NMC "Five Minutes of Fame" Presentation

Back in June at the NMC Summer Conference in Portland OR, I presented "Five Minutes of Fame" on our "WhyCI" social media contest, where we awarded two $1,500 scholarships for 15-second videos. It was a fun project! If you're interested, the video's now on YouTube.

Not sure why my face is that shade of blue, usually it's a bit more shifted to red...

LMS Futures: You've read the blog, now see the movie...

Link to the video here

My talk at Blackboard World was not recorded, and a few people expressed an interest in seeing it. As a substitute, I went into our new Faculty Innovations in Teaching Studio and created a 20 minute narrated version of the talk. It's a little stripped down and of course doesn't have the interaction from the presentation in Las Vegas, but I'm happy to be able to provide it for anyone interested. You can find it here at our Cinema CI site.

I have also submitted a proposal to the EDUCAUSE ELI meeting to be held next Spring in Anaheim California. If it's accepted, I'll be presenting a 15 minute "TED Style" talk on "Imagining the Post-LMS World". It will build upon some of the same information but with the intent of being more forward-looking and focusing on the opportunity to begin moving on beyond LMS.

I'll be at EDUCAUSE 2014 in Orlando next month, and I hope to make it out to OpenED in Washington DC in November - hope to see some of you at these venues so we can continue to conversation face-to-face.

Thanks again for all the comments and tweets and encouragement - much appreciated!

LMS Futures: Extinction?

This is the last entry on this topic (for now), and the hardest to write. My thinking has "evolved" rapidly on the potential for a post-LMS future.

When I started planning the Blackboard World talk on which this series is based, I decided NOT to predict what was likely to happen, but rather to do three thought-experiments about three different future scenarios, and see what I would find. But now that I've gone through this, I find myself yearning for - and helping to build - a post-LMS future. This is not a result I anticipated.

When I first put the dinosaur slide on the screen, someone at talk piped up and said I was telegraphing my conclusion. But the dinosaur is an ambiguous image - sure, they are extinct now, and they lasted a heck of a long time. And furthermore, we think that birds evolved from dinosaurs. So the dinosaur encapsulates all three futures.

After all, LMS's WILL be extinct... it's just a question of how long they have to run. Perhaps they will outlive email, or COBOL.

But it's not just a question of how long they will survive - somewhere, there's a school still running Lotus Notes. The question is how long they will dominate the mental model and the discourse around online teaching and learning in higher education. And now that I've worked through this in my own mind, I think we might be somewhat closer to a post-LMS world than I thought when I started.

For a moment, let's go back to my slide representing a student-centric LMS. If you look at the picture for a minute, and take out the word LMS, you'll see that what you've got looks a whole lot like the Internet.

If we can build connections by connecting learners and teachers and resources and tools using the Internet, do we need an LMS? Well, it's very useful to have some of the things an LMS provides, like:

• a standard approach to authentication (a way for people to log in) 
• a way to communicate between the learning tools we're using
• perhaps,  a way to limit access to copyrighted materials
• perhaps, a gradebook or other assessment tools

I'm sure you can think of many other helpful tools you'd like to have, but the point is that building every feature you want into a single system is an obsolete strategy for software. Yes, LTI helps, but it still starts from the premise that you have a core system and you want to plug tools into that system. What if everything was a person or a tool or a resource, and you could connect and disconnect them as needed? You'd have a very powerful learning environment that was not an LMS.

The question is, can you do it? The key observation that people such as Jim Groom and Brian Lamb and many others have made is that having your own virtual machine with Wordpress and a few other tools gets you a long way there. In other words, we may have been closer than we thought when we started down the LMS road, but we were seduced by the promise of the glowing system in the sky that could solve all our problems for us. The Reclaim Your Domain project launched by Kin Lane (@kinlane), Jim Groom (@jimgroom) and Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) suggests a strategy of moving forward into the past and giving students and teachers the tools to build their own connections that they can own and control. So perhaps by backing up a bit and moving in a different direction, we can begin to build a more flexible learning environment, one that is no longer closed in space and closed in time, and that can give the student a framework that can carry forward beyond the walls of academe. I don't know if it can work, but I think it's a journey worth taking to see what we can learn. We've embarked upon an experiment on my campus to explore the "reclaim" world with a few intrepid faculty and students, and in the future I'll be letting you know more about how we're doing.

To everyone who read and commented on these blog entries, THANK YOU! To everyone who came before me and put out the ideas that I synthesized/adopted/stole/reclaimed/repurposed/remixed - THANK YOU even more. It's been a fun ride and now I might even write a blog entry or two that doesn't mention LMS.

Photo credits:
Birds: Art Siegel via Flickr
Dinosaurs: Miki Roventine via Flickr

LMS Futures: Revolutionary Change via Student-Centered LMS

There are many forms an LMS revolution might take, but I'm just going to talk about one - creating a student-centered LMS. As I've mentioned (harped on?) before, the standard LMS model is centered around the course or the class. One other fairly obvious alternative is to build the LMS around learning materials - but I don't find this all that interesting because you end up with something that looks like a Content Management System. CMS's are great but I don't see them as an LMS replacement.

