LMS

Why are Third Party Vendors Such Arses?

Posted on by Jon K.

The short answer is that they’re not. They’re experiencing culture shock between higher education and capitalism. Their goals and higher education’s are entirely different, and sometimes diametrically opposed. Sometimes they’re not, but I’ll leave that for the Marxists out there to critique.

I’ll outline a few examples, no names except for where I need a name for a tool because it’s too hard to keep using “middleware” that could mean anything from a database to a API connector to something like IFTTT. I’m not writing this to shame edtech vendors or name call, but if you are a vendor and you do these sorts of things – maybe consider stopping.

Hyper aggressive sales.

You’ve all seen this, or gotten emails day after day from the same vendor telling you about their great product. Or, you’ve been a teacher, and they call you periodically. Or more frequently. Daily even. I’ve gotten relentless edtech bros emailing me on LinkedIn then at work. By the way, if you do this and it’s part of your company culture, you do know that I mark that stuff as spam, right? All it does is create one of two things for a relationship… you either gain someone who just capitulates to you (but resents you) or you anger someone (who then holds a grudge for longer than an eon). Neither of those are great, but one is a sale. In an extreme case, you might get a cease and desist from a CIO who is tired of your harassment.

Circumventing process.

EdTech workers have definitely been asked for this sort of stuff continually. Move fast and break things is not a good mantra for education, nor public institutions. If your company wants to do it your way, rather than a standard LTI 1.3 kind of way, and then refuses to budge because your API way (to simply manage single-sign-on!) is already built, you’re an ass. If you are ever told, “we don’t just enable every option in LTI 1.3 settings” and you turn around and suggest you need all those data options – you most definitely don’t. If we have a process that we tell you takes months to go through, no, it can’t go quicker. It’s literally my job to ensure the security of the data in the system you’re trying to connect to, so work with me, not against me. It’s not my fault you left it to the last minute before semester and are trying to rush the integration through, literally using teachers as a sacrificial wedge to bypass security, privacy and accessibility. You know what that makes you.

Oh, and when the vendor agreement allows an instructor to sign off for an entire institution? That’s no good.

Data greediness.

Outlined above a little bit, but when you ask for an API integration, you should be able to easily answer “What API calls are you making?”. If you have an LTI 1.3 integration, and we ask “what do you use this data for?” you should be able to answer that within minutes of asking. Dancing around that question just raises my suspicions. You might actually need all that data. In 20 years of doing this work, and probably working on 100+ integrations with the LMS and other tools, it’s happened twice. Those two vendors were very quick to respond with what they use each data point for, how long they kept it, and why they needed it for those functions. That’s excellent service. Also that wasn’t the sales person… so yeah. Oh, and 99% of integrations between the LMS and something else can be done with LTI 1.3. Vendors out there, please use the standards. And get certified by IMS Global/1EdTech. It goes a long way to building your reputation.

Third-party malfeasance.

OK, it’s not that bad, but a new trend I’ve started seeing is a vendor using another vendor to manage something (usually data). EdLink is the sort of thing I’m thinking about here. EdLink allows easy connections between two unrelated vendors with no established connection method. So think, connecting McGraw Hill to your Student Information System (not the actual example I’m thinking of to be clear, we don’t have, or want, to connect McGraw Hill to our SIS). To be honest, this doesn’t bother me as much as some of the other grievances I’ve got – but obfuscating your partnerships and running all your data through a third-party that we don’t have an agreement with, is definitely something that raises an eyebrow or three. As one starts to think about what-if scenarios (also my job) it makes clarity around who has your data at what time and for how long all the more difficult. The service doesn’t bother me, as long as the middle-person in the scenario is an ethical partner of the vendor you’re engaging with. In many cases, you need to have a level of trust in the partner, and if they’ve shown themselves as less than trustworthy, then well, you’ve got a problem.
Again, I’m sure EdLink is fine, but when a vendor uses EdLink, and is presented with that fact, it’s a challenge for security experts as they not only have to do one analysis, but two. I understand why a vendor might try to frame EdLink as their own service, but it’s undeniable that it isn’t. So just be honest and upfront. You may pass by a team that doesn’t prioritize this level of detail, but we are not blind. We will figure it out.

