Donald Jordan's Open Salon Blog

Why Learning Management REALLY Suck

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:04:21 -0400

Close Enough
Donald Jordan ©: 2012

The question that I open up most of my workshops on our university's Learning Management System (LMS) with is a throwback to an old Microsoft ad campaign that asks, "What do you want to do today?" I ask this question because too often, faculty do not approach technology by thinking about what needs to be done, but are often just struggling to "make it work." Some universities and colleges are fairly aggressive in their adoption of online and blended platforms for education while others have only dipped their toes into the technological waters, but often, such endeavors are initially managed by an IT department who, unconcerned with pedagogical issues, adopts yet another attitude of "Let's just make this work." And it does work, if by work you mean a place where instructors can put course materials and grades and where students can log on and download those materials and obsess about their grades. To be sure, there are other tools such as blogs, discussion boards, chat, and maybe even video conferencing and these tools can be very helpful, but there are several fatal flaws in this approach to online learning.

First, let's start with the question, "What do you want to do today?" Perhaps we should change this a bit and say, "what do you want your students to do today?" or "What do you want your students to learn today?" These are important questions-far more important than the dictum "I'd like my students to work on a discussion board or blog." Too often, course design starts with the tool, the assignment, or the technology being used rather than the outcome. This can be true in regular face to face classes, and it is especially true in online classes. The logic goes something like this: Online courses have discussion boards, our LMS has a built in discussion board, therefore let’s have a discussion board. Now, what assignment could I create to have students use the discussion board and how many points should I offer to get reasonable participation? What rubrics should I use in order to ensure that students respond to each other with more than a cursory "I agree!" or "Great post"? The real question is, why are your students doing this in the first place? What are you trying to teach, and what are you hoping they are learning through the process?

Good design is important on multiple levels of a course and the best design begins with what you want the students to learn. For example, "I want my students to engage with the text and struggle with the concepts. I want them to consult each other as they build a working definition of X." From this, it is easier to see that with goals of engagement, we can now create an assignment that fosters this. Once we have an assignment, we can pick the tools. The tools, in this case are not the most important thing, it is actually the least important thing. At the risk of oversimplification, consider this real world analogy: what would you say to an instructor that stated, "I want to use a chalk board for my class"? The chalkboard is a tool-a helpful tool no doubt, but only a tool. It can help in many ways, but its presence has very little bearing on what is learned. There are certain advantages that a classroom has when one is present, but learning can still occur in its absence. And an instructor who says, "So, what can I do to make students interact with the chalkboard in my class?" seems ridiculous. To carry the analogy a bit further, the instructor does not say "I want to use a chalk board, therefore, I will have student come up and do their work on the board so I can critique it in front of the class." Instead, the instructor starts with something like "my students are all making the same kinds of mistakes. Is there a way that I can have them use their own work and still instruct the class as a whole?" Yes, in fact, there is and the chalkboard is one very helpful tool in that regard.

While I admit the previous example is simplified, it is illustrative of the same subtle difference in how tools are both used and thought about in the online learning environment. The only problem is that technology (and the LMS) looms larger than life and seems greater than the activity that should really be the focus. Many faculty approach the LMS today like many approached the computer (and still do) in the 80s and 90s-as something alien, as something scary, complex, and unwieldy, something that will break if you do it wrong. And to make matters even worse, most LMS systems, even the supposedly "good" ones that are open and not burdened by six and seven figure licensing fees, do not really encourage good design or encourage asking the right questions. They demand organization and fidelity to a particular way of doing things-first this, then that. In fact, their ethic seems to be one of "it functions" and "it’s good enough" which is IT language for its stable, integrates with the school's student database, and provides reasonable service to the expected tools. What is missing is true design and a true element of what needs to happen for such technology to truly have an impact on learning. Simply put, the technology needs to disappear. It needs to disappear in the same way that technology in the classroom (from whiteboard markers to projectors) disappear until they are needed and are only needed when there is a clear and pressing pedagogical reason be there.

