This article describes a participative, action evaluation process (Nouwens & Robinson,1991;Wadsworth, 1991) that was developed when Central Queensland University (CQU) in Australia was forced to replace existing university-wide Learning Management System (LMS) software used to support the development and delivery of online courses. A number of important lessons were learned during this process and this article offers a sociotechnical systems analysis (Owens, 1998) of this evaluation process to assist cademic staff involved in evaluation and choice of similar enterprise systems to understand the complexities and implications of decisions they make.