Moving from the Transactional LMS to the Transformational LRM

[rgibson1]

I could not agree more....

"It is unfair (if common) to blame the longstanding LMS providers for the current limitations of their systems, as they were solving what was then the transactional task asked of them by universities: replicate the transaction of the traditional classroom in an LMS. Those transactions were the ones needed by faculty members to conduct their classes, things like taking and returning assignments, posting grades, sending messages, conducting classroom discussion, and sharing course materials. That generation of LMS providers did a great job and built systems around faculty needs and helped drive the enormous growth in online learning. However, we are now seeing a paradigmatic shift away from the faculty member/teaching focus that has long characterized higher education to a new student/learning focus. Whereas the LMS of the past encapsulated the whole of the instructor’s course and what was needed to conduct it, next generation systems holistically capture the student’s learning experience."

Moving From The Transactional LMS To The Transformational LRM 

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks for sharing this! That perspective has always been my approach, and my students have always worked in their own spaces (blogs, websites), creating the course by the choices they make from week to week... and I've never used the LMS for anything other than the red-tape requirements of enrollment and the final grade that I have to turn in.

I'm not really swayed by the AI-data-predictions part of this article (that still sounds pretty top-down to me, and not the self-initiated, self-determined learning that I see as more valuable and more authentic), but I certainly will welcome the day when we move from top-down teacher-directed learning to the connected learning of networked students. The Internet has made that possible for 20 years or so now, but the culture is what's lagging behind.

I am less optimistic than LeBlanc that we are going to see substantial change any time soon (we've built educational systems that are highly resistant to change)... and I am also far less sanguine than he is about what the commercialization of these technologies (AI, big data, analytics, etc.) will mean. But I welcome this discussion in any form at any time.

After all, we don't have to wait for change to come to us. RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW WE CAN BRING ABOUT A LOT OF CHANGE. For me, a good place to start is #TTOG and finding ways to get away from traditional grading. Once you free yourself of those constraints, all kinds of good things start to happen as a result: Teachers Throwing Out Grades. I am much more comfortable with the TTOG movement than with the big-data mavens like LeBlanc. 🙂

[rgibson1]

Hmm. Maybe. But WGU and SNHU already use non-LMS systems that allow students to progress through individualized learning pathways. The current lineup of LMS products don't do a particularly great job of managing student learning outside of the traditional semester calendar and term rubric. (Neither do the SIS products.) This class of product is really bred for the traditional format. As competency based learning gains momentum, my expectation is that companies like Instructure will need to offer an alternative product. In the case of WGU, they developed their own. In the case of SNHU, they use a variant of SalesForce. LeBlanc indicates they tried Blackboard and Canvas, but found the mechanics too wound around the traditional format. (eg, "Terms", "Rosters", etc.)

[laurakgibbs]

I guess my broader point is that we are expecting too much from software solutions (just as we put way too much trust in textbooks in the past). Analytics will never be able to answer the question WHY, and for that reason I don't think they are going to make the promised leap form big data to prediction. The complexities of why people learn well or poorly, why they are motivated or not motivated, are very difficult, and ultimately they are very soft, very subjective, very human problems.  Yes, there will be patterns in the aggregate, and patterns are useful for some kinds of analysis (resource allocation, for example). But those aggregate patterns are NOT useful on the individual student level, which variability comes into play and renders large-scale predictions much less useful. 

If analytics and AI help teachers to become better teachers, great. If they help students to be more self-aware and self-directed, even better! And more/better data can help advisors to do a better job too. But education is ultimately a human thing and expecting that technology will be a magic bullet to solve problems of economy or scale is misguided ... but very much in the corporate interests of the businesses who make such products.

Consider this example from big data and advising from Georgia State, and the misleading hype in the headline of the article. From the headline, you would expect this was about the power of the software, but read the article:

This wasn't just a tech fix. At the same time that it implemented GPS, Georgia State hired 42 additional academic advisors, bringing its caseload down to 300 to 1. ... In fact, says Renick, more than 90 percent of the cost of the project was in staffing , not in the spiffy new computer system.

So, the headline of the article should be: How One University Hired More Advisors To Boost Graduation Rates but instead the headline buys into the hopes we wrongly put in the promise of big data as a magic bullet. Humans aren't news; big data is.