One other big challenge with third-parties acting on behalf of a vendor is that if there’s a problem, you typically have to go through the vendor to access the middle person’s support team to get it rectified. This adds a layer of complexity AND time to something that was likely intended to save time and hassle for the vendor.

2 Comments

Ch-Ch-Changes

Posted on by Jon K.

I’m trying really hard to write more and this summer has been a challenge because I swore off doing what I normally do, which is too much. I took a semester or two off from my Master’s and got my head down in some work at work. I should probably update y’all on what I am doing because I typically write about that periodically – maybe not often enough?

So, I’m currently in my third year as Lead Learning Technologist – which is kind of middle management, kind of feet on the ground type of role. I don’t have budgetary oversight, but I do oversee the LMS team and play a role in guiding that ship through the stormy weather. The LMS team is small (two front-line support analysts and one senior systems administrator who manages the backend processes) but rockstars from top to bottom. My role is to plan out the projects, lend a hand where possible, do some of the long-term visioning, do some short-term put out fires, and help clean up messes. Ultimately, I’m not entirely responsible, but I am in many ways entirely responsible. That kind of middle spot is somewhat frustrating, but also rewarding. I get some freedom still, but I still have to run the major decisions up the flagpole. I also am the conduit between central IT and the LMS team which sits within Teaching and Learning.

It took a while, but I let go of the last of the old job (which was front-line support and LMS administrator, plus more) which was doing the LMS updates for the university about six months ago. It felt weird, and I will admit I left that until the last because I frankly loved keeping my toe in the water. Perspective is a weird thing in that the closer I come to the top (and it’s only been one minor step up) I can see that everyone is as frustrated as I am at the middle management problem – you’re always constrained by someone else’s decisions. I’m lucky in that I can have that clarity and I couldn’t imagine how I would function if I wasn’t able to see it and it was hidden from me.

We’re doing two large projects at the moment, finally launching a course outline library tool (and re-architecting some decisions that weren’t exactly built into the first iteration of the design of the tool’s functionality) and doing an LMS RFP – which is overdue because we were in a funded project for several years which precluded our ability to RFP and then the pandemic happened. So this is the first time since… forever. I’m acting as technical lead on both those projects. Technical lead is a weird thing that probably deserves it’s own chunk of writing (so wait for it, coming in 2025!).

I’ve been trying my best to help guide some things around AI without getting too involved in the policy, making diversity and equity a component of technological purchasing, and thinking a lot about process. I also spent a good chunk of time on this chapter in this ebook/anthology celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Teaching and Learning centre at McMaster.

Other than that, it’s just business as usual.

2 Comments

How To Use D2L Awards Across Multiple Courses

Posted on by Jon K.

Parts of this post were drafted in 2018. I’ve left them as-is and finished the blog post because I think it’s kind of crucial to understand that things have (and haven’t changed) a lot in this space. The D2L Awards tool is in desperate need of improvements, which is related to the underlying release conditions logic limitations and the way courses are positioned in the LMS. Those are structural issues, and entirely not D2L’s fault. In fact, it’s an education problem. Anyways, to the post:

I’ve been working with D2L Awards since they became available at my institution, around the Fall of 2014. I’d spent some time prior to that adding my two cents on the Open Badges Community calls, and tried to add the higher education perspective where I could (around the badges specification and higher education policy). One of the great values of badges is that they are very transportable – they essentially belong to the earner, with some caveats (like the badge hasn’t been revoked, or expired). To me this makes a lot of sense when you think of skills developing and documenting learning, which is the areas I’ve been working in the last few years.

So when D2L announced that the Awards tool would issue Digital Badges, I was very very happy. Well, truth be told, I wasn’t happy at all, because I had been working on installing our own badge issuing server and integrating it with D2L, so all of that work (the previous year or so) was down the tubes. But the upside was that it was an integrated experience and worked out of the box (so to speak). One of the first challenges was to get global badges, or the sort of thing that might transcend a course to work. The theory was that if you earned several badges from several courses (in D2L admin-speak, course offerings) you’d need to have some sort of way to know that. The somewhat simple approach is to use a higher level organization unit to manage that for you.

