e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: LMS & Learning Platforms

Everything you want to know about Learning Management Systems and whatever comes after them.

  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2

    In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:

    1. Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
    2. Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
    3. Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
    4. Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.

    I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. One implication of this is that there is no platform that will magically make education dramatically better if it works against the grain of the teaching practices in which it is embedded. The two need to co-evolve.

    This last bit is an exceedingly tough nut to crack. If we were to design a great platform for conversation-based courses but it got adopted for typical lecture/test courses, the odds are that faculty would judge the platform to be “bad.” And indeed it would be, for them, because it wouldn’t have been designed to meet their particular teaching needs. At the same time, one of our goals is to use the platform to propagate exemplary pedagogical practices. We have a chicken and egg problem. On top of that, our goals suggest assessment solutions that differ radically from traditional ones, but we only have a vague idea so far of what they will be or how they will work. We don’t know what it will take to get them to the point where faculty and students generally agree that they are “fair,” and that they measure something meaningful. This is not a problem we can afford to take lightly. And finally, while one of our goals is to get teachers to share exemplary designs and practices, we will have to overcome significant cultural inhibitions to make this happen. Sometimes systems do improve sharing behavior simply by making sharing trivially easy—we see that with social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, for example—but it is not at all clear that just making it easy to share will improve the kind of sharing we want to encourage among faculty. We need to experiment in order to find out what it takes to help faculty become comfortable or even enthusiastic about sharing their course designs. Any one of these challenges could kill the platform if we fail to take them seriously.

    When faced with a hard problem, it’s a good idea to find a simpler one you can solve that will get you partway to your goal. That’s what the use case I’m about to describe is designed to do. The first iteration of any truly new system should be designed as an experiment that can test hypotheses and assumptions. And the first rule of experimental design is to control the variables.

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  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 1

    Reading Phil’s multiple reviews of Competency-Based Education (CBE) “LMSs”, one of the implications that jumps out at me is that we see a much more rapid and coherent progression of learning platform designs if you start with a particular pedagogical approach in mind. CBE is loosely tied to family of pedagogical methods, perhaps the most important of which at the moment is mastery learning. In contrast, questions about why general LMSs aren’t “better” beg the question, “Better for what?” Since conversations of LMS design are usually divorced from conversations of learning design, we end up pretending that the foundational design assumptions in an LMS are pedagogically neutral when they are actually assumptions based on traditional lecture/test pedagogy. I don’t know what a “better” LMS looks like, but I am starting to get a sense of what an LMS that is better for CBE looks like. In some ways, the relationship between platform and pedagogy is similar to the relationship former Apple luminary Alan Kay claimed between software and hardware: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” It’s hard to separate serious digital learning design from digital learning platform design (or, for that matter, from physical classroom design). The advances in CBE platforms are a case in point.

    But CBE doesn’t work well for all content and all subjects. In a series of posts starting with this one, I’m going to conduct a thought experiment of designing a learning platform—I don’t really see it as an LMS, although I’m also not allergic to that term as some are—that would be useful for conversation-based courses or conversation-based elements of courses. Because I like thought experiments that lead to actual experiments, I’m going to propose a model that could realistically be built with named (and mostly open source) software and talk a bit about implementation details like use of interoperability standards. But all of the ideas here are separable from the suggested software implementations. The primary point of the series is to address the underlying design principles.

    In this first post, I’m going to try to articulate the design goals for the thought experiment.

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  • Editorial Policy: Notes on recent reviews of CBE learning platforms

    Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
    I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
    To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen
    They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed

    – R Plant, Kashmir

    Over the past half year or so I’ve provided more in-depth product reviews of several learning platforms than is typical – Helix, FlatWorld, LoudCloud, Bridge. Understanding that at e-Literate we are not a review site nor do we tend to analyze technology for technology’s sake, it’s worth asking ‘why the change?’. There has been a lot of worthwhile discussion in several blogs recently about whether the LMS is obsolete or critical to the future of higher ed, and this discussion even raised the subject of how we got to the current situation in the first place.

    An interesting development I’ve observed is that the learning environment of the future might already be emerging on its own, but not necessarily coming from the institution-wide LMS market. Canvas, for all its market-changing power, is almost a half decade old. The area of competency-based education (CBE), with its hundreds of pilot programs, appears to be generating a new generation of learning platforms that are designed around the learner (rather than the course) and around learning (or at least the proxy of competency frameworks). It seems useful to get a more direct look at these platforms to understand the future of the market and to understand that the next generation environment is not necessarily a concept yet to be designed.

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  • LoudCloud Systems and FASTRAK: A non walled-garden approach to CBE

    As competency-based education (CBE) becomes more and more important to US higher education, it would be worth exploring the learning platforms in use. While there are cases of institutions using their traditional LMS to support a CBE program, there is a new market developing specifically around learning platforms that are designed specifically for self-paced, fully-online, competency-framework based approaches.

