LMS of the future?

An LMS is a "Learning Management System."  Think "Blackboard."  It's basically about setting up a classroom environment online for distance education.

Blackboard is the current hegemony in this area.  It's doing its best to retrofit itself to the incredibly fast changing Google/Facebook world. The problem is that it is really hard to turn the Titanic. If they were starting from scratch today it would no doubt look a lot different. And most of us suspect that someone will come up with something relatively free and better soon, and down Blackboard will come like the music businesses when Napster came on the scene.

I heard Friday that one of the leading online educators is in the final stages of designing its own LMS.  More power to them.  That sort of innovation always excites me. It's not hard to cobble one together from the things available in Google and Facebook, but not professional enough for an online institution to do.

One interesting discussion I had this weekend had to do with bringing online education to Africa. What's interesting is that Africa is basically leap frogging the desktop, because they often don't have reliable power or internet connection. What they do have is cell phones!

So the question was first, could you create an even more sequential pedagogy that could be administered via smart phones.  Someone else then brought up the iPad.  You can even do Blackboard on an iPad.  The question is which server they use in Africa, since the iPad only works with ATT or Verizon.

A cell phone LMS would basically need to be able to:

• show text (in this case in very small screen snippets)
• take text input (probably by converting voice to text)
• It would need to link and sequence the course in a very linear thread, with minimal link following

Fun thoughts!  Ideally, someone would design a special tablet and bare bones LMS that did not require Verizon or ATT for hook up.

Blackboard's not so bad...

I've ranted in the past here about Blackboard. Now I'm heavy into setting up seminary courses around it. Two things have made it turn out well.

1. upgrades--less clicking... we also have the community add on now that allows people to communicate cross cohort.

2. The fact that at some point we had the brainstorm not to set it up the way they do.

For the life of me I can't figure out what the logic is in their default set up. You have to go to one button to see your assignments for the week, then another button to do your discussions for the week, then another button to submit things for the week. What nimskull came up with that!!

We have it set up with one button per week. Under that button is the assignments document for the week, the discussions for the week, and the submissions for the week. Not rocket science but a massively easier set up for everyone. Who were these Blackboard designers, strange aliens from Clickland?

Many public thanks to our Information Technology people: Mike Robinette, Mark Alexander, and especially Dave Leitzel (also to our web guru Lorne Oke). They have been sooooo helpful!

The Inferiority of Blackboard

I'm posting this to see what comes of it. Maybe someone who works for Blackboard will find it and get to work. Maybe they're already at work (please, please)...

Blackboard is neat--if you don't know anything else. I'm hoping they will make some major upgrades to their stuff in the days to come. Several courses at IWU use it now. But if I'm ever involved in starting a new program, I will be desperate to search options in this area.

First, though, let me mention two strengths Blackboard has over some other educational software:

1. You can do grades on it.

2. You can give quizzes and tests on it.

These are really great features especially for professors, and being able to watch your grade is a really neat thing for students as well.

Now for my down side list so far:

1. It isn't visual--it's all text oriented. It's not like the internet--not icon oriented. It's like a TXT file versus a DOC file. You don't click on pictures; you click on a bunch of words. No wonder science and math types seem to like it--it has no aesthetic appeal whatsoever.

2. It's not built for community (a second blip on the science and math types). It's one course oriented. There are no common community spaces for everyone in a program or in a community. It is a very left brain logical: course 1, course 2.

3. You can't have multiple windows open at a time. This is my biggest pragmatic complaint. If you are writing something in one area and need to look at something in another, you have to close and go back, then reopen. Better write it down, because if you forget what you looked at before you can get it into the other place, then you have to close everything and go back to the first place, then come back to the second place.

4. You have to close, and close, and close. Yes, alright already, I'm wanting to close.

5. Even though it is text oriented, the text space is fairly confined, embedded. You can't enlarge it to the whole screen. This again fits with the cold feel of it--it's two dimensional, not three dimensional.

6. You can't attach multiple files. If you want to post two things for the class, you have to make two completely different posts.

I may return to this from time to time, both with further strengths I discover and further weaknesses...