Re:mmm (Score 3, Informative)

I just happen to have the glorious (mis)fortune of operating a webct server. WebCT has gone through 3 standard major versions with a 4th due soon and a fork to a horribly expensive entirely redesigned version called vista which requires a mix of sun hardware, oracle and a few other things which cost half the earth (note, I like Sun hardware, but I'm talking rather sizable Sun hardware). The upcoming standard version looks a lot nicer in screenshot, and I hope they fix the backend, because of those problems mentioned:

1) SSL and ticket based authentication with the ability to authenticate via kerberos/Active Directory, ldap, custom authentication through a compiled c module or the old style dbm way, but there's a logout button now as well !

2) the site reference above references rather outdated information. Campus Edition 3.8 is current

3) if you think the frontend is still bad, you'd be digging your own grave if you saw the backend. For a 7-10k user base your talking about 1.5 million files, many of them zero length or similar used as flags with data storage in Bezerkeley DBM and ASCII. Data integrity is held by making sure the same chaotic (because they show order in their apparent randomness with closer view) values remain the same in many locations at once. This also means system performance is related heavily on disk access and cacheing. If it runs slow more disk spindles will make the world go round (to a point of course ...)

As a final point, developments in open courseware and other systems are becoming interesting, but the maturity from the point of view of service managers etc is important. The LMS vendors have support which can be purchased in more specialised agreements if necessary and this in turn makes management types feel safer. Its the same old problem in a different product. Give it a few years and I'm sure you'll see (possibly open) products that support distance and local learning that are well engineered, supported (by people offsite to make management feel safe or else a knowledgeable base of users to draw on as employees or contractors) and usable by designers and students. In particular, I think the combination of wifi, notebooks/tablets/pda's, lectures and LMS software could enhance the scenario as technology advances.