The learning management system is a crutch that gets in the way of teaching because it obstructs our vision of the content, the teacher, and the other students in the class. It intimidates both students and faculty and it demands new supplicants be trained on its way of doing things. It embarrassingly stands in front of the class and makes everyone notice it. It demands that you do things its way and it resists change. We need it, to be sure. We need it in order to manage the complex technical tasks of managing human interaction over increasingly complex networked systems. But we also need it to disappear-and that is the importance of development and design and why none of today’s “out of the box” solutions are particularly desirable. An LMS that students and teachers need to be "trained" on (beyond scholarship and pedagogical considerations for effective teaching and student engagement) is fundamentally flawed. What we need is a re-imagining of the LMS that is simple and intuitive, hiding the complexity of the technology behind an almost transparent veneer. When you can look at an LMS and imagine a first or second grader, without help, logging on and having a socially and pedagogically rich and fulfilling learning experience, then you will know that the technology has truly arrived and transformed education. Until then, well, Learning Management Systems suck.

Technological abstinence is not the way, Mr. Obama

Thu, 13 May 2010 16:05:50 -0400

At a commencement speech at Hampton University, I was a bit surprised by an unexpected dig at technology by Obama when he stated:

"[Y]ou're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads, Xboxes and PlayStations (none of which I know how to work) information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than a means of emancipation."

Obama and Technology

It seems to me that he is arguing against a view of the present, and the future, that is reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World , only in our world, information is the Soma and technology is the delivery vehicle. This is an increasingly common view of technology, and one that is based more in fear and misunderstanding than in truth. I find it interesting that this note of anti-technology, and especially the digg "none of which I know how to work" came from a president that is arguably one of the most tech savvy we've ever had. The focus on technology, however, is the wrong target and the misstep here is a failure to address the real issues and instead to take the easy road of identifying a common fear and playing to it.

True, information and entertainment are closer now than ever before, and the quantity of information available and being produced is on a scale that is not humanly manageable. And yes, technology can provide us with unprecedented ways of being distracted. There has never been a time when the average person was exposed to more influences than they are now, and it is only going to increase. Yes, there is a lot of mis-information out there, but there are an awful lot of people out there, as well, ready to call BS when they see it. Technology has allowed the people a voice that has never been heard before.

In the past, most people might have had a subscription to one newspaper and a few magazines. These were the points of view that they were exposed to. Even now, when you read an article or blog, it can be just as informative to read the comments as the article itself. Never before have professional writers been taken to task in such an immediate way, and I think our experience has improved because of this. To be sure, there have always been letters to the editor, and people have vented about bias articles around the water cooler prior to the internet, but when you can read a New York Times or Newsweek article and then read through the 132 comments below, it broadens your understanding of the topic, illustrates the bias of the writer (and the commenters) and provides a far more sophisticated backdrop with which to engage the material. To be sure, there is a lot of noise to the signal, but this just illustrates the direction that we need to focus on in education: Critical thinking, judgement, and assessment; the skills of the future.

Jeff Jarvis, Professor of Journalism at CUNY, states that "Content is dead." We are awash in content. Perhaps that was what the president was speaking to in his speech. But he blamed technology for this when technology is not what is at fault. What is at fault is that we need to teach our students how to build better filters. When I went to school, it was a struggle to find information. Any research project started with a huge initial investment of time an resources. Books were expensive to buy (and any useful book needed for serious -or even not-so-serious research were rarely found in the local pre-Barns & Noble/Borders bookstore) and libraries presented considerable time investments-if you could find transportation and get there during operating hours. Now, we are awash in information, it is true, but in schools, the focus has yet to shift from the old model of how to find information, to how to filter information and analyze it. There are teachers who do this, of course, but from an institutional, state, and federal level, our standards, policies, and laws do not yet account for this shift in reality. What we are missing here is that the very concept of critical thinking has shifted from "Something that an educated person should have" to "Something that everyone must have."

