I’m currently mid-way through Day One of a 3-day Blackboard training program (as a participant) and desperately need to get my thoughts out of my head and down on paper. As strange as it may seem, I’ve sought to enter into this experience with an open mind – and listen objectively – rather than crouch defensively behind my usual anathema for the LMS, hurling freedom grenades. But try as I might I just cannot get past the fundamental philosophical issues I have with this mode of education.
Everywhere I look I see constraints, control, and powerlessness for those who would do the learning . I also see a bloated multi-tiered hierarchy of access restrictions to functionality that affects the ability of instructors to customise and to design. At times it almost seems that instructors are as powerless over the system as the students they seek to engage with.
People speak of the recognised value of concepts like Lifelong Learning. To me the constraints posed by LMS’s like this are completely contrary to this ideal. They actively prevent the empowerment of learners through restrictions on/to access and exploration, based on what I feel is a false assumption that tightly controlled learning pathways somehow yield greater and more consistent learning outcomes.
Learning pathways as exemplars or guides can be valuable ways to expose students to subject matter, but I fail to see any of the same value in restrictions and control.
If we, as educators, are indeed striving to inspire and empower learners to contemplate their own ideas, and thus explore the myriad of avenues, channels and tangents that add depth to their experiences, then the environments in which they learn – and the networks they form – are absolutely critical. Environments should be as flexible and accommodating as the learning experiences they seek to facilitate. As such I question how effective learning management systems are in achieving this.
That said though, I am actively trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to approach this experience objectively. So anyone with thoughts, opinions or experiences that are contrary to this are encouraged to speak up. Diversity is a good thing after all.
Well said, and I think so many folks talk out of both sides of their mouth with regard to th LMS. Call it what it is, a bear trap for content that will let nothing go and further alienate the nature of the web from learning institutions far and wide. No need to be objective about the LMS, it sucks, plain and simple.
That’s the only real conclusion I can come to as well really.
Though as I responded to Ed Webb’s comments elsewhere (I love his reference to it being a “quixotic effort.”)
Great to see the Bava back up and running again!
Cheers,
Mike
I thought BlackBoard was ‘out’ and Moodle was ‘in’, not that Moodel is a lot better, in my opinion
That’s definitely the impression I’m getting as well, and I share your sentiments and reservations about whether Moodle is much better. This is perhaps my streak of fierce individualism and advocacy for self-direction speaking, but I am not particularly fond of LMS’s of any flavour.
To me the utmost significance is establishing spaces where the individual can explore, document and discuss their own ideas – in whatever framework they choose. Personalisation and continuity of experience are the core components. However by nature LMS’s centralise, and create course centric silos, and in doing this it removes many freedoms from the hands of the students. Use of LMS’s seems to focus on the needs of the few – administrators, instructors and senior managers – arguably at the expense of the many.
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I’m absolutely with you in terms of what learners need in an ideal world, but I can still see a place for the formal structured LMS for delivery of core administrative stuff, integration with central records systems and all that. It provides a very clear framework for the students to know where to go and what to expect particularly when the lecturers are such a mixed group some of whom are more than capable of using a range of tools seamlessly and many of whom are hard pressed to do anything.
Hi Katie,
Thanks for the vote of solidarity
I’ve definitely heard this suggested before and can see the logic behind that as an administrative time-saver. At the same time it’s a pretty expensive grading solution, wouldn’t you say?
As far as what to expect, based on the feedback I’ve heard from students regarding local use of the LMS – usage is anything but consistent. Some say their instructors go all out and provide in-depth modules, others says it’s just used as a PDF repository; others don’t use it at all.
This could apply to any technology though really, the presence of a platform does not necessarily equate to innovative usage. However I’m not so sure that establishing consistency alone is argument enough for an LMS – especially since consistency doesn’t imply a vibrant, nurturing learning environment. Would you agree?
We already have, and are looking to increase the compulsory usage of the VLE and with a strong enforcement for ‘baseline’ (aka administrative) usage. The idea is that the VLE then becomes the authoritative source for everything to do with the course for the student.
Now, as you say, none of that implies anything at all about a nuturing learning environment, but it does provide realisable expectations for the students, and I think that is worth a lot.
I see the VLE area for a course as the starting point – the lecturer can choose to jump from here to whatever tools they choose to use, and hopefully the students can choose to pull the info from this starting point into their PLE etc as they wish.
It’s interesting to read the other comments, all of which (if I read it right) seem to support the idea that the VLE is a necessary component…and in our institution, I can only think of a few (very keen, social network literate) instructors who would disagree.
I also despise the LMS at a gut level.
