Thus an instructor or educational institution is thereby coerced by the "habit forming qualities" of the unique CMS user interface they are using, by their investment in time in learning the unique complexity of how their particular CMS works, and by the lack of portability of the considerable typed and graphic (and animation, audio and video) content the institution has created and stored in the CMS, so that the vast majority of CMS users become increasingly unwilling to switch to another CMS. Typically they wait as long as the vendor or CMS developer requires they wait until "the next better release" of the product. And they do not switch usually for many years after adoption of the chosen CMS! They very often do not switch until the "pain" of using an increasingly outmoded, too slow to change, CMS or LMS is so great that their "user base" is "up in arms" to have something better such as some new software that has appeared on the commercial market in recent months or years!
To summarize then: the two factors of
- deliberate vendor-created commercial software user-dependency-creation and
- the vendors' deliberate slow-as-possible software upgrading process
...stifle the much swifter and more innovative improvements of commercial and even of free open source software and software systems for educational purposes. The faster, better innovations have ALWAYS been possible to create, test, and deploy by the competent eager (if sometimes over-eager) developers. And those innovations could provide so much better, low-cost and/or more freely accessible educational content to students as well as allow instructors much greater ease-of-use of the host CMS or LMS to create educational experiences with their students via the Internet and within their 'ordinary' classrooms. Thus the "free market" has created legions of less empowered educational end-users who become subservient to "good-enough software" and systems that experts like myself know could be so much better, subservient to the limitations and constraints of "commercial needs" incuding the manufacturers' need to maximize their "return on their investment" (ROI) of time and money in the creation, testing, deployment, and upgrading of that educational software or their educational systems. And again that also limits and constrains bringing truly better educational experiences and materials to students via the Internet.
