e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Learning Platform

  • LMS Is The Minivan of Education (and other thoughts from #LILI15)

    During yesterday’s K-20 learning platform panel at IMS Global’s Learning Impact Leadership Institute (the panel that replaced the LMS Smackdown of year’s past), Scott Jaschik started the discussion off by asking “what is the LMS?”. As I have recently complained about our Saturn Vue that replaced a Chrysler Town & Country, the answer I provided was that the LMS is the minivan of education. Everyone has them and needs them, but there’s a certain shame having one in the driveway.

    The Car Committee

    It’s popular to gripe about minivans, but in reality they reflect what we (the family set with kids still at home) actually are and what we do. Sure, the minivan encourages us to throw everything in the car and continue soccer mom lives, but they do offer great seating, storage, smooth rides (on boring roads at least). Likewise, the typical LMS is in actuality still a Course Management System (CMS), which reflects how courses are organized and managed in large part.

    We’re done with the boring minivan and have moved on to SUVs, but the SUV has morphed into a minivan with bad gas mileage and poor seating. It feels so nice to call it a different name, but it’s still a CMS minivan at its core.

    There are new innovations in the car market, like the Tesla. The risk we face in education is falling back on our RFP-driven habits. Great car demo, but the committee is using a family-driven process.  Item #142 includes having more than 5 seats, with a place for little Kenny’s sippy cup in each. You know what, let’s just make it taller and add a hatch in the back. Item #275 requires ethanol percentages (and we read an article that batteries are risky), so  could you add in an standard engine? Two years later . . . “dammit, the LMS”.

    Put it together, and the LMS is important and ubiquitous, but we all know we need better options. Despite this, take away the LMS and see if students like a different method to submit assignments or check grades for every class. (more…)

  • 2U Learning Platform Update: Removal of Moodle, addition of accessibility options

    2U has now been a public company for over a year, and that had what is easily the most successful education IPO in recent history. Shares have almost doubled from $13.00 at IPO to $25.50 last week. At the same time, there is a swirl of news around their new partner Yale and the Physician Assistant’s program – first the announcement of program from one of the elite of elite schools, second the news that accreditation approval for the new program is not going to be as easy as hoped.

    While both aspects are newsworthy, I’d like to dive deeper into their infrastructure and learning platforms. The company is far from complacent, as they continue to make significant changes. (more…)

  • Back To The Future: Looking at LMS forecasts from 2011 – 2014

    At today’s Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2015 conference (#LAK15), Charles Severance (aka Dr. Chuck) gave the morning keynote organized around the theme of going back in time to see what people (myself and Richard Katz primarily) were forecasting for education. By looking at the reality of 2015, we can see which forecasts were on track and which were not. I like this concept, as it is useful to go back and see what we got right and wrong, so this post is meant to provide some additional context particularly for LMS market. Chuck’s keynote also gives cover for doing so without seeming too self-absorbed.

    But enough about me. What do you think about me?

    I use the term forecast since I tend to describe patterns and trends and then try to describe the implications. This is different than the Katz video which aimed to make specific predictions as a thought-provoking device.

    Pre-2011

    I introduced the LMS squid diagram in 2008 as a tool to help people see the LMS market holistically rather than focusing on detailed features. Too much of campus evaluations then (and even now) missed the big picture that there were only a handful of vendors and some significant market dynamics at play.

    A 2009 presentation, by the way, was the basis for Michael and me connecting for the first time. Bromance. (more…)

  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 5

    In parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this series, I laid out a model for a learning platform that is designed to support discussion-centric courses. I emphasized how learning design and platform design have to co-evolve, which means, in part, that a new platform isn’t going to change much if it is not accompanied by pedagogy that fits well with the strengths and limitations of the platform. I also argued that we won’t see widespread changes in pedagogy until we can change faculty relationships with pedagogy (and course ownership), and I proposed a combination of platform, course design, and professional development that might begin to chip away at that problem. All of these ideas are based heavily on lessons learned from social software  and from cMOOCs.

    In this final post in the series, I’m going to give a few examples of how this model could be extended to other assessment types and related pedagogical approaches, and then I’ll finish up by talking about what it would take to make the peer grading system described in part 2 be (potentially) accepted by students as at least a component of a grading system in a for-credit class.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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…)

  • Flat World and CBE: Self-paced does not imply isolation

    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.

    Several weeks ago Flat World announced their latest round of funding, raising $5 million of debt financing, raising their total to $40.7 million. The company started out by offering full e-textbooks (and was previously named FlatWorld Knowledge), developing 110 titles that included 25 of the 50 most-used lecture courses. The e-textbook market was not working out, however, and the company pivoted to competency-based education around the time that Chris Etesse became CEO two years ago. Now the company is developing a combined CBE learning platform with integrated course content – much of it repurposing the pre-existing e-textbook materials. Their first academic partner for CBE is Brandman University, a non-traditional part of the Chapman University system and is currently one of the CBEN network.

    One central tenet of the Flat World approach is based on their history and pivot – a tight integration of content and platform. As Etesse describes it, content is a 1st-class citizen in their system whereas other loosely-coupled approaches that do not tie content and platform together can be difficult to navigate and collect learning analytics. In other words, this intentionally is a walled-garden approach. For Brandman, approximately 70% of the content comes from the pre-existing FlatWorld texts, 25% comes from various OER sources, and about 5% has been custom-designed for Brandman.

    In other words, this is very much a walled garden by design. While there is support for outside content, I believe this integration must be done by Flat World designers.

    As was the case for the description of the Helix CBE-based 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. (more…)