A while back, I wrote a rant about why LMSs fail to evolve. It got some…notoriety. Since Phil and I are now writing a bi-weekly column for the Chronicle‘s new Re:Learning section, I thought I’d try trimming down the piece and rewriting it for a general audience. It was an interesting exercise. On e-Literate, we have the luxury of writing pieces that are as long as we want them to be and of assuming that our audience is pretty knowledgeable about a wide range of tech issues. We can also choose to target different subgroups of our audience with each post. Honestly, there have been times when I’ve written a post that was primarily intended to persuade one (influential) person, although I always try to make my posts interesting to a broader range of people. When we write for the Chronicle, we are always writing for a broad audience of non-techies, and we have to keep our ideas small and focused enough that we can adequately express them in 1500 words or less. But to the degree that we succeed, we have an opportunity to be ambassadors for ed tech issues to broader academia.
Since many of you play that role of ambassador every day, I’d be grateful for your feedback. If you have a moment, please go read the article at the Chronicle and then come back here and comment on it. Did I pick the right aspects of the issue to focus on? Do you think this piece would resonate with your campus stakeholders? Would it be helpful to you in your conversations at work?
All of the issues you addressed in your article are true. However some blame lies at the institutional level for not planning for the use of the LMS as a strategic tool, for not educating faculty, staff, and students on how the tool will be used to help assess student success, and for not insisting on standards.
A great article, and this applies to many technology procurement efforts.
An additional suggestion is that lists of requirements shouldn’t be about static features of the technology (integration with Second Life) but should rather be about dynamic activities that the technology will support (teaching using content from Second Life).
This shifts the discussion from looking at lists of the features that the LMS has to what can faculty, students, etc. do with it. This can also be used to move the vendor sales team from a yes/no response to an in depth explanation. The in depth discussion can also support discussion of the overall experience of using the product.
With our last LMS RFP I also found that this approach gave me insight into which vendors were focused on the technology they were offering rather than being focused how their technology is used to improve education.