Monthly Archives: March 2016

A Flexible and Personal Learning Environment

About this time last year, EDUCAUSE published a piece titled the “The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment.” (Disclaimer: I was one of the many who participated in this effort.) Little did I know (that is, until the EDUCAUSE ELI Conference earlier this year) that SURF in The Netherlands was also working on a similar effort called “A Flexible and Personal Learning Environment.” Both publications are well worth your time to read. The SURF project seems to have been connected to a series of related ones that were focused on studying learning technologies and practices. Unfortunately I don’t read Dutch, but a great deal of their work has been translated into English.

I appreciate three items in the SURF document that are particularly well-articulated. The first is coverage of the diverse perspectives of what “integration” means. The visual integration of learning tools and how they are accessed is a focus of this document as are the data/analytics perspective and the systems perspective. Sometimes, in my opinion, the first perspective is overlooked, and the second and third are lumped together.

CC BY 3.0: SURFnet
CC BY 3.0: SURFnet

The second is an enumeration of the components that such a modern learning environment would contain broken down by function and linked to both the processes they support and the data artifacts to which they relate.

CC BY 3.0: SURFnet
CC BY 3.0: SURFnet

The third is an architectural perspective from a case study contributed by Erasmus University Rotterdam that elevates the importance of APIs in constructing such a learning environment. I am a huge fan of APIs and believe that they will play an increasingly central role to make learning technologies work better together in ways that current approaches cannot. (On a random side note, check out this recent coverage about a recent event that focused on “Indie” ed-tech and personal learning APIs. There really are many great ideas out there – too many to cover in any one post or at any one event.)

CC BY 3.0: SURFnet
CC BY 3.0: SURFnet

I encourage you to take a look at the Flexible Learning Environment publication. It offers another helpful perspective as we search for the right ways to design and build (and think about) the right tools to advance teaching and learning.

-George Kroner (personal thoughts do not represent my employer’s)

The Rise of the Shadow LMS

Quick quiz – what do these 3 images have in common?

Capture2

Capture5

Each of these screenshots shows rich, interactive content from a third-party educational courseware product being played from within a traditional LMS. And the learning experiences that these types of products can provide is often vastly superior to what can be built using the content tools that most LMSs natively provide.

Over time, these products are adding more and more features that one might normally expect to see in a LMS – giving weight to Norman’s Law of E-learning Tool Convergence:

Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

While I am not attempting to redefine courseware or jam any the above products into a specific named category, these systems often feature better grading options, more pedagogically-relevant assessment, and specialized reporting and analytics that surpass those available directly within the LMS. (They do, however, generally maintain the ability to sync grades back to the LMS and leverage its authentication and enrollment/rostering capabilities.)

Much like shadow IT , these systems can often be implemented by single instructors or departments. They can also offer value beyond what the enterprise-provided solution is able to the point where they are becoming so capable one has to begin wondering – can they begin to replace the LMS on their own? After all, these systems are typically plugged into LMSs, often provide better experiences than LMSs, and often take over a large chunk of the responsibilities that traditionally reside inside the LMS. And they can even offer additional capabilities that aren’t yet provided very well by LMSs such as nuanced learning analytics capabilities and content formatting that adapts seamlessly to mobile and tablet formats. At what point do these learning tools effectively become “Shadow LMSs?”

The question I have in my mind today is if LMSs will one day meet the same fate as portals. That is – promising in concept, and maybe worth it if you put a lot of effort into them, but of varying utility in general practice. In the future, will it still be worth the complexity of having a LMS in the middle if the goal is to navigate the student directly to their learning experience?

-George Kroner (personal thoughts do not represent my employer’s)