Random Thoughts

I received three comments on my LMS post, and I decided that I owe those three people — and anyone else who might want to read it — my thoughts in light of those comments.

First came Ezra’s comment.  He is an LMS administrator and talks about the importance of managing.  He said, in part:

One site which provides it to all students and the faculty is easier to manage than dozens of confusingly related items.

I agree with him.  It is, without a doubt easier to have one pace where all students and all faculty go to access their courses.   I saw that this semester when one group of students seemed to have trouble figuring out what got posted where.  I realized that I needed to do two things:  1) not move back and forth between the different platforms so much and 2) make sure I explain and explain and then explain again what each platform is for.  I accept the vast majority of the “blame” for the confusion in this case.  I am attempting to design things better for fall and summer.

Next comment came from Charles, who said:

A better question is, Is a blog, wiki, or LMS useful (for a particular purpose)?

That’s when this all started to make more sense to me.  It is obviously a question of the right tool for the right job.  Looking at it that way, I can see that an LMS makes sense for some jobs.  It is a secure site for exams and grades and such.  I am not sure of its usefulness for some of the other tasks I need to do, though.  Blogs are great for writing for an audience and for discussion.  Wikis are good for collaboration.  Each tool has is own value.  And I thank Charles for pointing that out.

John then joined the conversation, agreeing basically with Charles and adding:

I find the LMS a misnomer because I don’t think any learning is managed, but it does provide a nice place to post some material for the students to use as they need it. I just wish they designed the LMSs better for teachers and students and they didn’t take so much of my time managing them.

And that, I think is part of the problem for me.  It takes a lot of time to set up a course on an LMS.  It takes a lot of time to set up the assignments and then eventually to download, grade and upload them again.  Having set up a course for the summer on a blog and then having copied the material to our LMS, I can say without a doubt that it took me less time to come up with the idea for a unit and flesh it out in the blog than it did to take that same material and put it into the LMS.

Part of the problem with an LMS — or at least the big commercial ones — seems to me to be that they try to do too much.  They want to be all things to all people.  I don’t need that.  What I need is something smaller and more flexible.  I want something that I can see when I want to see it (not when someone else decides to make it available to me)  so I can learn from it,  borrow from it and and add to it.  I guess part of my problem is that I want to manage my own teaching and learning environment.

I think it will be a long time before Ezra and other LMS administrators are out of work. It will probably never happen.  Even I am not advocating eliminating LMSs from the world.  (Although, if I had the chance, I might try to eliminate all of the proprietary ones in favor of Moode and other open source alternatives.)  But I would like to see education move away from thinking that an LMS is THE way to do online or hybrid education. As Charles and John indicate, an LMS is a useful tool.  But, I would argue, it isn’t the only tool.

Another post from Technology for the Adult Education Instructor. She calls for:

…an educational revolution. Evolution is common in education. We are reactive rather than proactive, based on the conditions that surround us.

My boss yesterday was telling me of the push at the state level for distance education, but all she could see were the problems. I think, though, that it isn’t as tricky as she thinks. I need to talk to her and lay out some ideas I have. I would love to see us develop a website that students around the state could access. We could set up regular courses using Moodle, and we could track enrollment and progress. Maybe we need satellite locations to provide basic computer familiarization and, if necessary, access to computers. I don’t know. I know that many of my students have computers but, as one told me yesterday, so far it sits in the corner as a decoration because she is afraid to turn it on.

I am excited about this prospect, more excited than I have been in a long time.

A couple weeks ago I ran across this article from eSchool News about the Governor of West Virginia and his take on the importance of technology to small rural schools. Just now getting around to writing about it, though. The article quotes Linda Martin of the organization Challenge West Virgina and says,

She said equipping each school with distance-learning technology would cost about $20,000, but it would save millions of dollars in school construction and transportation costs.

It is amazing when you think of it that way, isn’t it? $20,000 is nothing these days.

In my very small college, we used to offer French. We don’t offer it any more because we only had two students who took it the last time it was offered. If we could make distance learning a normal part of what we do, it would be easy for the students who want to take French to do it. It would require technology, but even more, it would require a mindset that we don’t have yet. I congratulate West Virginia on electing a governor who is on the ball — at least on this point.