Typically, in a LMS structure you have the top level, or Organization level; underneath that some form of Department or Faculty, and underneath that Courses.  D2L Brightspace also has these things called Templates above the Courses, other LMS’s might have those structures, maybe not. Much of that structure is determined by your institutions Student Information System (typically Banner or PeopleSoft, but may be renamed to suit the institutions’ whims).

An example organization structure with various levels of groups

To facilitate badges to be issued as a result of other courses, or as part of an unofficial grouping (think HR related training) you will have to create a shadow structure that connects the Courses and Templates to a shadow Department. You could use the existing Departments to do this as well, but it’s generally safer to do this in a shadow organization rather than the real one. There’s little danger of doing anything damaging in this space, but you will need to be in and out of here doing enrollments. Some SIS systems already have enrollments at Department levels (we don’t) – so you definitely don’t want to mess with what your SIS does. If your SIS doesn’t do enrollments at the higher levels (excepting Organization and Course levels) then you could use existing structures, but you then risk breaking things if the SIS changes Departments or enrollments shift.

An example organization structure with various levels of groups, with a shadow structure to facilitate outcome achievement to levels above the course

The other benefit of a shadow structure is that you could combine things in unofficial ways. For instance, you could connect all the Community Education courses together across the institution, or connect experiential learning, or co-op… you get the idea.

Essentially, you don’t use the Awards tool as a relationship, but the Competencies tool with the Award tool as the outcome of the relationship. The Competency feeding up the hierarchy of organizational units, and then you can trigger awarding a Badge or Certificate with the activity that granted (in whole or in part) at a higher level. The student would get a badge from an organization they may or may not see (depending on the D2L permissions at that level, if any).

No comments yet

ETEC 511: Tipping Point, A Critical Case Study Proposal

Posted on by Jon K.

One of the observations I have made over the years, and particularly over the last decade at McMaster University, is that the LMS has mostly displaced the use of personal websites for teaching. The reasons for this are multifaceted and contextual to individual institutions, however, at McMaster, I have observed that it is most likely related to the course themes of Digital Labour (once in the LMS, it is easier, and less labourious to keep using the LMS and the labour of using the LMS can be offloaded to teaching assistants) and Attention (student preference is to have all learning in one place). However, there are secondary contributing factors, which would fall under Algorithms (enhanced ability to track and observe course activity) and Sustainability (not from an environmental standpoint, but a course sustainability practice). There is also a factor of culturalization – since 2011, LMS use has not been mandaked. The makeup of faculty has skewed younger and with that pre-LMS teaching has faded from institutional memory. In many cases, no one even thinks that teaching outside institutional systems is possible or even desirable.

No comments yet

D2L Fusion 2017 Recap

Posted on by Jon K.

Every year it’s a bit different; some new faces appear, some old ones disappear. Jobs and roles change, focus changes. Las Vegas is a place that exemplifies an absurd demonstration of capitalism at its most consumer-driven absurdity. With the event happening in Las Vegas, I thought that D2L might be subtly telling us that they were taking a gamble. Turns out, that the gamble is not a big, all-in shove to take the pot, but perhaps a less-sexy gamble of shying away from glitzy announcements, to a more mature, iterative approach.

People talk about Las Vegas light shows being spectacular, but the one over Oklahoma City was pretty dang cool.

Flying Near Lightning from Jon Kruithof on Vimeo.

Usually in my recaps I’ll talk about the sessions I attended and what I learned. This year, was like every other, the sessions were well done, interesting, and useful (although maybe not immediately useful in my case). I won’t break down each thing learned, or really talk about what the learning was, instead I’ll reflect on the conference as a whole and maybe some of the underlying things that were interesting.

My focus this year was to really better understand two things, API extensibility and the data hub (Brightspace Data Platform, or BDP, which is awful close to ODB). I think I did that. I attended one session that described how they use the API to scrape everyone’s course outline, which was cool because that’s something that has come up periodically at McMaster, and I’ll have to get in touch with them to see how they handled ownership and other matters. It’s that fine line that admins run up against, where they can do things, but should they? We often fall on the no, we shouldn’t side.

