Most educators would agree that it is important for pedagogy to guide decisions about technology and not the other way around, and yet there is relatively little debate in academic circles about the limiting effects of the LMS.
Why is this?
So I signed up for Connected Courses.
It may reboot one of my blogs — if nothing else — which have become increasingly neglected as I have become more of a microblogger these days.
Amazingly, I just sat and watched a YouTube without shuffling in my seat for one hour and six minutes courtesy of Jim Groom, Howard Rheingold, and Alan Levine. (I even smiled at their blokey in-jokes.) Seriously, though, these guys need to be taken seriously. I will stick this course out if it kills me because there has to be more to life as a university learner than the ‘LMS’, and I’m confident these guys have the answers.
In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:
While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.
After almost a decade away in the corporate world, I don’t think I could have picked a better time to return to mainstream academia. Universities are changing — largely because of external pressures it must be said — and I can sense an openness to new thinking about pedagogy that wasn’t in evidence before. A key driver, I think, is the ubiquity of technology.
Whether we are talking about desktops, laptops, tablets or hand-helds, access to ICTs is no longer strictly the realm of the geek. Walk into any classroom in a university these days and its like a technology park. The big question, of course, is the extent to which all this hardware is actually serving to enhance learning.
Image source: tech-faq.com
Joshua Kim wrote a nice piece in IHE a couple of weeks ago that posed some very candid questions about the future of Blackboard. This company is the Leviathan of the proprietary learning management system market, and suffers somewhat from Microsoft-syndrome on account of its market domination. Very few educators I know have anything nice to say about the platform, other than the fact is tends to be pretty stable. This, of course, is very necessary, but also very dull. It is also a sad indictment on the quality of the student learning experience in higher education.
In an age when there is so much action going on within social media, it is most unfortunate that the market leader continues to trot out something that is quite so pedestrian. The problem, simply put, is that when you have such a large market share there is no pressure to innovate. You can make all the feature requests you like, but there will be no response until there is a critical mass of users making the same request.
Like Dr Kim, I wonder how much longer this strategy will continue to deliver. Monolithic LMSs are very 20th century, and to stay ahead of the game these days, versatility is everything. In short, a key consideration now is whether your delivery platform is going to be able to incorporate the new tools next year that no-one has even invented yet.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=0qX80isox4Q]
The sceptical amongst us will no doubt look upon the Facebook-delivered MBA by the London School of Business and Finance as a gimmick. This may be the case, but 12000+ hits in just over a month it is hard to ignore if you are a struggling bricks-and-mortar b-school! Another metric that is hard to ignore is the population of FaceBookLand which, last time I checked, was the third largest country in the world.
Image source: ipattt.com
Joshua Kim wrote a thought-provoking piece in Inside Higher Ed yesterday, entitled The iPad and the LMS. He puts forward some pretty compelling arguments as to why the days of the browser based learning management system (LMS) might be numbered. Sentences that jumped out and bit me on the nose include:
Somewhat ironically, one of the emerging limitations of the browser application is a loss of certainty that the LMS can reliably deliver its content. As the browser world has split between IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, we are seeing different behaviors in each browser. Four browsers and numerous versions are just too many to test all features, or to make sure that rich media content always plays as it should
… this my own experience on a regular basis!
The danger is that our models for delivering education will fail to keep up with changes in how consumer and entertainment content is delivered. Books, movies, TV shows, magazine articles, newspapers – they will all move to the app.
… pre-iPhone, I would have been very skeptical, but App-powered m-learning is now a serious reality, and the advent of the iPad can only hasten this trend.
Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikelesombre/
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last week on Blackboard’s acquisition of Angel. The article’s title: Blackboard Buys Another Rival, to Customers’ Dismay, says it all really. We’re not to worry, however, because Blackboard’s president and chief executive, Michael L. Chasen, said the company had learned from the WebCT acquisition and promised that this time it will be different. Unfortunately, Mr Chasen just doesn’t get it. He and his company continue to misread the zeitgeist, and if ever a business deserves to fall victim to disruptive innovation, it is this one.
Blackboard is widely regarded as the Leviathan of the learning management system (LMS) world, and it is a platform that has come to dominate online delivery of education, particularly in the higher education sphere. Aside from its poor reputation for customer service, this cumbersome monolith does not have the capacity to keep up with the pace of change. The science of online learning continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and as a proprietary, high-cost, and relatively inflexible system, Blackboard can only innovate at the speed of its next service pack. Meanwhile, the open source movement incorporates pedagogical innovation on the run. The end result is that Blackboard is simply ‘uncool’, and it will remain so, long as it continues to tell educators and learners what they can have, rather than give them what they want.
All this will be welcome news for the likes of Moodle, Sakai and Ning, and the smaller proprietary systems that are nimble and versatile enough to ride the social networking wave, and provide the kind of learning environment for students and faculty where they feel they have creative licence and a sense of ownership.
