QOTD: Patrick Lambe on elearning systems

From Patrick Lambe: Why Elearning Systems Will Never Rule the World

Elearning pageturners deserve all the cheating they can get. This model of technology-assisted “self” directed learning is at least half a century old.

Old tools for new situations

In my last post I shared a comment from Hal Meeks in regard to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Is E-Learning Forever Trapped in a Field of Dreams? The discussion has continued today in our Teaching and Technology Round Table mailing list. I finally weighed-in after this comment from Henry Schaffer:

...before this digital/web/stuff was foisted on us (faculty,
staff and students) there used to be this irritating dance of getting
the course syllabus to the students. Hand it out, but not everyone is
there. Then they get lost - "why don't you bring more to class?" Or
the late night phone call, "When is the next exam?" Annoying to the
instructors, frustrating to the students.

Now we just put the syllabus on a web page - and, as they say, "Walla!"

I don't know anyone who wants to go back to the old game.

I have no desire to go back to the old days either, but the old days now are how we did it three years ago. I'd like to see us change the game entirely. Here was my response to Henry from earlier today:

Except for today there are a zillion ways to put that syllabus online short of spending zillions of dollars on CMS/LMS solutions. Yet, we cling to the technologies of the last decade that neither the faculty nor students prefer. While at the same time, enforcing built-in and totally unacceptable (industrial era) pedagogical frameworks.

It warms my heart that we are at least having these discussions, and the opportunity to challenge the status quo.

Content versus community

From David Wiley: Social Objects and Campfires:

If your educational materials are not “social objects” - in other words, if you don’t already understand that their main purpose is to bring people together so that social learning interactions can happen - why are you producing and sharing them? A relevant follow-up question is, if you are not providing the functional space for these social learning interactions to happen in (or at least pointing to a space where they can), why are you producing and sharing them? This is the key question for all OER and OCW projects.

The focus being on maximizing the opportunities for interaction, collaboration, and learning. It's not about content. Which is why content management systems and course management systems are the wrong tools for learning. These tools place the focus in the wrong place.

The come-to-me-web: educational version

Good read, well actually it's a great graphic, at the Science of the Invisible on the demise of the LMS and the emergence of the PLE

Learning management systems under fire: Course management systems can just as easily stifle learning as enable it.

It's really quite simple. The future is the PLE, and it will be impossible to deliver on this future from behind the comfort of your institutional firewall.

Seeking loopholes in online classes

The latest issue of Innovate Online has an interesting article on how online students are spending a tremendous amount of energy trying to game online course systems: The Loophole Generation It suggests that students spend more time and energy trying to avoid the work than it would take to just do the work in the first place.

I was reading, and smiling a fair bit when I came across this little gem on the various strategies being used. This one in particular struck a chord:

The Cheater may use a wide variety of techniques used to avoid work. He or she may copy entire assignments from another classmate, submit work posted as examples by the professor as his or her own, contribute little to no work to group projects, have someone else help with an online test, or purchase an entire paper from an online retailer. These students are fully aware of what they are doing. Even with university honor codes and instructor-developed online codes of ethics, this behavior persists.

This immediately brought back some memories of my time in graduate school some twenty-five years ago. I had a statistics course where the professor graded using Z-scores. Most of the tests were taken out of class on our own time. The professor knew that we would not help our classmates, because doing so only hurt our own grades. You have to love that collaborative learning!

Anyway, our mainframe computer files were in one big course directory and exposed to the rest of the class. If your classmates were the least bit computer savvy they could see the code you wrote to solve exam problems. I can't remember how exactly, but I figured out that some classmates were stealing my programs. Normally I wouldn't have cared, but in this situation with the grading normalized, someone stealing your stuff only hurt your own grade. I solved the problem by deliberately embedding errors in my code after solving the problems and printing the results.

I'm sure some of my classmates are still wondering how I did well on tests when they did so poorly. If you are a former classmate, and reading this today, I'm sorry! I didn't make the rules.

Anyway, the students of today aren't any different than the students of yesterday. All that's changed are the rules of the game. If we'd stop focusing on assessment, and start concentrating on learning there'd be a lot less of this gamesmanship.

QOTD: Harold Jarche commenting on D2L's competency model

Geez, do I enjoy reading Harold Jarche: Putting a training peg into an education hole

Using training tools to manage learning is like using a spreadsheet to grow your garden. A waste of time and energy.

The highschoolification of higher education and the LMS

Michael Feldstein at e-Literate discusses: Desire2Learn Competencies and Rubrics: Part I, and the increasing tendency to create metrics to measure... heck if I know? I just know they're not measuring learning.

Of course, you regular readers know that I think these bloated and bureaucratic systems are a step in the wrong direction for institutions of higher learning. Perhaps I'm old school, but I think these sorts of things are best left between the learner and their professor. Not between the learner, some software, and their institution.

