Portals and the LMS continued

So, since I'm actually hosting a roundtable on this, where do they intersect anyway?

To be honest, I really haven't seen it done well even in the all-in-one products. Sure, you get single sign on and it all looks the same, but I managed to hack that into Dokeos and Academus in about an hour. So where could (or should) they leverage each other?

1) Content management. Right now things get stuffed onto the LMS from a network drive somewhere, but there's no real thought put into content reuse, sharing and the like. Why not have the ability to upload a syllabus to the LMS and have it automatically included in a list of syllabi for current courses on the portal that the provost can browse. (Or students- I've never understood the reluctance of various faculty to publicize their syllabi.) Why can't announcements posted on the portal appear on LMS calendars if the professor wants?

2) In a similar vein, is the campus portal being used for social networking: everything from the campus events calendar to surveys to blogs to full-on networking stuff exists in most portals. Much of this can be leveraged within the LMS as well, and most of them have similar tools built into them. Why can't you just have a single interface for a survey or a blog. Of course, this assumes your students actually use the social functions in your portal and just don't go to Facebook instead.

3) Library integration. This is one area I haven't seen done well anywhere. Book searches, reserves, online journals and all the rest could be built directly into the portal+LMS combo. A single link from a course to the electronic reserves (with no login) is a huge plus.

4) Data aggregation. One area where a portal home page can really help is a "Here's everything you need today" list. Let users customize the data that appears- you can get all the course assignments and tests/quizzes, the lacrosse schedule, the dining hall menu and a pull of any clubs you might be interested in into a single space. This can also be useful for campus-wide non-critical announcements such as our upcoming campus power outage.

5) Curriculum and advising integration. If you're at a school with a somewhat odd general education program, having a degree audit system in the portal coupled to course information in the LMS could work very well. We get petitions here from students asking to exempt from a requirement or count a course for some thing that it's not explicitily listed for, but with the backing of LMS assets like syllabi for the relevant courses advising a student would become a lot easier.

So, where else can we go that's beyond my limited imagination?