I will argue for a way of looking at information that breaks it up into two types (this is a working model, and I welcome any input): Authentic and inauthentic. Authentic content is content that, either bias or not, factual or false, allows for comments, revisions, or any other type of feedback. Inauthentic, then, is content that does not. In this model, what we need to do is teach students to seek out an analyze authentic content because this is the material that invites criticism, allows for alternating viewpoints, and opens debate. Inauthentic content, on the other hand, has the taint of marketing materials that project a canonical position that is above such debate. In the new would, such positions should be treated as suspect. I am aware of the fact that this model has limitations. For instance, books could be considered inauthentic, and indeed many are-for they do not necessarily invite debate. Television and other broadcast media are similarly inauthentic. Though in both of these cases, there are ways, generally on the web, that will allow discussion and debate in a way that was the exclusive domain of academics in generations past. Only now, we are part of the content creators.

What the president's statements do not illustrate is that people are more engaged with each other through the internet than at any time in the past. More people are creating content and engaging friends and communities in interesting and unique ways that would be impossible without those very same technologies that he derides. Many of the most popular video games are not passive entertainment like television (or dare I say, reading) but are popular because they provide editors that allow gamers to make their own content, levels, and sometimes, as with LittleBigPlanet, their own games. Yes, there is a lot of drivel on YouTube, but there is, for those that look, incredible educational opportunities.

Cory Doctorow, author of Makers , stated once that the difference between thinking something and knowing how to do it is all but disappearing. Want to know what teachers think of their jobs and students? What to know how to build a go-cart? What to see a lecture on 18th century history? It is all there. Want to see cute pictures of cats with snazzy sayings? Yes that is there too. And the bad stuff, however you define it. And, no, that wont go away. But it will also not help matters to make people afraid of it. What education needs to do is give their students the tools that will allow them to function and thrive in our brave new world.

To do this, the essential skills that we need to impart is not a doctrine of technological abstinence, but a system that will help us all function in a world of information abundance.

Critical thinking and participation: As early as possible, students need to become creators and content providers. They also need to be taught how to distinguish fact from opinion and authentic vs inauthentic forms. They need to be shown that truth can sometimes shift in the face of new information.
Filtering: Often, filtering is a skill that is overlooked, but is critical in a technological environment. The most effective and knowledgeable people in the future will not be the ones who have access to the most knowledge, but will have the best filters.
Machine enhancement: To warn parents and students away from technology and machines is counter-productive. Humanity has reached a place where machines are inevitable, and soon may be necessary for survival (professional and otherwise). Rather than fear (which means the machine controls us) we need to be preaching mastery. Students, indeed everyone, needs to master the machines they use.
Mashing: New ideas never spring from nowhere. What the internet is good at is illustrating how unrelated ideas and concepts can be related when you turn them this way or that.
De-constructing: Ask the question: what are our assumptions and what if they were wrong?
Making: Making things gives you power, forces you to understand. It is the very hight of Maslow's hierarchy. What technology provides is the broadest array of tools for creating that humanity has ever been exposed to.

Game engines, word processors, mash-up sites, video, music, in addition to all of the resources that show you how-to do things in real life as well. What is truly amazing, however, that many creative avenues that are essentially free today would have been impossible in the past or been prohibitively expensive. We should be celebrating that fact.

Killing our sacred cows in education

Tue, 11 May 2010 22:05:34 -0400

"Experiment" by Jim Rowe

Educational leaders, if they wish for their institutions to remain healthy, must think about the future differently from past generations. Indeed, they must think about and reassess the very nature of education. This is not to say that the pedagogies and methodologies of the past are irrelevant, but that there are more people seeking education from backgrounds and situations that would not have needed formal academic education in generations past. The older methods of abstract academic education, memorization, and lecture suited best for the industrial age still work for the same types of students, yet in the face of changing demographics and changing needs of the populations that our colleges serve, those particular students are becoming a smaller ratio compared to the type of non-traditional, first generation, and/or older students that are increasingly demanding more from our colleges.

