Abstract
<P class=abstract>This article presents a comparative study of online education systems in Norwegian, Swedish, and Australian universities. The online education systems discussed comprise content creation tools and systems for learning management, student management, and accounting. The author of this article arrives at the conclusion that there seems to be a general lack of integration between theses systems in all three countries. Further, there seems to be little focus on standards specifications such as IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) in higher education in all three countries. It was found that both Norway and Sweden value the importance of nationally developed learning management systems and student management systems; however, this does not seem to be the case in Australia. There also seems to be much more national coordination and governmental coercion concerning the choice of student management systems used in Sweden and Norway, than is the case in Australia. Finally, with regard to online education, the most striking difference between these three countries is that of economic policy. In Australia, education is considered an important export industry. In Norway and Sweden, however, the export of education does not seem to be an issue for public discussion.</P>
Highlights
This article was conceived during a two-week study tour of eight Australian universities in Queensland and New South Wales
One manager at Charles Stuart University (CSU) Online reported that WebCT is the most commonly Learning Management Systems (LMS) in Australia, but that Blackboard is used in the majority of enterprise installations
The analysis further indicated that ClassFronter, WebCT, FirstClass, and BlackBoard are the most commonly used LMS systems in the Nordic countries
Summary
It was later nurtured and developed further through literature studies, in-depth telephone interviews, and email correspondence with representatives from the universities and a number of other contacts. This article is based on the author’s research in the European Web-edu project (http://www.nettskolen.com/in_english/web_edu.html), which has conducted a number of regional analyses of European experiences with learning management systems. These analyses are based on more than 100 in-depth interviews with experts from 17 European countries. Knowledge about higher education in Australia is based on the higher education report for the 2001-2003 triennium (DEST 2001)
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