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(This is a text summary of the He Said She Said podcast from October 20, 2005. This is a bi-weekly podcast that deals with a wide range of topic on Education and Educational Technology. The show’s host is Rob Reynolds and he is joined by Susan Smith Nash. The He Said She Said podcast is available every Wednesday and Friday on Xplana Radio.)

Briefly…

This podcast addresses the concept of the Learning Management System (LMS) and the role it should and does occupy in the education space. In particular, we’re concerned in this podcast with the over-valuation of the LMS as a solution for designing good curricula and generating valuable content. Susan and Rob both agree that the proper designation of the LMS is as one of many possible tools.

She Said:

Which is more important: academic goals and outcomes, or, getting to know your LMS? The answer is not as transparent as it might seem.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have evolved to the point that they are indispensable tools for online and flexible learning. Not only do they contain features that allow the posting of academic content, they also allow integration of widely disparate databases, which include registration, enrollment management, bursar, and records databases.

As wonderfully useful as they are, they also present academic units with a challenge. How flexible are these powerhouses? And, if they are flexible, how complicated is it to learn how to use them?

Blinding array of LMS choices. In the last ten years, I’ve worked in a hands-on way with multiple iterations of many learning management systems, some now defunct, or devoured by others. These have included Blackboard, WebCT, Prometheus, Desire2Learn, Lotus Learning Space, as well as experience with proprietary systems and a few open-source solutions, including Moodle and Chef.

Round pegs into square holes? In each situation, the challenges confronting the instructors, developers, administrators, and curriculum specialists are similar. One has to figure out how to make round pegs to into square holes.

The way to present content and to create an ideal online learning environment does not often have much to do with the way that the learning management system is configured.

Further, the underlying assumption is that the LMS has divined the one ideal manner to present information, facilitate interactivity, allow assessment, maintain records for grades, etc.

This leads to what I consider to be the “tyranny of the LMS” — which is to say that it is tempting to start looking at the constraints of the LMS first, and making academic goals and learning outcomes secondary to simply keeping the LMS behemoth alive and running smoothly.

He Said

This topic was a natural for us after the announced merger of WebCT and BlackBoard. Heck, if you’ve been in the business long enough you’ve probably used a number of different LMS platforms. You may have started out with a homegrown solution, migrated to your school’s first adopted LMS, and then onto another. What that experience has likely taught you is the following:

• Current LMS platforms are tool not turnkey learning solutions
• LMS platforms are just one of many possible and important tools in the online learning enterprise
• These platforms do not take the place of good teachers and good content
• LMS platforms are most valuable when their “technology” is more transparent than the learning process

Susan and I both agree that the current slate of LMS players won’t be the last, and that the issues surrounding these technology tools will be the same that we deal with regarding future technologies.

Personally, I wish BlackBoard and WebCT all the luck in the world.

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