I didn’t really pay attention to the keynotes – John Baker’s become quite a good speaker – but I’ve heard it before. I’ve been working at D2L clients now for almost a decade. I’m probably as intimately familiar with the product as many of the people working at D2L. Ray Kurzweil is interesting as a person, and I appreciate some of his theories, I don’t think the singularity will happen (we may approach it, but never achieve it) and I don’t really dig his speaking style. The talk (for me) really circled around the changing nature of work and that is a reality of my everyday.

I did a session about the work we’re doing badging faculty for skill in LMS use, more in another post about that.

I saw echoes of what I’ve done around faculty training in other presentations (which I stole from others whom I’ve worked with and talked to). More importantly, I walked around chatting with folks I know, wondering if this was still right for me? Is EdTech still the thing that I want to be working in? I’ve been in this field since 2001 (or 2003, or 2005, depending on when you want to mark my start – whether as a computer programming co-op student looking after a language lab, or when I graduated or when I first started working in higher education relatively uninterrupted). That’s a long time. I’m still energized by seeing the exciting things that other people are doing. And almost to a person, whenever I say to those people, “hey that’s awesome” or express my interest, there’s the same, humble responses of surprise that anyone would want to talk to them about what they’re doing. I don’t know if that’s a Fusion specific thing, or an EdTech person thing, or just my humble radar forcing me to talk to those people.

It also reminded me that any interesting work was extending the LMS –  using Node.js to create an Awards Leaderboard, doing data analysis for LMS wide analytics using the Brightspace Application API. Hell, even understanding what the Discrimination Index means in the Quiz tool.

My personal underlying theme was that there’s more that can be done with the LMS if you extend it’s capabilities. I think we’re on the cusp of doing just that. 

Once again, it was a fun after the conference experience. Hanging out with some of my favourite people (and recognizing the posse from just a few short years ago is just about gone!).

 

No comments yet

Blackboard Thinks They Know How You Teach

Posted on by Jon K.

In November of last year a blog post by Blackboard was making the rounds. A Blackboard study documented how instructors use their system which was somehow conflated as being equivalent to knowing how teachers teach. We could talk about how terrifying this blog post is, or how it’s devoid of solid analysis. Instead I’d like to turn over a new leaf and not harp on about privacy, or a company using the aggregate data they’ve collected with your consent (although you probably weren’t aware that when you agreed to “allow Blackboard to take your data and improve the system” that they’d make this sort of “analysis”), but just tear into the findings.

Their arbitrary classifications (supplemental? complementary?) are entirely devoid of the main driver of LMS use: grades, not instructor pedagogical philosophy – students go to the tools where they are going to get marked on.  Social? I guarantee if you did an analysis of courses that value use of the discussion tool (note, that’s not about quality) as greater than 30% of the final grade, you’ll see a  hell of a lot more use of discussions. It’s not that the instructor laid out a social course, with a student making an average of 50 posts throughout the course (which if you break that down to 14 weeks of “activity” that works out to 3.5 posts per week – which is strangely similar to the standard “post once and respond twice” to get your marks – it’s that discussions are the only tool that give some power to students to author.

Time spent is also a terrible metric for measuring anything. Tabs get left open. People sit on a page because there’s an embedded video that’s 20 minutes long. Other pages have text which is scannable. Connections are measured how? Is it entry and exit times? What if there’s no exit, how does the system measure that (typically it measures for a set amount of activity and then if none occurs the system assumes an exit)? Were those values excluded from this study? If so, how many were removed? Is that significant?

Now Blackboard will say that because of the scale of the data collected that those outliers will be mitigated. I don’t buy that for a second because LMS’s are not great at capturing this data from the start (in fact server logs are not much better), because there’s very little pinging for active window or other little tricks that can only be really assessed using eye tracking software and computer activity monitoring. Essentially garbage-in, garbage-out. We have half baked data that is abstractly viewed and an attempt is made at some generalizations.

Here’s a better way to get at this data: ask some teachers how they use the LMS. And why. It’s that simple.

If you look at Blackboard’s findings, you should be frankly scared if you’re Blackboard. Over half of your usage (53% “supplemental” or content-heavy) could be done in a password protected CMS (Content Management System). That’s a system that could cost nothing (using Joomla or any of the millions of free CMS software available) or replicated using something institutions already have. The only benefit institutions have is that they can point at the vendor when stuff goes wrong and save money on outsourcing expertise into an external company.