How One University Used Big Data To Boost Graduation Rates : NPR Ed : NPR 

[dwillmore]

I just wrote a long response and then deleted it.  Yes, we want to transform students and ourselves, but students typically want the grade and do not care about transformation.  Why? Everything that matters to the student is based on the grade and credit hours.   Did you graduate?  Was your GPA above 3.0?   Those are the two questions that need to be answered to get into the interview, and in the end, most students are in college to get a job.  This may be different at the senior and post-grad levels, but it is true of freshman and sophomores.

Collecting data to see what the state of the student is currently is important, but that is not an LMS job.   The LMS feeds data into systems that perform this job. Typically, these systems view at-risk students and ignore superior students. 

Mr. LeBlanc discusses a holistic view of the student.  How do you measure holistically?  How do you ensure a student can read, write, calculate, and think critically in a holistic manner?   Instructors at the higher education levels are subject matter experts.  Did the student understand and keep the information offered?  How do you assess. this.

Transformation is a transactional set of sequences aggregated.   Each transaction is transformational, but not holistically.  How do we become transformational?  We change the way we teach and assess.   Even when I was a student with black and white TV's and no personal computers or cell phones, teachers tended to stand in front of the room regurgitating information I just read in the text while shuffling through overhead slides.  This is useless and adds no value to education.  Yet, this was generally the case in every freshman and sophomore class I attended and looking at our online classes here, nothing has changed.  We also assess at the lowest level of learning, answering simple multiple choice questions.   Why?   I think it is because, for the faculty, this takes the least amount of time and effort.

Better assessment, better instruction, a portfolio of accomplishment, and changing the focus GPA for getting a job to a focus on accomplishment.

[laurakgibbs]

Well said,  @dwillmore ‌! To me, the holistic center is the individual student and what the learning means to them. That varies enormously; the word "unique" gets thrown around a lot these days, but my students really are unique, and the more I learn about them and their lives, the more I realize that. 

In terms of teaching, switching from grades to feedback (and continuous improvement) changes EVERYTHING. And the reason we have not done that is not a technology problem; it's a culture problem. I've written about my own un-grading adventures here:

http://Grading.MythFolklore.net

Even when I had stopped putting grades on anything, it was until I started explicitly teaching growth mindset that I was able to supply students with the vocabulary they needed to re-think their school experience (again: it was a language problem, not a technology problem).

Growth Mindset CanvasLIVE 

And I cannot say enough good things about Starr Sackstein's book!

Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning Series) (V... 

[rgibson1]

 @dwillmore ‌ I would concur that students have been boondoggled into believing the grade and credit hour are the hallmark for learning achievement. But if you look at LeBlanc's thesis, he's merely indicating that today's LMS is nothing more than a bolt-on to our educational paradigm. And students believe the grade is almighty because the LMS tells them it is. In fact, it's predicated on it. Having experienced "other" systems (eg WGU) I can tell you that the LMS is really not that important at all. What's more important to student achievement are the pathways and customization that are baked into their delivery system. Grades are meaningless in that context. So are credit hours. Unfortunately, LMSs harden the existing orthodoxy and delivery formats. If you look at today's LMS, there is really not much THAT different than Web-Course-in-a-Box from 1995. And what did it do? Simply provide a convenient mechanism to post traditional content. A data dump. Fast forward 20+ years and most faculty still use the LMS as a data dump. Transactional, not transformative. I challenge the LMS providers to develop products that transcend this aging metaphor.

[laurakgibbs]

My cynical reaction is that more LMS just means more of the same-old-same-old. If we really want a new culture of education, we can have it now. We don't need to wait on anybody's technology. And the fact that people like LeBlanc are touting technological solutionism makes me suspect that it's not really going to be about a new culture at all, just a new way of controlling students top down and reducing costs by eliminating expensive human teachers.

So instead of challenging LMS providers to develop new products, I think we need to challenge LMS consumers to try new ways of teaching... and THAT will be what really inspires better/new technologies for learning.

Audrey Watters is always a good read on technology solutionism, the new behaviorism, and all the other pitfalls into which technology tends to lead:

http://hackeducation.com/ 

[rgibson1]

Love Audrey. I found it curious that a technology cynic (she proudly wears that badge) would be invited to speak at InstructureCon a few years ago. She's no fan of LMSs. See: http://hackeducation.com/2014/09/05/beyond-the-lms-newcastle-university Talk about inviting the wolf to dinner....