    Recently I saw a demo of the new CBE platform from LoudCloud Systems, a company whose traditional LMS I have covered a few years ago. The company is somewhat confusing to me – I had expected a far larger market impact from them based on their product design than what has happened in reality. LoudCloud has recently entered the CBE market, not by adding features to their core LMS but by creating a new product called FASTRAK. Like Instructure with their creation of a new LMS for a different market (corporate learning), LoudCloud determined that CBE called for a new design and that the company can handle two platforms for two mostly distinct markets. In the case of Bridge and FASTRAK, I believe the creation of a new learning platform took approximately one year (thanks a lot, Amazon). LoudCloud did leverage several of the traditional LMS tools such as rubrics, discussion forums and their LoudBook interactive eReader.

    As was the case for the description of the Helix CBE-based learning platform and the description of FlatWorld’s learning platform, my interest here is not merely to review one company’s products, but rather to illustrate aspects of the growing CBE movement using the demo.

    LoudCloud’s premier CBE partner is the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center, a part of the College of Education that provides professional development for Florida’s 55,000 early learning teachers. They have or expect to have more than a dozen pilot programs for CBE in place during the first half of 2015. (more…)

  • First View of Bridge: The new corporate LMS from Instructure

    Last week I covered the announcement from Instructure that they had raised another $40 million in venture funding and were expanding into the corporate learning market. Today I was able to see a demo of their new corporate LMS, Bridge. While Instructure has very deliberately designed a separate product from Canvas, their education-focused LMS, you can see the same philosophy of market strategy and product design embedded in the new system. In a nutshell, Bridge is designed to a simple, intuitive platform that moves control of the learning design away from central HR or IT control and closer to the end user.

    While our primary focus at e-Literate is on higher ed and even some K-12 learning, the development of professional development and corporate training markets are becoming more important even in the higher ed context. At the least, this is important for those who are tracking Instructure and how their company plans might affect the future of education platforms.

    The core message of Instructure regarding Bridge – just as with Canvas – is that it is focused on ease-of-use whereas the entrenched competition has fallen prey to feature bloat based on the edge cases. Despite this claim and despite Instructure’s track record with Canvas, what does this mean? I’m pretty sure every vendor out there claims ease-of-use whether or not there are elegant or terrible designs ((Although I would love to see the honest ad: “With a horrible, bloated user interface based on your 300-item RFP checklist!”)).

    Based on the demo, Bridge appears to define ease-of-use in three distinct areas – streamlined, clutter-free interface for learners, simple tools for content creation by business units, and simple tools for managing learners and content. (more…)

  • What TechCrunch Got Wrong (and Right) About Instructure Entering Corporate Learning Market

    After yesterday’s “sources say” report from TechCrunch about Instructure – maker of the Canvas LMS – raising a new round of financing and entering the corporate LMS space, Instructure changed plans and made their official announcement to today. The funding is to both expand the Canvas team and to establish the new corporate LMS team. I’m not a fan of media attempts to get a scoop based purely on rumors, and in this case TechCrunch got a few items wrong that are worth correcting.

    • Instructure raised $40 million in new financing (series E), not “between $50 to $70 million”. TechCrunch did hedge their bets with “low end of the range at over $40 million”.
    • The primary competition in the corporate LMS space is Saba, SumTotal, Skillsoft, Cornerstone – and not Blackboard.
    • The Canvas LMS was launched in 2010, not 2011. (OK, I’ll give them this one, as even Instructure seems to use the 2011 date).

    TechCrunch did get the overall story of fund-raising and new corporate product right, but these details matter.

    Instructure’s new product for the corporate learning market is called Bridge, with its web site here. This is an entirely new product, although it does share a similar product architecture as Canvas, the LMS designed for the education market (including being based on Ruby on Rails). Unlike Canvas, Bridge was designed mobile-first, with all mobile capabilities embedded in the product and not as separate applications. In an interview with Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, he described their motivation for this new product.

    We like the idea of building software that helps people get smarter. Post education there is a void, with bad corporate software.

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  • NGDLE: The quest to eat your cake and have it too

    And I’m going old school and sticking to the previous saying.

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    Today I’m participating in the EDUCAUSE meeting on Next Generation Digital Learning Environments, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ((Disclosure: Our upcoming e-Literate TV series has also received a grant from the Gates Foundation.)). From the invitation:

    The purpose of the panel is to identify potential investment strategies that are likely to encourage and hasten the arrival of “next-generation digital learning environments,” online learning environments that take us beyond the LMS to fully support the needs of today’s students and instructors. [snip]

    It is clear that to meet the needs of higher education and today’s learner, the NGDLE must support a much wider range of functionality than today’s LMS, including different instructional modes, alternative credit models, personalized learning, robust data and content exchange, real-time and iterative assessment, the social web, and contemporary software design and usability practices. The policy and cultural context at our colleges and universities must also adapt to a world in which all learning has a digital component.

    As I’m making an ill-timed trip from sunny California to snow-ravaged DC for a reduced-attendance meeting, I should at least lay down some of my thoughts on the subject in writing ((Now that I’ve gone down for breakfast, the 2-inch snowfall would be somewhat embarrassing if not for the city being shut down.)).

    There is potential confusion of language here by implying NGDLE as an environment to replace today’s LMS. Are we talking about new, monolithic systems that replace today’s LMS but also have a range of functionality to support new needs, or are we talking about an environment that allows reasonably seamless integration and navigation between multiple systems? Put another way, investing in what?

    To get at that question we should consider the current LMS market. (more…)