If you take the findings further, only 12% of courses (“evaluative” and “holistic”) get at the best parts of the LMS, the assessment tools. So 88% of courses reviewed do things in the system that can be replicated better elsewhere. Where’s the value added?

No comments yet

First Month (and a bit) of PebblePad

Posted on by Jon K.

It seems that the basic uses of an eportfolio platform are easy as pie for our campus. We’re now at the mid-to-highly complex uses that I thought we might see before this – which begs a question. Is it that no one wanted to push the boundaries of the older system, or was it that the boundaries weren’t worth pushing? Or maybe we weren’t ready to push? I’ve often said I’ve built a career out of workarounds and getting systems to do what they weren’t meant to do. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to do that – with LTI and ubiquitous acceptance of embed codes from social sites – there’s not a lot of need to bend systems.

However, getting acquainted with a new system (full caveat I had access to the older version of the system for almost two months before PebblePad was turned on September 2nd), while trying to wrap my head around some of the complex asks has been challenging for an old brain like me. For instance, wanting peer marking, peer review and feedback, but not allowing other peers to see the graded assessment or the graded feedback, yet allowing for a commentary feedback to exist on the item, and the assessor can provide a final grade based on the accumulated individual feedback from other students. In a class of close to 80 students. Turns out, not a problem. Even with some initial missteps, it was relatively simple to setup and have working (with some significant help from PebblePad support).

Flexibility for what students can do in the system? No problem. We’ve got one class that’s given workspaces to all their project groups giving them full access to that area to configure how they like. They just can’t remove managers (the instructors) or give grades. They could if their role was configured for it, and the instructors wanted that. That kind of power in a system is really something I’ve missed with the major LMS vendors (and believe me, I’ve asked for the power to give instructors the ability to give students a sandboxed area to add their own content, create their own assignments, etc. etc.). We’ve got another doing peer review. We’ve got another doing typical portfolio stuff – where the student assembles a portfolio and submits that to a lone marker.

I don’t want to sound like a pitch man for PebblePad, but honestly, in a decade plus of working with learning systems, putting in tickets and generally working with educational technology, I’ve never had better service than I do with PebblePad. Tickets are answered intelligently within 24 business hours, most often resolved within that time. Now maybe that’s me, finding easy problems to solve… but only one ticket has lasted longer than a week, and it was to do with the iOS app that was mostly waiting for Apple to approve the app’s update. Which is a huge testament to the people working at PebblePad.

With that said, we’re working with version 5 of PebblePad, and I’m starting to get at some of the limitations. The first one, is that you can’t embed anything into the system except YouTube videos. Students just don’t use YouTube – in fact many use Vimeo, Prezi, Slideshare, Vine and any number of other sites would be nice to embed that right on a portfolio page rather than link it. Now, having spoken to them about it, they’ve stated that they will look at it and see if there’s something they can do to branch out from just YouTube (I suggested adding Prezi, Vimeo, Slideshare, and a couple other ubiquitous sites). There was some security concerns about rogue embeds, but I’m sure they can figure out a solution. Most of the limitations I’m seeing currently will be gone when version 5 and 3 have parity in February – and some were addressed in the November 15th update – again a good thing to see with a company.

So over a month in, I’m really, really impressed. I don’t often get ebullient with external companies (in fact I’m usually very critical of edtech capitalism), as I’ve seen companies grow and what that growth means for the clients,  I hope the future is as bright as the present.

Full disclosure: I was invited to attend a week’s advanced training at PebblePad HQ in the UK. My work paid for the flight, Pebble Learning paid for a week’s accomodation as well as meals and drinks. I don’t think that my opinion can be bought with a week’s accomodation and food (we did have a lovely time), nor change my opinion of the product. Your opinion and mine may vary.

No comments yet

LMS Review

Posted on by Jon K.

So our current contract with our LMS vendor is complete in October 2018. I can’t say what we’ll do, but the landscape has changed somewhat since the last LMS review was done at work, so we’re starting to form a committee to look at our options. Ultimately, we’re doing this so far in advance because you should take at least a year to transition, which would put us at fall 2017 for starting to roll out the new system for users, which means that we’d need to know in the spring of 2017. Maybe the cost of change will scare us into another contract. As I see it, there’s four options available to us.