[laurakgibbs]

I'm also a confessed foe of the LMS, and it is to the credit of Jared Stein, Brian Whitmer and others at Instructure that they have always sought out conversations like that in public spaces. As here:

Thoughts about Choosing, Change, and the 800-Pound LMS Gorilla 

I'm here at Canvas Community for the Community rather than for the Canvas. 

Consider me a wolf cub. 🙂

[laurakgibbs]

Fabulous new blog post from Robin de Rosa is about exactly the kind of transformations I am hoping to see! The whole post is worth reading:

Open Pedagogy: Quick Reflection for #YearOfOpen

Just one quote that especially resonates with me:

Learner-Driven Structures. Another thing Higher Ed pays a lot of lip service to is the idea of “student centered learning.” Working with OER helped me see learning materials as more shape-able, and involving students in that shaping had a profound effect on the location of authority in our classroom. Suddenly the course content became more of a locus of dialogue, and curation of content became something we actively discussed in class. From there, I moved to more non-disposable assignments, and students used open licenses to contribute their work into our class textbooks. I am interested in how working with students to build new architectures– outside of the LMS– can assist in building a sense of student investment in education. Involving students in content curation, setting course policies and procedures, designing online and physical spaces for working, developing assignments, engaging in self-assessment and peer feedback: all of these things increase student agency in learning, and all of them are facilitated by the use of the open license. How does the open license help? It shifts authority from the learning materials to the learner, and allows faculty to rethink the role of learners in contributing to– not just consuming– knowledge.

Pinging  @kona ‌ for student-centered learning. 🙂

[dwillmore]

I think we also need to think about what an LMS should be.  In my view, the LMS should simply be a shell that provides a simple way to post content of various types, keep a list of students and teachers, provide security to the LMS course shell, a grade book, simple assignment, and quizzing.  Keep it as simple as possible, but then open the LMS to integration with other web tools. Allow that integration to provide single-sign-on (SSO) and grade push back to the LMS.  Make that integration secure and easy.

The LMS and any software/hardware must become invisible to the users and simply be as you find with Facebook and Youtube.  While Canvas is not perfect, it is the closest to perfect using my definition that I have used.

[laurakgibbs]

That is my situation also: I need something integrated with enrollment, a secure place where students can record their own grades (I do no grading), plus the homepage jumping off point where I put my daily announcements. That's all for me. At the same time, I realize that many instructors are not ready, willing, or able to take advantage of building learning spaces online. It is my hope to share my experience in creating online learning spaces using all kinds of tools (real tools, not just faux tools for school like the LMS) so that they can BECOME ready, willing, and able. 🙂

Plus, for the students, the LMS can help them integrate ACROSS classes, which can be very valuable, and I know my students are liking the integrated calendar; see blog post below from a student last night. And, as I know from other students, they like the live feed of the calendar that they can add to an existing calendar they might use already (many use Outlook because we have Exchange email), plugging ininformation from Canvas into a real tool.

Screenshot. Here's what my student said about the calendar last night: just like many faculty, there were plenty of students who had a strong D2L set of habits, so asking them to switch in their senior year was not easy, but I am happy that we had many converts who ended up being glad to switch:

[johnmartin]

Thanks rgibson1, laurakgibbs, and  @dwillmore ! what a great discussion! Five more tabs open to read through more thoroughly,  but I wanted to push back onlaurakgibbs's "we don't need to wait on technology" statement. Totally true for "us" — we can set up transformational micro-environments for learning in our courses and informal spaces — but for a more widespread adoption at formal educational spaces where scalability solutions are made by Economists and Engineers, we need really strong (and quantified) examples of technologies and systems that have transformational learning environments built in. Canvas, we agree, doesn't go far enough here. And perhaps it's not the thing that should. But the more it does, the more campus decision-makers will use it, and the more learning environments will change.

[laurakgibbs]

How long are Economists and Engineers going to continue to get to be the ones delegating those resources?

At my school, millions of dollars, LITERALLY millions of dollars, were thrown away over the past several years in a misguided, misinformed, and misconceived attempt to build a MOOC platform. Oh, we were going to have the biggest, the best, the MOOCiest classes. And now: nothing. Literally nothing to show for it except some YouTube videos.

