EDUCAUSE's 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Alternatives describes how institutions and individual faculty are increasingly turning to various combinations of Web 2.0 tools and other resources to support their unique learning environments and goals and to perform all of the functions of a traditional LMS tool.

A traditional learning management system (LMS) provides a set of tools to manage learning resources, administrative functions, assessments, and grading. Alternatives to conventional LMS's include wikis, blogs, bookmarking tools, document sharing applications, timeline tools, and media delivery options available as discrete services that can be combined to meet specific teaching and learning needs.

At Columbia, services such as Wikispaces, EdBlogs, Columbia on iTunes U and YouTube EDU, form a set of curated alternatives to the main CourseWorks environment.