Online Learning: We’re doing it wrong.
Imagine that you are walking across a busy neighborhood. The four blocks or so that you cover in a given day are familiar to you, there is a sort of order to the day to day chaos. You turn down an alleyway and arrive at a very small door. You have business on the other side of it. You go in, do your business, and then leave and go back out into your neighborhood.
But wait. There’s more. You find that you must visit that little door regularly and sometimes at odd hours. No matter what you are doing you must stop, get up and move from where you are to the little door. You cannot access it from anywhere but that place except in the most cursory ways. In fact, most of the messages you get while you are going about the rest of your day amount to some version or other of “Come here! We need you!”
This is an LMS.
It is not like real life. It is not like a regular classroom. It is a system that we have outgrown.
I think that the original ideas for learning management systems were well done. I think they were a structure that was logically built out of the way we taught in the classroom crossed with the structure of correspondence courses. Information traveled much differently. The idea of a personal information stream was unheard of. Now we live our lives around the management of how we process and organize streams of information. That includes everything from emails, social networking, to videos and funny photos of cats. Those who don’t, will.
The major issue here is that the philosophy of the LMS never changed. Originally it was a frontage road to a location for students to access course materials. Now students are living next to an interstate and what was once a handy and convenient path is now a cumbersome and inefficient side trip, to a cul de sac.
And sure, there are mobile apps for most LMS’s. but regardless of how well they work, all they can ever be is an additional tiny door. The current trends in LMS development seem to move toward acquiring and privatizing more than it is to being open and sharing. So the disconnect becomes wider and no one seems to care because we are “improving our LMS.”
But the workings of the LMS are not the issue, its existence is.
To a point, some central location needs to keep information, deliver assignments, keep a gradebook. These work well both in class and online. Even in traditional classroom a central gathering is taking place 2 or 3 times a week. The LMS is also tied to the institution, like your classroom.
But there has to be some other component that is there for engagement, not delivery. The discussion board option in an LMS is frustratingly limited. Even creative use of the discussion board rarely sparks anything resembling a good classroom conversation. Students speak about what they are asked to speak about to get a grade and move on. Why offer off topic observations, new ideas or random thoughts to that environment when, 1) it’s not what you’re suppose to be talking about 2) in a bad situation you might actually lose points for doing so. It is much easier to add something to a verbal conversation than a written one. Or at least a conversation structure that is modeled off of systems that students already use for casual conversation.
What we need is a communication component that is integrated into a student AND faculty’s stream of information. Something they are going to interact with on the street, saving the little door for occasional visits. The flow of information happening in real time to be interacted with in a number of different ways with all of the class being able to ask questions, add links or photos, encourage and just chat.
Consumption is not education. Real learning takes place when students understand how the content fits in with the rest of their lives and experiences. We can deliver our content in sterile, isolated packages and hope that they draw the connections themselves, or we can drag the content out into the rest of the world and weave it into their daily life.
Learning is messy and organic. Good teaching is as much instinct as it is proficiency. The classroom environment is a laboratory for the exchange of thoughts and ideas. We need a platform where that can truly happen online. An e-classroom.
And really, that component seems to be Google+. Or at least I hope it is.
More to come.
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