I wish campus decision-makers would take a real online course to see what it's like. And how HUMAN it can be, and should be IMO. Then they could base their decisions on some real experience, not just marketing hype. My experience is based on teaching full-time online since 2002, while many of these decision-makers have not even taken a single online course, much less taught one.

I'm scalable! Just hire MORE FULL-TIME INSTRUCTORS if you want to scale up instruction. I'm at an R1 school where teaching is at the bottom of the food chain; TT faculty teach, yes, but they have very little incentive to invest in their teaching. We need more dedicated, full-time online instructors. But hiring just regular old people is not cutting-edge and press-release-worthy like rolling out some big new technology initiative.

My courses and course materials are 100% in the open. There's plenty to show for the paltry investment the university makes in my salary annually, and I make sure to show and share openly. For the $3 million dollars we are paying annually to an external company for a proprietary MOOC platform (separate from Canvas! why? who knows), the university could hire 50 more full-time instructors like myself, including both salary and benefits. And together we could teach 10,000 students (at roughly 100 students per instructor per semester).

That's how scale works in my opinion: hiring and supporting the right PEOPLE, not throwing money at software. See link above to a similar account of the need to hire more advisors if you want to improve student retention.

And, yes, that is just my opinion. But it is a strongly held one, especially after watching the MOOC debacle at my school over the past several years. 🙂

[johnmartin]

Alas, laurakgibbs, it seems that the Economists and Engineers (who, by the way, bring a great set of perspectives!) are currently all the rage for a system with dwindling resources. There should definitely be a third E category in that group, and there's not (not enough anyway, imho).... 

[laurakgibbs]

Ha ha, "E" for educator indeed. 🙂

[kmeeusen]

Wow! This is one of the best conversations the community has seen in a long time,  @johnmartin  , laurakgibbs  rgibson1 and  @dwillmore   ! These are the conversations I love, because pedagogy, and especially online pedagogy is my main area of practice, and I believe that online education is transforming the educational systems, and that this transformation is just beginning. I think that folks will look back on this era 100 years from now, and mark it as a milestone in a revolution.

So just some thoughts from an old man who has seen a lot of pedagogical theories and practices come and go just over his lifetime, and has studied many more from earlier in the 20th Century - some good, some not so good, and some downright terrible!

And as some of you might suspect, and I think Laura knows, I have a tendency to play the Devil's advocate at times.

Laura said,

I certainly will welcome the day when we move from top-down teacher-directed learning to the connected learning of networked students.

I agree to a limited degree, but with a caveat. There have been many changes in a teachers role, teaching styles, and teaching pedagogy over the last 100 years; and especially in K12. The effects over the last 50  years have been devastating to young student learning. People love to bash the "sage on the stage", "Learn by rote" pedagogy experienced by students prior to the mid 1960s, but the results in real learning were incredible compared to what we experience now. Too many students are graduating high school without knowing how to read, write and accomplish basic arithmetic. The reasons are very complex, but I place most of the blame on school systems, and local, state and federal governments. I also lay a level of blame on schools of education that promote every flavor-of-the-week learning theory that they send new teachers out to experiment on young learners with. Prime example - Learning Styles Theory! OMG! Will the last psychologist to leave the building please turn out the lights on this long debunked piece of horse-hockey! But do away with "teacher-directed" learning, no thank you. It is not, and never will be about the technology. It is about the instruction, and the technology is merely a tool for its delivery.

Rob said,

Having experienced "other" systems (eg WGU) I can tell you that the LMS is really not that important at all. What's more important to student achievement are the pathways and customization that are baked into their delivery system.

I'm sorry, but WGU's education is delivered on an LMS, albeit an LMS they designed specifically to fit their education model. When talking about the misguided emphasis on grades and providing an awesome example, let's look at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. It was founded in 1967, and Evergreen was formed to be an experimental and non-traditional college. Full-time students enroll in interdisciplinary academic programs instead of classes. Programs typically offer students the opportunity to study several disciplines in a coordinated manner. Faculty write narrative evaluations of students' work in place of issuing grades. Laughed at for many years until folks started noticing that employers really wanted their students, and the graduates disproportionally started occupying leadership positions. Evergreen is ranked #1 in the West for Undergraduate Teaching at Masters Universities. It uses Canvas to deliver its online courses!

