IMS Global: Course management systems are certainly in vogue these days. Administrators see them as an effective means of enhancing the student learning experience. eCollege has been in existence for a little over a decade and you've been with the company for most of the time. What changes with regard to CMSs have you seen in higher education?

MS: As the programs become larger, and the difference between learning in traditional classroom environments and online learning diminishes, the tools that allow education to occur most efficiently are those that are going to prosper. For a lot of students, doing online distance education is often the only option available. I'm talking about working parents who rush home after work, pick up their kids from daycare or soccer practice and then, once the family's asleep, log on to their classes. For eCollege, it was critical for us to make investments in technology to ensure that when students have the time, they can truly focus on their education and not have to worry about managing technology. Which of course is the whole point of online education: learning.

A great example of how eCollege has used technology to enhance online learning is the "What's New" tool. Any time students log in to their course system, the system immediately shows them what's occurred in the class since the last time they logged in. For example, if the instructor graded something, the student sees that on the home page and there's a link to the graded document. For faculty, it's the same thing-the ability to hyperlink to what's new means less time hunting on the system and more time interacting directly with students, which is critical in driving student success and learning outcomes.

Another focus over the last ten years has been how to collect all of the tremendous wealth of activity data that's occurring in the CMS and present it back in a way that allows the institution to quantify best practices and improve the quality and success of their online programs. I think historically, in the on-campus environment, in order to get primary research, you'd have to have an observer in the back of the room and they'd be taking notes to determine if the student sitting in the back row is really participating or not. But with the introduction of technology in education, you can really monitor all the activity of every user and then develop sophisticated modeling and correlation analyses to quantify best practices. And then one can analyze the data to see what the results are in light of the adoption of those practices. For example, an institution could develop a model that says student retention is driven by the instructor logging into the system x number of times a day for x period of time. With our reporting services, we can collect all of that information and present it to our clients in an efficient and effective manner.

IMS Global: It would seem that kind of analysis really goes to the heart of what the Spellings Commission has been driving at, the need for greater access, assessment, and accountability. You're providing the data that enables your clients to measure the learning outcomes.

MS: That's 100 percent correct. In fact, last year we announced a product called Learning Outcome Manager, which gives our customers the ability to measure and assess student activity and participation in a variety of ways, thus bringing more accountability to online education. With the Learning Outcome Manager, schools can manage their objectives across the enterprise and use data to drive their decision-making, which ultimately is aligned with the Spellings Commission's interest in moving toward more accountability in higher education.