6. Academic Corporate
Learner SIS (or Human Resource
Access instructor) (or self)
Learner Instructor System and
Management managers
Completion Time Mastery
7. Delivery transparency
Online, hybrid, classroom
Content interoperability
SCORM
Hosting
ASP vs. local
8. Blackboard
market leader
Desire to Learn Content
Discussion board
integrated CMS
Assignment
Moodle Home page
open source Test
Alchemy
corporate
Editor's Notes
Tonight, I’d like to talk with you about an electronic delivery environment called a Learning Management System, or LMS. Created in the mid-1990’s, the LMS has become the most prevalent delivery mechanism for online and computer-based courses. Partly because of the jargon, partly because of the increasing technical complexity of these systems, and partly because of the exponentially escalating costs (and thus the stakes for the vendors as well as the customers), a myth has grown up around the LMS. I’m here tonight to dispel that myth—that the selection of a specific LMS matters. I’m here to tell you that it does not. I’m here to argue that your use of an LMS does matter—but exactly which LMS you use does not. What I’m going to cover are the following topics: Acronyms Benefits Segments Academic Corporate Characteristics Interaction Administration Other Platforms Blackboard Desire To Learn Moodle Alchemy
Coming up with an acronym (or a catchy name) that sticks is the goal of every marketer—and most of the tech community as well. From TCP/IP to HTML, we talk in a language that I’ve heard described as Alphabetian. We tell ourselves that Alphabetian saves time, and it does—AJAX is faster to say than Asychonronous Javascript and XML HTTP Refer. However, I often suspect that Alphabetian allows us to exclude those who aren’t “inside” our community, and I am particularly suspicious of vendor acronyms because the acronym, not the actual product or idea, is what ends up being sold. Nevertheless, let’s cover a few acronyms: As I said at the start, LMS is the generic acronym that stands for Learning Management System. Note the emphasis on the management of Learning, not Learner. For a definition, I’d like to propose: an LMS is a database application that manages the intersection of learners and instruction, provides a virtual classroom for the affordance of that connection, and provides centralized administrative support for learners, instructors, and accreditors The CMS acronym was invented by the vendor segment that deals with higher education and stands for Courseware Management System. The Blackboard platform we use in this class is called a CMS. This is a particularly inaccurate acronym because CMS also stands for Content Management System which are used to manage websites. Let’s ban the affiliation of CMS with anything other than content. LCMS stands for Learning and Content Management System. As LMS products became expected to manage content in addition to learning plans, vendors began integrating CMS—content management—features. In fact, most LMS products today are actually an LCMS. VLE is an acronym that is used most heavily in Europe and Australia higher education circles and stands for Virtual Learning Environment. There is little difference between an academic LMS and a VLE. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence—again, starting in Europe and the UK—of the term PLE or Personal Learning Environment. To some extent, a PLE has been driven by the development of Web 2.0 tools; however, even before flickr or delicious, academics were proposing that blogs could be used to create ePortfolios and form the basis of a PLE. The lack of an administrative interface or even an instruction component has hindered the widespread growth of PLE’s: what university is going to pay a million dollars for a system that essentially gives students publishing space that they could get for free? At the same time, the constructive focus of PLE’s is driving significant changes in academic LMS’s.
So why do we need an LMS? Couldn’t we do the same thing with Excel or Access or even yellow sticky notes? Sure—but it would be painful to the instructor (and not what he or she was hired to do) and inefficient for the corporate training manager (with hundreds or thousands of employees and hundreds of courses in prescribed certification sequences). To avoid that pain, an LMS serves two primary functions. The first function I call administrivia; however, don’t let that imply that these functions are trivial—they are not as important as the learning or the instruction, but as everyone in this class knows, we count on being registered so we can get credit for taking the class. Registration is the central aspect of administrivia and is typically accomplished by a data feed from a university SIS or Student Information System to the LMS; in the corporate world, this same function is accomplished by a data feed from a corporation’s human resources or HR database to the LMS. Registration is what gave us access to Blackboard in this class and makes our courses show up in our personalized list in Blackboard. The other aspect of administrivia is assessment—not always the assessment instrument itself, but at least the grade on the assessment. Why is this important? All courses require a record-keeping aspect—be they academic or corporate training or certification exams. An LMS houess these records along with our registration—the fact that we were enrolled in the course. It’s our proof that we deserve our grade. The second function of an LMS is centralization. A centralized and common location for all our course functions gives us a focal point: we login to Blackboard, and we have access to our course readings, to external sites like our blog, and to our discussion board. We don’t have to keep three separate URLs for these separate functions, nor do we even have different locations to go for different courses. In this sense, the LMS is like our virtual campus The other aspect of centralization is as a file repository for our work—our discussions and our assignments—like a mini-ePortfolio. For these reasons the use of an LMS makes a lot of sense.
