Transitioning to Maryland’s ELMS Environment

Maryland’s enterprise learning management system (ELMS) was deployed during the fall 2006 semester. Initially, faculty from the A. J. Clark School of Engineering and Robert H. Smith School of Business were migrated to the new ELMS environment (which is powered by Blackboard Academic Suite). In addition, any other faculty members across campus who wanted to begin using the ELMS environment were able to request and use course space.

The Academic Support staff in OIT is currently migrating WebCT course content to the ELMS environment – only course content files are being moved, not the entire course itself. ELMS provides a single content area for storing course files. When faculty set up their courses, they will be able to link to their content files in this content area from within their courses. This approach allows faculty to maintain and distribute a single master copy of content to multiple course spaces. During this transition of WebCT content, the current WebCT server will continue to run in parallel with ELMS. This is expected to last through the end of the spring 2007 semester.

Several resources are available online for faculty, including quick guides and all training materials (found under the Faculty Resources tab on www.elms.umd.edu). Visit www.training.umd.edu for the current training schedule.