David said,

In my view, the LMS should simply be a shell that provides a simple way to post content of various types, keep a list of students and teachers, provide security to the LMS course shell, a grade book, simple assignment, and quizzing.  Keep it as simple as possible, but then open the LMS to integration with other web tools. Allow that integration to provide single-sign-on (SSO) and grade push back to the LMS.  Make that integration secure and easy.

This is, and always has been one of the primary goals of Canvas, and to date nobody does this better. Canvas is even using the LTI tool model to build its new Quizzing Engine. This is one of the features that sold me and our state system on Canvas - the ability to customize Canvas quickly and easily using integrated tools. Now almost every education tech vendor in the country is clamoring to integrate their tools with Canvas, and the ones who aren't are watching their market share plummet.

Laura, I will leave open pedagogy for another discussion, but want to assure that I am a huge fan, advocate and student of open pedagogy. Thanks for the link and excerpt. I must read this. I think that Canvas supports the concepts of open pedagogy in a manner that other LMSs are now finally trying to replicate. On my bucket list - the final last death breath of the traditional textbook publishing model. I do not want either teachers or students to be constrained by the traditional textbook and the need to modify and supplement it to make it even marginally useful as a tool that helps students meet learning outcomes.

Finally, because I'm tired, Laura said,

How long are Economists and Engineers going to continue to get to be the ones delegating those resources?

At my school, millions of dollars, LITERALLY millions of dollars, were thrown away over the past several years in a misguided, misinformed, and misconceived attempt to build a MOOC platform. Oh, we were going to have the biggest, the best, the MOOCiest classes. And now: nothing. Literally nothing to show for it except some YouTube videos.

I wish campus decision-makers would take a real online course to see what it's like. And how HUMAN it can be, and should be IMO. Then they could base their decisions on some real experience, not just marketing hype. My experience is based on teaching full-time online since 2002, while many of these decision-makers have not even taken a single online course, much less taught one.

Amen to that! Don't get me started on MOOCs (Massively Overrated Obstacles to Constructive learning - okay, not the best creativity in mangling their acronym, but you get my point). Another flavor-of-the-month! But the point here is that decision-makers and governments no longer truly support education, at least not in the manner we see in some other countries. Expensive experimentation at the expense of solid education is not support. And, yes, let's get administrators into online classrooms - the best, the good, the bad, and the ugly! Then we might start seeing real change, and monies to support it. I mean, maybe even training for teachers in how to make the best use of instructional technology for the betterment of student learning!

Now that was fun, but I gotta go.

Kelley

[laurakgibbs]

Oh, this is great,  @kmeeusen !  I owe you a longer reply, but I just wanted to say that I love the MOOC acronym, ha ha. Massively overrated indeed.

And about connected learning: I am not a learning anarchist... but because there is so much passivity and obedience in schooling as practiced now, I do tend to overcompensate by talking all the time about student choice, autonomy, etc. I am hoping we will get a Connected Learning group here soon (apparently they are brainstorming new ways to make better use of the Group spaces, and when they are ready to re-launch the new approach to Groups, Connected Learning will get a space, yay!) ... anyway, in terms of thinking about teacher roles, and I definitely see lots of important roles for teachers to play, there was this very nice little article in Fractus Learning yesterday which is actually about way more than boys and reading:

The 6 Reading-Habit Initiator Personalities (Hint: Only 1 Transforms Boys into Readers)

These ideas about initiator personalities can be very useful in thinking about the many different roles we can play. 🙂

[kmeeusen]

Oh I get it laurakgibbs , sometimes we use absolutes and hyperbole when railing against failing or failed systems - it is just human nature. I do it all the time.

I just wanted to remind that you yourself are a teacher, and a good one who is truly student-centric, and your students would not have achieved what they have achieved if you were not there!

Teachers rule, and can never be replaced by technology. Well, at least not in our lifetime, although I have read some great science fiction related to this.

Kelley

[dwillmore]

I never speak in absolutes, ever, and I am always right.

[anthonem]

I'm scalable! Just hire MORE FULL-TIME INSTRUCTORS if you want to scale up instruction

Thank you for saying this! So true.

[kmeeusen]

LMAO!

Absolutely LMAO!