Many of our learning institutions claim to be student- or learner-centric. Nearly everyone on my campus can quote the first words of our mission statement: "Placing students at the center of the educational experience..." And much of the time, we take that seriously. What would a student-centric LMS look like? It's a non-trivial design problem, but here's a few high-level thoughts.

In a student-centric LMS, the core abstraction of the LMS is the student. In the diagram, I'm imagining a student with control of connections to other entities within the system. These could be instructors, or other students, or learning materials. To create a course, you invite students to connect with a common set of resources, one or more instructors, and the other students in the course. When the course is complete, the student can drop the connections she doesn't need any more - but keep the rest. As the educational experience proceeds, the student collects, under her control, the connections that remain meaningful and useful and drops the ones that are stale or irrelevant. Furthermore, these resources could be local and within the LMS, or they could be external to the LMS or to the student's current institution.

If you start building the LMS from this perspective, you end up with something like the diagram on the right. I've just added a few connections to give a sense of where I'm going. Students can connect to students and to resources. Instructors would just be another kind of student, ones with perhaps some special abilities (like assigning grades).

The model is simple, but the change is important - if we build the LMS from the bottom up as a tool that connects students and resources rather than a tool that replicates the notion of a closed course, we'll get a system that's quite different from what we have now. But once I envisioned this model I started to question whether the LMS as a system really offers any value. Perhaps, if we created technology to support learner -to-learner interaction, we're on the road to not needing an LMS. And perhaps, this isn't really something new at all but a return to models familiar to the history of the Internet.

LMS Futures: Evolutionary Change

I began this series promising to speculate on three possible futures for the LMS - evolution, revolution, or extinction - so let's start with evolution. An evolutionary path assumes that the LMS as we know it today basically got it right, it just needs to get better. If the user interface can be improved and simplified, if mobile access can be an assumption, if outside tools can be better integrated - maybe that's all we need.

I was somewhat amused when I arrived at the BbWorld keynote address and heard CEO Jay Bhatt outline his priorities for the Blackboard Learn product:

1. Improve the user interface
2. Mobile first
3. Cloud infrastructure
4. Big Data

Now, after we get done chuckling over "mobile first" being the second item on the list, what we have here is a recipe for incremental, evolutionary change. Some people I respect spent a lot of time looking at the new user interface and came away impressed. Bb claims they are moving to a fully responsive design, and from what I saw it appears to use a timeline as the key organizing principle for the interface, which seems like a promising approach to me. 

Providing a better interface and better mobile access can potentially improve the user experience for Blackboard - and perhaps help catch them up with the competition - but does nothing to address the essential nature of the critique I've developed here. Any LMS built around the model of a closed course has severe limitation and implications that I think have negative consequences (elucidated nicely here by Michelle Pacansky-Brock).

I don't have a lot to say here about cloud infrastructure - I think this is a move that Blackboard needs to make to be competitive but it has no inherent impact on the student or faculty learning experience. Big data... I don't want to go there right now. Just for the moment, let me say my optimism about the potential for big data is balanced by some pretty big doubts about the value and concerns about the risk.

This is Blackboard's plan and the list might be different for another LMS, but an evolutionary change means we've accepted what an LMS is and what it can do, we just want it to do it better. That might be the most likely path for the near future, but it's also the least interesting, so I'm looking forward to my next post on revolutionary change.

(photo credit: Bert Hakim @flickr cc-by-nc-nd/2.0) 

LMS Futures: The Charge Against LMS

For my talk at BbWorld, I contemplated what it is that people hate about LMS's in general. I summarized these issues in the visual shown here.

The topic "What people have about X LMS", where X is often, but not always, Blackboard, is one I chose not to get into at BbWorld. There's plenty that's been written and spoken on that topic.

Are there other things about the LMS that aren't captured here that you think are important? Or does this pretty much cover the difficulties that make you, your faculty, or your students frustrated with your LMS? If you think I've missed something I'd be grateful if you'd comment below.

I'm particularly interested in the third topic, which I think is the most interesting and the most deeply imbedded in the fundamental design of the LMS.

LMS's are closed because they were designed to be that way. As I've argued here before, the LMS mimics traditional classes, and traditional classes are closed. In a future post, I'll consider what an LMS might look like if the design was centered on the student rather than the course.

LMS Futures: Paving the Cowpaths

I want you to imagine you're a higher ed CIO or Provost in the year 2000, and you get the follow two sales pitches for a learning (or course) management system.

1. If you buy LMS A, it will open up wonderful new possibilities for your students to learn using online technology. It will require your faculty to completely rethink their role, they will need to adopt new strategies and redesign their courses, but at the end they will have radically better results.
2. If you buy LMS B, it will help enable your faculty to do what they are doing in the classroom now, but they can do it online. This will enable you to reach new students and engage your existing students using technology, without requiring any major disruption in the role of the faculty.

Is it any surprise that #2 was the winning strategy? Organizing the LMS around the course and modeling it like a closed classroom, was the right strategy for selling the product. But today we find ourselves "inside the (course) box". In a future post I'll discuss how a course-centric model implies a particular software design that's part of the frustration so many of us have with the LMS 15 years later.