But how do leaders think differently about an institution that is not only slow to change, but steeped in a thousand years history and tradition? Most leaders, even the younger leaders in Generation X, went through school before (or just as) the internet began disruptively changing the very nature of the knowledge economy. What proves to be the most difficult prospect of planning for the future is that there is very little in the past that informs the strategies and technologies that may be instrumental in a few years. In order for education to survive, there needs to be a deep and concerted effort to come to terms with what education actually is, what purpose it serves, and what what outcomes it hopes to achieve. A diploma can no longer signify that you survived a process and learned how to jump through some arbitrary hoops, but must indicate that you have a particular set of competencies and skills that have been demonstrated in an objective and impartial manner.

In such a re-examination and re-envisioning of higher education, core concepts that are taken for granted must be assessed. An example of one such cornerstone of education that is rarely discussed is the purpose behind an education that is based on units. Generally, most, if not all, reputable institutions rely on the number of contact hours to determine minimum standards for degree completion. "Minimum contact hours" makes sense in a pre-technological society where an institution can use a blunt measurement such as contact hours as a substitution for minimum exposure to a subject or skill. If you assume that in a particular population, 50 hours of contact will result in a certain level of mastery for a significant portion of the population, then you can use it as a crude measurement to equate different courses on an equal basis, that is, a 4 unit anatomy course can then be given equal weight to a 4 unit chemistry course. Yet, this unsatisfactory for vocational education and adult learners who may have considerable experience in comparison to a 17 year old high school student, or are required to master a particular skill before moving on. One of the chief problems with the unit model is that it artificially assumes a population of students that are all, essentially, starting at the same place. If such a system were turned on its head, and outcomes became the operative goal, then an educational leader might conclude that an outcomes based system might be of better service to our current population: a system where instead of a pre-determined number of hours is no longer relevant, but demonstrated mastery of a particular objective is required. In such a system, one student who can write 1,000 words a day may breeze through freshman composition in a week or two, while spending several months mastering chemical formulas in chemistry. Classes become more like laboratories focused on achieving certain results, rather than focusing on particular number of hours. While this model might seem strange for higher education, consider whether or not it makes sense for a 45 year old, who never went to college, but worked herself up in management at a local business and then started her own business, and then decided to go back to college to get a degree, should be required to take the exact same courses and hours that is required from an 18 year old with no "real-world" experience. They are in two different places, and though receiving the same information, receiving two completely different educations.

Another example of a blind spot facing education that is illustrated in Kamenetz (2010) "DIY U: Edupunks, edupreneurs, and the coming transformation of higher education," is the issue of instructor grading. Western Governors University (WGU), an accredited online university, challenged the notion of instructors grading their own courses as an issue of conflict of interest. In one sense, Instructors are ranked by their student's successful passing of the course, and their primary purpose is to facilitate, instruct and guide, but all of the grading of the assignments that are directly tied to the course outcomes, are graded anonymously by impartial graders (who are also instructors, but from other courses in the discipline and specifically trained on grading criterion for their respective outcomes). This conflict of interest highlights a major blind spot in higher education today: instructors are judged on their effectiveness, yet they are also the ones that assess their students and, in effect, determine the pass/fail rate of their courses. Even the most honest of faculty may still be subject to expectation bias.

For higher education to remain relevant, it will be important to not only increase retention, but also to ensure that students who do graduate, walk across the stage with skills appropriate to the classes and programs with which they were engaged, with little doubt that they have the skills and didn't just "do the time." Such changes, however, may necessitate the killing of more than a few sacred cows. But, the real challenge is that many of these sacred cows are so embedded in the culture that they are essentially invisible and may need strong iconoclastic leaders to uncover.

Engagement Technology or How I Learned to Stop Worrying...

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 01:08:21 -0400

I find it very interesting that many of the technological initiatives in education have largely failed, or at least failed to live up to the hype. When looking at the cost benefit analysis of many IT projects, most simply do not make sense. A number of studies discuss the use of computers by overworked instructors a little more than very expensive e-readers-if they are used at all. And ultimately, as educators (administrators as well as teachers) we have to ask the most fundamental question: does it improve teaching and does it engage the student, and is there a better, cheaper way to get the same results?