At a more rational level, I have spent many years adapting them (first BB, now Moodle) to make them do what I want, and advising others on how to do the same through tutorials such as this one and organizing workshops with titles like “Making Blackboard Work For You”. It is an uphill battle. People are more comfortable with a “package” and plugging things in.
For an innovative instructor, it is key to remember that these systems can (and should) be adapted, turning them into mere shells that can provide the protective devices (or the appearance of same) demanded by many schools and colleges (passwords, student confidentiality). As they respond to the pressures of the marketplace, the LMS makers have had to continually add features that make it possible to escape the system from within the system.
So although I am currently writing an article about how the LMS determines pedagogy for novice instructors, I am also actively engaged in the subversive activity of undermining its intent as a “closed silo” (attributed to Lamberson and Lamb, I believe). It’s slow, but productive.
Lisa
Hi Lisa,
I’m glad you jumped in the discussion because I’m quite conscious of your experience with use of LMSs. They’re use is mandated at your institution for each course, aren’t they?
A colleague of mine and I were talking via IM during the training session about experimenting with just what you’re referring to – seeing how much we could push the envelope and provide channels that open up the closed model and help light shine in from the outside world.
I’m curious though – from the perspective of the novice user, would modelling this sort of subversive use of closed LMSs complicate the situation at institutions that don’t mandate their use? Or might this provide a staging area for moving on to more progressive uses?
Personally I’m inclined to by-pass the LMS completely, but I’d be interested in your thoughts.
http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.com/2009/04/in-praise-of-walled-garden-vle.html
I wrote the above post before I read your one. I am speaking hear about the value of privacy in learning. I don’t suppose it is essential to have a VLE/LMS for this but I think it makes it easier.
Thanks
AM
Hi Anne Marie, I actually saw your post come through last night. Thanks for chiming in! A few thoughts come to mind here:
First, I think it’s important to distinguish between the needs and desires of the students and those of a central authority. As I’ve said before, I am NOT in favour of demanding that everything be made open – I think that would be a mistake.
I think openness is a decision that should be left to the individual. So if it is a student’s preference that everything occur behind a walled garden, and that an LMS is the most comfortable environment for them and is the most conducive to their learning – then that’s a much different matter to forcing them to interact there.
For example, I like what George Siemens and Stephen Downes did with the Connectivism course. They established a central Moodle space where students could elect to interact via the forum, but they were not forced to post there – you could have done this with Blackboard to the same effect. They could use blogs or other modes of discussion if desired. The key was that choice was left to the learner.
Secondly, as both you and Sarah Stewart have discussed before, there are circumstances – especially in Medicine – in which confidentiality is a legal requirement. In this case use of a walled garden is in line with the law.
Again, this is a very different matter to use of an LMS merely because it suits the control needs of a central body – it reflects distinct obligations and requirements that must be met and adhered to.
The need for confidentiality doesn’t necessarily dictate use of an LMS though mind you; it could involve private blogs or discussion forums as well.
Hello again Mike
I keep missing follow-up comments:( I need to have a better mechanism to pick them up.
I’m not forcing students to use my forum. They can have discussions in Facebook or wherever else they want as long as they do respect patient confidentiality if relevant. But if they do want some input from me, to check that they are going in the right direction, well, couldn’t check and respond to 20 different conversations in different locations.
I think of discussion boards in the VLE a bit like an optional session where students can do small group work but I can wander around and answer their queries or correct any misunderstandings. They don’t have to come along to these tutorials. But when you are participating in a large course with 300 others who might be glad of any opportunities to interact with tutors that you get.
If I wanted to set up my own private discussion forum outside of Blackboard which do you think would be the best?
Thanks again
Anne Marie
Hi Anne Marie,
Have you tried subscribing to the comments? There’s a link/radio button at the bottom of each post that should let you do this. Alternatively if you have subscribed, but aren’t receiving notifications of new comments – can you let me know and I’ll look into it? I installed the plugin to enable people to stay up to date on any new additions to the conversation.
As far as private discussion forums go, there are several I can think of, but the one you choose will really depend on a couple of things:
1) Privacy – in your case, preserving patient confidentiality is critical. I’d be inclined to read the fine print in the End User Licensing Agreements, and/or Terms of Use for any online service prior to using it and establish with certainty that there are no conflicts of interest.
E.g. Confirming that use of the forum doesn’t grant the service owner the ability to reuse your content or entries/posts elsewhere. Terms of Use can be really painful to read, but in your case there’s good reason to be careful.
Typically links to either or both of these will be included in the footer of the site and/or included in the creation process when first setting up the group.
I haven’t looked into this a great deal before, so I’m pretty reluctant to make a recommendation on a specific service. There are a few that I’ve used in the past though, and functionally they’ve been ok – Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are the first to come to mind.
