Thread:Insidious pedagogy (4)

Taking the opportunity to put my toes into the DEHub water on a topic that's close to my heart - the problems and evils associated with the CMS/LMS plague (my bias should now be clear).

Folk might be interested in the brief blog post Lisa Lane made after the article was published, not to mention the comments.

I outlined some of my initial responses to the article in a blog post last year.

There are a number of solutions, I suggested three
 * 1) Encourage and enable academics to improve their use of the Internet, especially social media, in research and their private life.
 * 2) Modify the institutional context to encourage, enable and reward an active focus on improving learning and teaching.
 * 3) Adopt a best of breed or small pieces loosely joined alternative to the LMS.

Solutions #1 and #2 offer the potential to address the second criticism of the LMS (most use is for content delivery). The proposition is that if more staff are comfortable and familiar with technology, especially those used for collaboration and communication, then they are more likely to think about using it in their teaching and learning. However, that's only likely if the institutional context actually encourages them to engage in novelty around learning and teaching. I would argue that the vast majority of academics see rewards coming from places other than learning and teaching.

There's also the problem that most of the social media and other Internet tools people are likely to use in their research and personal life are likely to be significantly better than the clunky and limited alternatives provided by LMSes.

This is connected to solution #3 and is also a criticism of the LMS based on its product model. Essentially, an LMS is an integrated system. The sweet spot of integrated systems is in areas of low variability, low diversity and low change. I have argued that e-learning falls well outside this sweet spot. More detail available in this post on product models and this one on procurement strategies which formed part of the foundation for a presentation I gave last year.