However, if you accept my basic premise that a specific LMS doesn’t matter, the value of differentiating these systems purely on the basis of functionality is moot. Even if you don’t accept my argument, the differentiation of LMS products on the basis of features is specific to an individual implementation. In other words, until you actually need to select an LMS for a specific organization with specific learning needs and a specific culture, it makes little sense to categorize the products purely on features. At the same time, it is useful to distinguish two general types of systems on the basis of the target learner: Academic systems Course are designed to be managed and led by instructors Access is designed (within a defined curriculum) to be by learner selection Key characteristic: use of a variety of communication tools, from email to discussion boards to chat For example, announcements are used due to length of time the course runs Corporate systems Courses are designed (for the most part) to be self-paced Access is designed (for the most part) to be by training plan Key characteristic: use of a variety of management tools, from progress tracking to reminder emails delivered to a tiered hierarchy of managers For example, if a learner hasn’t completed a required certification exam, the system will send a series of escalating emails
Let’s look at the differences in more depth because these distinctions will also help elaborate on the benefits and characteristics of learning management systems. From the point of view of Moore’ s theory of transactional distance, one lens for looking at online courses is the nature of student-content, student-instructor, and student-student interaction. So, let’s look at the interaction possibilities. In academic systems, content interaction is minimal while in corporate systems, content is generally extensive. As a result, corporate courses tend to include more multimedia because the content must carry the full extent of the instruction and the content is usually delivered to a larger learner population (which in turn supports a more extensive production budget). An emerging trend in corporate courses is the pairing of audio with PowerPoint slides. Low-cost and easy to use software applications—Captivate, Articulate, Camtasia to name three—have enabled corporate trainers to quickly convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash “movies” from the desktop. However, unless the original PowerPoint training was systematically designed—as we’ve done in this class—the result is ineffective content with audio. In academic systems, instructor interaction is extensive; because the faculty member carries a portion of the semantic weight of the course content, some level of direct instruction is usually necessary, if only from posing the, “big questions,” on the discussion board. In addition, the instructor typically performs the assessment function, grading assignments and providing feedback. In corporate systems, assessment is usually conveyed via feedback mechanisms within the course itself and then delivered via the LMS in the form of a score; a passing score sometimes means access to another course in a defined training plan. However, research from the Open University in the UK has shown that limiting feedback to computer responses increases learner attrition or drop-out; in addition, as we’ve seen with some of our designs, the creation of effective computer responses requires anticipating a large variety of learner actions and thus requires extensive time which equates to money. As a result, corporations are starting to adopt online, usually synchronous, instructor-student interaction in the form of training webcasts using tools like WebEx and GoToMeeting. These tools allow a trainer to “broadcast” training from her desktop with an inexpensive web camera; the more sophisticated tools include the ability to poll users, share a virtual whiteboard, and even take control of a learner’s desktop for demonstration. Finally, in academic systems, learner interaction is extensive; witness the blog responses in our own class, and in 100% online courses, we typically see even larger numbers of student-student interaction. In corporate systems, because the focus is on the learner’s personalized training or certification or compliance plan (even though that student belongs to a defined group with a common learning plan), student-student interaction within the course or LMS is usually minimal. At the same time, if we consider the concept of communities of practice, learner-learner interaction probably occurs outside the course or LMS in the real world.
Academic and corporate LMS’s also handle administrative tasks differently, primarily due to differences in learning cultures. In academic systems, learner access to courses is controlled by the school’s student information system or by the instructor—never by the learner herself. However, in corporate systems with a prevalence of adult learners, access is often offered to a catalog of prescribed courses (created by the Human Resources department based on the training plan required for the employee and her job function) and open courses available to anyone for the purpose of self-enrichment. In an academic system, learners are managed (generally) by a single instructor while in corporate systems, learners are managed by the system itself (following a training plan that resembles a workflow) with monitoring (as necessary) by the employee’s manager. In the area of completion, an academic LMS usually sets a course to be complete according to a specific date—the last day of a semester. Completion is measured by a defined time period: your course is over at the end of that time period (except in the case of an Incomplete). In a corporate LMS, course completion is defined by a mastery threshold, such as a specific score on a post-test assessment. Whether it takes you a day, a week or a month, your course is complete when you are complete. In a corporate LMS, mastery is associated with job behavior and performance, and the larger corporate systems incorporate what’s called 3600 feedback: course completion and scores are correlated with subsequent performance evaluations and even follow-up interviews with the learner’s manager and co-workers. A disturbing trend in the corporate world—although this is not caused by the LMS but simply enabled by it—is to define completion and mastery as the amount of time spent in the course.
Delivery transparency also varies between academic and corporate systems. Corporate systems handle all types of delivery mechanisms—from online to hybrid to classroom and more. Academic systems are usually geared to online and hybrid courses; most universities would never require that every face to face class utilize a Blackboard course as the gradebook. Content interoperability is usually defined as adherence to the SCORM specification, an amalgamation of proposals from LMS and courseware vendors to allow content built for one LMS to run in another. SCORM was driven by the Department of Defense, and thus adherence to this specification is critical for any LMS vendor seeking use by the armed forces. As a result, every corporate LMS incorporates SCORM as a standard content type, while academic LMS’s usually handle SCORM as an add-on. Finally, the actual physical location of the LMS servers varies by segment: corporate LMS’s are almost always housed on the corporation’s premises, while academic LMS’s are often hosted by the vendor in an Application Service Provider (or ASP) model. While both segments have privacy and security concerns, corporate users have additional competitive concerns that mandate a local installation. I hope this first section has convinced you of the value and the role of the LMS in both the academic and corporate learning markets. Now, let’s look at some of these products, and let’s see if—at the end—you agree that an LMS is an LMS.
Let’s get out of PowerPoint now and actually look at some LMS’s. We’re going to look at three academic systems—Blackboard, Desire to Learn, and Moodle—and one corporate system, Alchemy. What we’ll see is that content, loaded as self-contained learning objects, runs just the same across all these systems. That student-instructor via submission of assignments and the resulting feedback is the same mechanism (although called different names). And that student-student interaction is enabled in all the systems although more varied in the academic systems than in Alchemy; at the same time, Alchemy has a built-in workflow and training plan hierarchy that the three academic systems don’t have or need. At the end of this tour I hope you’ll agree with the opening premise of this presentation: it doesn’t matter which LMS you use as long as you use one.
