Software / Service Providers

Information for Online Educational Delivery Software Providers wishing to be reviewed on the EduTools site

The Scope of EduTools
The primary target audience for this site is decision makers in the higher education community. The site is designed to support decision making about online educational delivery software and services. The software and services reviewed in this site must fit within three broadly defined criteria:

1. the target market for the software or service must clearly include higher education institutions

2. the software must be a "Course Management System," and

3. the software is currently available as a download, a service, or by licensing agreement. We will not include pre-release versions of products.

Higher Education Target Market Defined
This site is focused on course management system software that views higher education as the primary target market. Indicators of this focus may include:

• the software is being provided from within higher education

• the product is primarily used in higher education

• the software company’s website explicitly describes higher education as a target market

• existing customers include higher education institutions

• the product integrates with academic-oriented back office systems (e.g. student record systems such as SCT Banner or Datatel's Colleague) versus more industry-oriented ERP or HR systems (e.g. SAP or BAAN)

• the scope of content partners include traditional academic publishers versus more industry-oriented workplace learning publishers.

Course management systems are defined partly by what they exclude and partly by what is included.

The working definition of course management systems excludes: Single function software like stand-alone assessment tools, synchronous tools or authoring packages that do not also have many other features or act as part of a larger suite that delivers online education courses. Course content materials and course content bundled with its own online delivery system.

The working definition of course management systems includes: Software suites that enable both synchronous and asynchronous student participation with both the learning content and with other students and the instructor. Systems sold in a traditional vendor model which allows institutions to run the software in their own environment and hosted services provide through Application Service Provider (ASP) style relationships. Software packages and hosted services when they provide at least one of the following functions: Tools to facilitate multiple aspects of course design, content authoring, and content management. Tools for administering assessments and tracking the usage from both a student and content perspectives. Tools that structure content delivery and course progression around conventional post-secondary course units of delivery and post-secondary schedules such as terms and semesters.

How to get reviewed on this site
EduTools researchers will provide information to providers, whose products are listed on our site, on how to keep their product information current. If your software is here but you haven’t heard from us, please feel free to follow the instructions below to set up a new account.

Please check to see if your products is on the list of products to be reviewed. If you think your software or company fits into the scope of this site and your product is not listed on the EduTools site, Please complete the review request form >> You will be asked to provide your contact information, the name of the company and product you represent.

After EduTools researchers review your information and agree that your software fits within the scope of the site, one of them will email you information on how to submit draft feature descriptions for review.

What to expect of our review process

EduTools provides independent reviews of higher education course management systems. In order to write the reviews, the EduTools researchers typically follow a three step process:

1. Review the product literature on the company's website and capture any relevant feature descriptions listed there

2. Review any available product demos and attempt to describe the relevant features found there, based on our standards for describing feature functionality.

3. Dialog with the contact person or designate to clarify any unresolved questions and give them an opportunity to offer corrections or amendments to the proposed review.

The goal of this process is to provide an accurate description of the software for use in a comparative analysis along side other comparable software.