1. Stay with D2L. This is the easiest answer, and least complicated. We’ve been relatively happy with them as a company so there’s really no need to change, and despite the minor blips (the great outage of 2012) it’s been pretty smooth so far. Maybe continuous delivery will be awesome, and really a review of the LMS will be a mere formality.

2. Move to another hosted LMS. This is the second easiest answer – if the campus decides that D2L isn’t the choice for us, then we choose another vendor, enter into protracted negotiations, and go through the formal process of getting vendors to submit to review, tender offers, and go through the motions with selecting a new partner for the next five years. I’m not sure if the campus will think this is an option at all. Blackboard was our previous LMS, and didn’t work – essentially leaving the campus without a functional LMS for a whole semester. By the time it did start working, the relationship was in trouble, and well, that’s why we have D2L. That’s according to faculty who were here during the time it happened, which was prior to my time. Another seismic shift may not be in the cards. Another factor is that we’ve become a PeopleSoft school for our various systems across campus. That implementation has been rough for the campus. I’m not sure they have the appetite for another system to learn so quickly.

3. Go back to self-hosting LMS software. This allows us to look at open source solutions, and rely on our own IT group to take server maintenance, infrastructure and all the other associated risks back under our roof. It’s unlikely that we would do this due to the human cost of running a mission critical server – and we’d have to look at hiring back expertise that was relocated to other groups on campus or into industry. Those costs, are not insignificant. The complexity of running Moodle or Sakai at scale for 25,000 to 30,000 users, isn’t lost on me. It’d be a great challenge. I don’t know that this will be palatable to the campus either as we’ve had people who were running their own Moodle install come over to use the institution’s provided install of D2L. Maybe that’s the path of least resistance? Maybe it’s the students pushing for one platform? Who knows.

4. Do away with the LMS. This is an entirely radical idea, but what if we just left it up to instructors to do it themselves? I’d be ok in this scenario, despite having this a huge part of my job description, because there’s always going to be technology to use to teach. I’d have to adjust. Would this even fly? Probably not. Imagine the headlines: “first University to do away with the LMS”… would be useful to put on my tombstone after everyone lynches me because they need a secure webpage to link their stuff to.

As a teaching and learning centre, we’ll be interested in finding something flexible to teach not only in the modes that people currently teach in, but also in the pedagogy that people want to teach in. All LMS’s say they can do constructivist style setups, but really they require changes globally to do so. No one gives the instructor the power to turn on or off student control of a slice of content, or a discussion, or even a collaborative space for document sharing. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that all LMS’s are designed as content delivery tools, not knowledge construction tools. And to that end, the choice of tools that can be used is often controlled by LMS administrators, not the instructors. Now, there’s great reasons for structuring things in such a way; theoretically administrators have subject matter expertise in selecting partners to connect to the LMS and have experience with vetting vendors. Right? I hope so. I know I’ve tried my best to make sure I’ve done right for student’s privacy, intellectual property and general safe digital space. I don’t know what I don’t know though. I guess, through the next three years, I’ll start to find out.

2 Comments

Why Are Systems Administrators for the LMS Such Dicks?

Posted on by Jon K.

Full disclosure. I’m an LMS administrator, and I’m probably a dick. I will say, in my defense, that I’ve never set up a system from scratch, but have contributed to configuration discussions, so I’ve been close to the decisions that get made in configuring a system, I’ve never had to do it.  I have, however, had the opportunity to change the system and still have not, for many legitimate reasons. However, the controls that we could configure to be adjusted by the end user, in all practicality cannot be configured in that way due to the constraints of the software. The only platform that could be configured in such a way was First Class, which wasn’t an LMS, but a communication platform for collaboration (think SharePoint, but functional).

What if faculty could choose the tools they wanted, and essentially plug them into a system that housed their content and managed the enrollments? I don’t see this as any different than a faculty member choosing a textbook – however, the education system and people like me, LMS administrators and educational technology advocates everywhere, have made choices like this all but impossible because of the infantilism of faculty. We often treat faculty like they couldn’t, or shouldn’t make these choices. As educational technology professionals, we often just espouse what we think in much the same way a parent lectures their children. We talk about ways that technology should be used, instead of fostering a culture of creativity, we actually work against it in the interests of managing technology.