2) Functionality – Providing there are no concerns in the Terms of Use, or End User Licensing Agreement, the next question is what you want to be able to do there. Obviously you want a forum, but what other options are you looking for, e.g.:
- the ability to subscribe to updates that are emailed to you (and be able to email a response rather than visit the site)?
- image or document sharing options
- collaborative spaces/wikis or the ability to create static web pages
- set-up user profiles and/or include widgets
There are a range of possibilities, ranging from simple explode lists to functionally rich sites like NING. That said I don’t know much about NING though, so my main advice is to read the fine print first.
If you have specific elements you’re after please mention them and I’ll see what I can track down for you. Or perhaps other people here can make a recommendation based on their experience.
Does that help at all?
Hope all is well!
Cheers,
Mike
Being devil’s advocate here – it’s been my experience that you have to take very small steps at a time when working with people do are unfamiliar with online tools. I have found that people are less suspeciious of LMS and once they get the hang of that, then they start to move outwards as they become more knowledable and confident. So maybe LMS are the place to start, and you go on from there. I have to admit I learnt a few skills in BlackBoard that have helped me as I have moved into a more personal learning environment. There has also been an element of reverse psycology-having worked with Blackboard, I now know what I don’t want as student and educator!
Mike, we do not yet have a mandated CMS, and that is partly because I’ve been pushing against it for years. Although, at any time, that may change. Instead, I helped the technology committee craft a policy for faculty *not* using college-supported technologies. At this time, however, I’d estimate 90% of our online faculty use Blackboard, maybe 5% Moodle, 5% other.
Sarah, I’m not sure starting with a CMS is such a good idea because, as I’ve noted, novice faculty tend to use the system only at its most basic level. This is one of the main premises of the article I’m writing.
In my experience, when you start new faculty member in a CMS, they not only stay there but input things directly into the system (as they are taught to do by our technology people) and are then trapped. In workshops, my colleagues and I try to teach interested faculty not to put anything they don’t have to inside the system, to plan for flexibility.
But I have also seen faculty start with a blog or wiki instead. They tend to get sucked into using a CMS because of two things: the need for an online gradebook (demanded by students) and the belief that’s it’s needed for student confidentiality or FERPA (which isn’t exactly the case).
As someone who has sat through similar presentations for the past 6 years, first with WebCT and now Bb, I sympathize, Mike. I also think the kind of training involved is utterly irrelevant.
I think one of the central problems with distance education, and online learning in particular, is most teachers’ lack of experience as a distance or online student. We all have decades of experience in a classroom as students and teachers to draw models and ideas from. Most of us have taken few if any online classes. A 3-day f2f session on how to use the LMS du jour won’t change that.
One of the things I’ve been fighting for at my institution is faculty training in pedagogy and course design, and to have that training as an online course to provide the experience as an online student that most of us lack. I (sort of) won the battle, and we’ve just begun to institute the program.
After going through the first iteration (using Bb), I’m more opposed to Bb than ever. I dislike using it as a faculty member. My experience as a student has been completely miserable. I’m now planning to spend the summer re-developing my courses for the fall largely outside Bb, with only a few token links (like Lisa demonstrated) out from Bb. My college doesn’t mandate use of Bb, but it is strongly encouraged.
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Lisa Lane has just posted a fantastic overview of her experiences with LMS / CMS at her institution and I would HIGHLY recommend visiting the post – “Why an LMS“.
I’d also encourage you to leave your thoughts there as comments – or post your thoughts on your own blog and enter trackbacks to both of us. Lisa is a fantastic example of innovative use of technology in the classroom, and certainly not one to toss it in casually. She’s got tremendous experience with it and is very thoughtful about its use.
For continuity, here is the comment I left there:
I used to hate cole slaw. Despised it for years. Then, I took a bite of some slaw from a particular restaurant (a quality place) and suddenly realized that the cole slaw wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I’d been eating the wrong kind.
LMS might be the same way. Negative reactions may have less to do with inherent limitations and more to do with poor development, instruction and limitation.
We need more people who make GOOD slaw. And more folks who can do LMS the right way.
Cole slaw
Ha! What a great analogy. Certainly LMS-use can improve from its current defacto purpose (amongst many) as solely a PDF repository. So I think you’re quite true there – we need more people who can make GOOD slaw.
A few of my colleagues and I have even joked about seeing how progressive a module we could put together in Blackboard – to see if it’s at all possible to create a learner-focused half-way open module, or if it’s just too much to ask and the technical restrictions are too great.
That’s probably the only thing that could get me to use it – the challenge of trying to pierce the walls of the closed model.
LOL I used to hate coleslaw, till I made it at home with veggies I grew in my garden.
