Excellent comments Gardner, but I would like to respond to three items. 1. You said, "But this line of reasoning assumes that the gold standard for teaching and learning is the status quo in higher education..." While those of us who are caught up in innovation don't want to think that this is the case, it is. Spend any amount of time talking to faculty trainers and they will tell you that the average faculty member is only interested in those technologies that require the least amount of effort to learn. Friedrich Nietzsche said, "To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence." And for most faculty members teaching with technology is disagreeable situation if it involves significant innovation. Remember, these are also the majority on faculty committees and those committees are the ones that ultimately make decisions when it comes to adoption of just about everything in the public universities. And for now the commercial platforms are the best at presenting the least disagreeable situation. Perhaps I am wrong, but show me an institution where the other 84% of faculty are demanding to work with cutting edge technology to facilitate eLearning. 2. I agree with your take on "Frankensteining." The creature that is built need not be a scary one or one that runs amok across the campus. I was using the term more generically. 3. Where will the next round of innovation come from? I think there are opportunities for it to come from both the for-profit and open source communities. The proprietary LMS providers could build a very sleek and elegant solution if they had the will and foresight. As I alluded to, all of the pieces are out there its just a matter of putting them together. The same of course is true for the open source community. For the former it requires vision and funding. For the later it requires organization. While there are some promising indicators and prototypes out there, no one has yet went all-in to make this happen and until someone does the the solution that is the most comfortable (which right now is Blackboard) has the run of the market.