This lack of interest in LMSs is also something we have experienced here at the University of Delaware. As Instructional Technologists, we try to guess what faculty need for their courses, but we are not the best judges for that. So it always comes back to what faculty want to support their teaching, and then trying to map it back to technologies that could support these teaching scenarios.

For most “automation” scenarios (site creation, grading, assignment dropbox, etc.), the LMS does just fine. These administrative tasks are not exciting, yet they are vital to support the scalability of our higher education institutions. No wonder faculty are not engaged.

This is something the Sakai community is trying to address in its future version, Sakai 3. The Teaching & Learning group is gathering core teaching and learning activities to make sure they are included in the next generation of Sakai. You can see some of the work on our wiki. http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=68158536

But then there are also all the web 2.0 tools that are way sexier than the LMS. I tried to address what an LMS really is in a blog post back in December: http://anythinginstructional.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-would-we-need-lms-anyway.html

In my opinion, an LMS should offer an convenient alternative to support the most common teaching and learning scenarios, and let faculty that want to live on the bleeding edge experiment with new technology, without taking away the convenience of the LMS.