Any LMS will try to please too many people, and will have a built-in pedagogy. Cobbling together an LMS on your own using web applications might be akin to homemade coleslaw.
But yes, being able to get a coleslaw made-to-order with the ingredients of my choice would be close.
“I used to hate coleslaw, till I made it at home with veggies I grew in my garden.”
Wow the analogy’s are getting really deep now!
We had a garden, but the possums unearthed it and gobbled it up before we could reap the benefits of the harvest.
That said, I think I just stretched the analogy a bit too far…
Oh, I don’t know. I think anyone who had a class based on Furl bookmarking would get the possum thing completely.
Hi Mike
Yes, I think I must just have missed clicking on subscribe before. Thanks for your reply above but to be honest I can see no reason at all why I would want to try and set something up outside of Blackboard if the best suggestion is google groups. Why would they want to bother signing up to this? Would I know who they were? Students signed up to delicious using their student ids not real names and I didn’t have a clue who they were!
Are people really using google groups to communicate with students in favour of Blackboard? I guess if I could talk to some who were doing this I might see the benefit of it.
You have written “A few of my colleagues and I have even joked about seeing how progressive a module we could put together in Blackboard – to see if it’s at all possible to create a learner-focused half-way open module, or if it’s just too much to ask and the technical restrictions are too great.” What are the technical restrictions? Perhaps they are not there in Cardiff University? What is an open module and why do you want it?
Thanks again
AM
Hi Anne Marie,
I guess for starters it depends on the scope and scale of opportunities for discussion you’re hoping to facilitate, and whether you want the conversations to remain accessible to students after the courses are complete.
Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytechnic uses Google Groups quite extensively for the Wikieducator courses he facilitates. Facilitating Online Communities, for example, is one that I was involved in as a student.
Admittedly I dropped off the radar in that course in the wake of CCK08 (which also had a cohort of students using a Google Group. However I’ve found after the fact that the opportunity to go back through the forum posts long after the course had drawn to a close has proven really useful.
This is quite in keeping with the notion of flexible learning I think, which really isn’t a strong point of the LMS in my opinion. LMS modules tend to exist only as long as the course is in session, and after that all content is locked up or deleted – meaning there is no way to refer back to discussions later. From the standpoint of personal reflection and review of past concepts, this is a huge disadvantage.
I would imagine you could leave a module open and continue to provide access to the forum postings after the course had completed, but I would also suspect central IT would have policies against that due to the potential for a blow out in the number of active courses in the system (and the resulting storage requirements). This is another advantage of free tools like the ones provided by Google or Yahoo. They’ve got far more storage capacity and infrastructure available than your average Central IT department does.
As a result, in the case of group tools like Yahoo or Google, the content exists in perpetuity – so long as the group isn’t deleted. Depending on how the group is configured, sometimes the content is available to anyone who wishes to see it. This can provide really valuable opportunities for people who haven’t taken the course (or formally enrolled), but are keen to explore the subject matter.
That’s one of the main things I mean when I talk about openness – the free sharing of information and knowledge for whomever might benefit from it, regardless of their context, pre-existing knowledge or other factors. My personal view is that knowledge is only as useful or as valuable as the number of people who are able to engage with it. Information that’s locked away or restricted isn’t nearly as valuable to society (in my opinion) as information that’s shared freely and publicly.
Once again though, in the context of medicine there are distinct issues or risks that arise in open discussion and the sharing of information (you and Sarah Stewart would know more about this than I do). But for me openness is always the default.
In terms of technical constraints of an LMS, and Blackboard or WebCT in particular, they are designed to establish self-contained modules for use and interaction by a limited number of people. So, much of what you’re able to do in an LMS is locked behind a login, and subject to different levels of access permissions. Running an open course in this environment – where openness refers to public visibility – might prove completely impossible.
The other significance of openness to me is the implications it has for the development of learning networks. Here learning networks include not only students, but a diverse range of people, perspectives, and areas of expertise. If learning networks are only as valuable as the depth and diversity within them, then homogeneous groups such as those created by LMS modules might actually limit the potential for learning – especially when the a course is rigidly structured and pathways explicitly set-out, with minimal room for exploration.
I guess the significance of openness to me lay in the removal of barriers and restrictions to learning. You could still use a curriculum model in an open setting, the significance is that students have far more opportunities to explore their own ideas, interact with many different people and perspectives, and maintain far a greater sense of ownership (and long term access) than what you find in an LMS. I think it’s also more conducive to life long learning.
My concern is, as students continue to work within closed systems, they will grow more and more used to operating within closed systems – and that once they’re out of school they won’t be familiar with how to operate and learn in the absence of barriers and constraints when the learning is ultimately up to them to steer and motivate.