Over the past 20 or more years, the educational establishment has been a sometimes willing and sometimes reluctant participant in experimenting with how technology can be made to help students learn. But looking back, many of these experiments didn't make very much sense. A lot of money was spent with very little return (in comparison to other investments that a school might have made).

But what I find interesting about technology, is that it may not be that the schools end up having much to say about how technology will shape education. After years of spending untold millions of dollars on an aging infrastructure, educational software that in many cases is only a step up from malware, and budgets that are breaking under the strain of recession, education is finally at a tipping point where it might be changed in a fundamental way by technology. But it very likely may not be from within.

In the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns the authors discuss how technology has fundamentally changed society, which in turn is exerting a force on education. Mass communication, social networking, and a myriad of other technologies are changing the way we interact with our institutions, and it has affected the way we see ourselves and how we see our relationship with knowledge. What cheap, ubiquitous technology has done is it has raised the bar on what we know is possible, and then society passes on that expectation to our institutions.

My nine year old son has discovered YouTube. On it, he has found like-minded individuals who have a similar passion for legos, ballon animals, and the video game Spore. He began by watching videos uploaded by other adults and kids showing how they made their creations. Some videos are how-tos, others are stories; some near professional, others not so much. But they engaged him. He began by mimicking what he saw, creating lego creations very much like the ones he saw. He learned some basics of level creation and game theory and made several Spore levels, each one more interesting and complex than the preceding. Then one day he disappears with my iPhone and suddenly I had 20 or so how-to videos that he created and wanted me to upload to YouTube so that he could both show off his own creations and help other kids learn to make little lego creations. He sees, he learns, he creates, he fails, he teaches others. The secret here is that this is not a passive activity.

This last weekend, he asked if it was possible to connect several scenes together in one video. I told him that it was possible and showed him our video editing software. He got very excited and asked for my phone and came back with a movie called Scrab Battle, his first movie. Aside from fatherly pride, I know my son is not unique. Millions of kids are out there doing the same thing. And it is these generations, benefactors of nearly free social media and inexpensive technology, that have created these ad hoc learning communities, and will hold educators to account. What they are looking for is engagement. The question is, will enough of them find it in school?

Sisyphus and Education: Let's Do It Again!

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 05:08:25 -0400

I remember reading the The Myth of Sisyphus many years ago and not really getting it. Not until I got into education, that is. The semester, the quarter, indeed the school year, is a repetitive cycle, as is most of life. When we are young, it is not as readily apparent as when we get older and more experienced. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the titan Sisyphus is doomed to roll a large rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down once he gets to the top. The cycle starts over again and again for eternity. The last line, as I remember it, Camus states that in that activity, he imagines Sisyphus happy.

I wandered the library today, looking for current research, and it struck me that these books that I am rejecting as too old for my purposes—mid-eighties and nineties—were once current and even cutting edge. Sisyphus’ bolder has rolled down the mountain and others—perhaps us—are rolling it back up again. The anxiety that the existentialist feels, I think, is that realization that everything we do is at once singularly important and singularly absurd at the same time.

We are struggling with issues in education today that 20 years from now will be moot. We are dealing with students today that will no longer be our responsibility in a few months (or will they?) If we fool ourselves into thinking that life is like a story and there will be a result, an end, then we will be sorely mistaken and bitter when life continues on without us. The existential view, as I understand it, instead believes in no destination, no ultimate reward, but finds joy in the act—the struggle. We are on a journey, but we are doomed to never arrive—in fact, it is impossible to arrive. Life has a way of moving the end point endlessly before us like a rainbow or mirage. Instead of finding frustration, the existentialist is satisfied that they are part of the process and find contentment within the journey itself.

We fool ourselves if we think that a policy, a methodology, an ideology, a religion, is going to solve all of our issues. We fool ourselves if we think that one approach to education will be a magic pill that will make everything fall into place. The beauty of existentialism is that it gives a philosophical framework within education, indeed in life, to enjoy and focus on the process, independent of the end. Education is a practice, and, even if perfection is achieved, there's another class waiting for you in a few months and another generation of students to be taught, and another generation of educators waiting to try out other new ideas.

Image by Fouro