D’Arcy Norman started a lively inter-blog conversation like we haven’t seen in the edublogosphere in quite a while with his post on the false binary between LMS and open. His main point is that, even if you think that the open web provides a better learning environment, an LMS provides a better-than-nothing learning environment for faculty who can’t or won’t go through the work of using open web tools, and in some cases may be perfectly adequate for the educational need at hand. The institution has an obligation to provide the least-common-denominator tool set in order to help raise the baseline, and the LMS is it. This provoked a number of responses, but I want to focus on Phil’s two responses, which talk at a conceptual level about building a bridge between the “walled garden” of the LMS and the open web (or, to draw on his analogy, keeping the garden but removing the walls that demarcate its border). There are some interesting implications from this line of reasoning that could be explored. What would be the most likely path for this interoperability to develop? What role would the LMS play when the change is complete? For that matter, what would the whole ecosystem look like?
Seemingly separately from this discussion, we have the new Unizin coalition. Every time that Phil or I write a post on the topic, the most common response we get is, “Uh…yeah, I still don’t get it. Tell me again what the point of Unizin is, please?” The truth is that the Unizin coalition is still holding its cards close to its vest. I suspect there are details of the deals being discussed in back rooms that are crucial to understanding why universities are potentially interested. That said, we do know a couple of broad, high-level ambitions that the Unizin leadership has discussed publicly. One of those is to advance the state of learning analytics. Colorado State University’s VP of Information Technology Pat Burns has frequently talked about “educational Moneyball” in the context of Unizin’s value proposition. And having spoken with a number of stakeholders at Unizin-curious schools, it is fair to say that there is a high level of frustration with the current state of play in commercial learning analytics offerings that is driving some of the interest. But the dots have not been connected for us. What is the most feasible path for advancing the state of learning analytics? And how could Unizin help in this regard?
It turns out that the walled garden questions and the learning analytics questions are related.