Are you looking to maximize students’ likely economic benefit from their education, regardless of career path? Are you trying to create better citizens? Or do you care most about helping the student cultivate a rich and fulfilling life of the mind? The answers to these questions have a strong impact on whether it makes more sense to look at test scores or portfolios, whether assessment instruments should be the same across courses or even across states, and lots of other critical implementation questions. Without widespread agreement on goals and priorities, there will be no widespread agreement about what to assess or how to assess it. It is nearly impossible to get such widespread agreement in many cases. And yet, there is also a sense that if we give up on assessing outcomes altogether, we run the risk that the schools that students, parents, communities, and governments invest in will produce nothing of value for anyone.

Higher education never seemed to have an issue with being considered a valuable investment before there was something called a Learning Management System. In reality these are Learner Control Systems (LCS). They have nothing to do with what's best for the learner. The sooner they can be run out of higher education the better off everyone will be-- especially the learner.

The open source LMS dominoes start to fall

Another major university says goodbye to the closed source, and proprietary world of commercial Learning Management Systems. This time LSU. From eLiterate:

On Saturday, November 3rd, MoodleRooms Michael Penny reported that Louisiana State University would be moving to the Moodle Learning System. LSU is a Major research university enrolling more than 30,000 students, including more than 1,600 international students, and nearly 5,000 graduate students. LSU has more than 1,200 full-time faculty members and a staff of more than 3,000.

This is not a Facebook post...

Not wanting to break my observance of Facebook Free Week, I'm declaring up front that this is not a Facebook post. This has nothing to do with Facebook, but everything to do with a philosophy of putting the learner in the center of a Learning Management System. It is more learner-centered to take the content to the learner than the learner to the content: Roll your own LMS with Facebook

Getting tired of the Learning Management System on your campus? Ever look to see how infrequently your students actually log in to see their assignments etc? Let me tell you, it’s pretty darn infrequently. So why not create a course site on a social network where they already live? Facebook now has several apps that make a near perfect course management system. Use “Courses”, a file sharing app, and a chat app and you’ve got every tool in Blackboard on a site that doesn’t go down, isn’t so bland that it puts you and your students asleep, and actually offers collaborative resources that BB can’t provide (oh and you’re not supporting a company which caters to administrators rather than instructors and students but that’s my personal grudge).

This makes too much sense, and I'm surprised more faculty aren't jumping all over this strategy. The only thing that would make this better is if these learning opportunities were being made available in something like Elgg. We desperately need neutral systems where the content is not owned by the application provider.

ISA vs HASA learning makes total sense to me

Mike Caulfield has a great post: ISA, HASA, and the Inverted LMS. He starts off talking about linguistics, and I was oh so close to bailing when I came to this:

So it’s no surprise that the modern LMS developed under what I would call a “container model”. We “upload files to” it. We have discussions “in” it. And if the “outside world” needs to see something “in there”, we give them “access”.

And the students? Well, they’re “in there” too. At least the piece of the student that belongs to that class is. You know, the English major slice. The part of the student that is a science minor is in another box, and the part of a student that is looking for a job or hanging out with friends doesn’t have a box at all.

That pretty much says it all in regard to the LMS. They aren't about the student, they are about the instructor -- making the instructor's life easier. With syndication and other technologies they don't have to be done this way anymore. It's the CBS vs USA Today strategy played out in an educational context.

What if we moved from the container model to the tagging/syndication model, and instead of uploading something into the ENG 331A box, we kept it on the student’s own site and tagged it as being relevant to his ENG 331A class and say, his professional portfolio? And maybe tagged it as a submission to the Academic Excellence Conference as well?

It's all about where you place the focus. We talk a good line about being "student centered" but the values embedded in the old line tools don't embrace that philosophy. Mike concludes:

Once again, in a student-centered LMS, the student contains part of the class rather than the class containing part of the student.

Dang that sounds nice!

QOTD: Wayne Mackintosh

Found on the WikiEducator site in preparation for the Tectonic shift think tank meeting to identify the transformation opportunities for Mediawiki and related FLOSS technologies for eLearning:

All you need for the future of eLearning is free content, Mediawiki and Google

There is also an excellent contributed article by Wayne Mackintosh on the Terra Incognita blog at Penn State that is definitely worth a read.

QOTD: Alfie Kohn

This Alfie Kohn quote was found in the Harvard Education Letter (thanks to Johnnie Moore):

The notion of accountability, in theory, doesn't disturb me. But these days, accountability has come to be a code word for more control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms. And it has approximately the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing

And therein lies the problem with the way that most Learning Management Systems are being deployed. They are built and designed by people who are not in the classroom. They are not about learning, they are about control (Blackboard nails student engagement).

This is why open source solutions like Moodle are so important. Perhaps a system designed by the community, the whole community, can stop some of this nonsense. It's nice to see the use of Moodle with its social constructionist pedagogy gathering steam. Not that it isn't capable of being misused as well.