And there’s the ugly word: management. Systems administrator aren’t just administering systems, but really they’re administering people, and administering access to information. Some parties (students) shouldn’t have access to each other’s courses, so that’s a constraint on what we can do – especially if a system wasn’t (gasp) designed for it. Some parties (faculty) shouldn’t have access to each other’s courses to preserve intellectual property – the only capital they have under neoliberalism.

While we may be justified in many cases in saying that faculty don’t always look out for the finer details of educational technology (like privacy, or data collection, or accessibility) – it’s not because they couldn’t. I often wonder if we stopped running workshops on how to use the tools we support in place of teaching what the considerations are for using tools if faculty could be encouraged to take responsibility for their own teaching spaces?

Could institutions feasibly support hundreds of tools? Of course not, but instead of training people how to use tools, we should be training people how to select tools that respect user’s privacy, meet their needs and most of all, help students learn. Really it’s that simple.

1 Comment

What If… We Made the LMS Truly Modular?

Posted on by Jon K.

I think we all understand that the LMS as a tool is a pretty cruddy one. It does a lot of things, some well, many not in ways that you, as an instructor would prefer. At last year’s Fusion conference, we heard D2L speak about their LTI integrations, and how Brightspace was the integrated learning platform. I’ve heard that many people envision what D2L are selling as a hub and spoke system – where Brightspace (or the Learning Environment, or even more crudely, the LMS) acts as a hub – and the tools connected are the spokes. I wonder what things would look like if we extrapolate that idea out to the nth degree?

For instance, you could replace the gradebook with a tool that worked for you – Google Spreadsheets, Excel online, or a box plot device. Chalk and Wire has replaced Canvas’ gradebook in one instance, and I’m sure that the inefficient tools of any LMS are things that one would want to replace. Does that mean the all of them? For some snarky folks, yeah, that would mean all of them. Those folks should just teach in the open web.

The LMS also provides a fairly elegant way to get student data into your course area. That’s probably something instructors or faculty wouldn’t want to do. Hell, I’m glad we have someone on my team that wants to do it because it’s an ugly job.

And for many, the content management of these systems are pretty good. In D2L’s case, the way the content tool works is pretty decent (now if hide an item means really hide any evidence of the item, we’re talking). Imagine if you could take elements of one system you like (say Angel) and add-in features to allow for customization for the individual course needs?

Or how about replacing the groups tool with some other mechanism?  Quizzing is something that people already are pushing to publishers like Pearson or McGraw Hill, but what about up and comers like Top Hat or Poll Everywhere (which, lets face it, is essentially a quiz engine wrapped in a polling tool)? Discussions become a Disqus link at the bottom of a item in the content area… there’s lots of clever fun to be had with this idea.

Now to some extent, you can do this already (depending on how locked down your system is by your systems administrators). Change the navigation bars to point to tools you use connected through LTI – however you have some issues with doing this yourself. The biggest one is that at some point, you’ll run into some technological problem that you can’t solve easily. I suspect, that’s what the Internet is for.

At some point one (or many) of you will point out quite rightly, that this sounds an awful lot like what the web is (or more accurately, was). And my answer is yeah, that’s about right. Used to have websites that we plugged bits of HTML into to make what we needed. Until it was commodified.

You can probably draw a comparison to the modern LMS to Facebook – mostly everyone uses it but would probably use a better system if everyone else went to it first. Universities would consider another model as long as everyone will come along. However, in the current higher education system, where we have seasonal and precarious work dominating instructional positions – there’s no time or want to develop a better way. The LMS works as a co-conspirator in the commodification of education. It’s not directly responsible, but it plays a  part in making education at university an easily packaged and consumed affair. The LMS isn’t alone, Coursera, Udacity, those type of MOOCs are equally complicit, or maybe even moreso.

And that’s a more likely reason we’ll see a modular LMS. More vendors get opportunities to get into different institutions that aren’t their current clients.

No comments yet