ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
Summary: Remember way back in the day when I said 2011 would be all about the platform? That platform is your LMS, whatever flavor you might choose.
There were lots of take-homes from ISTE. It's a big conference with a lot of smart people trying to change the way we educate our students and leverage the vast technological resources at our disposal. It's also a big conference with a lot of people trying to sell you a lot of stuff.
One thing, though, with the potential to help unify all of these tools, techniques, new pedagogy, and digital learning resources is the LMS, aka, the Learning Management System. It seemed that everyone was trying to get into the LMS business at ISTE and, if they weren't trying to get into it, were already deeply in it and were trying to make sure that plenty of new customers were on board as well. Several businesses had built businesses just around Moodle, the most popular open source LMS.
Other companies were integrating LMS features into their own products, whatever those were. Often they were content companies who wanted to surface their learning resources somewhere useful. Others were providing turnkey, all-in-one LMS/CMS/SIS platforms. Hosting companies specializing in LMS products for schools were easy to find as well: Moodlerooms was a major sponsor of ISTE.
None of this is a bad thing. It simply means a lot more choices and harder decisions for educators looking to bring their learning resources under the umbrella of an LMS. While Moodle used to be the default K12 choice and Blackboard the default for universities, the breadth and depth of learning management systems and LMS-like tools has increased drastically. Moodle remains an awesome choice (whether in K12 or higher ed) and Blackboard still has considerable traction (OK, it has a whole lot of traction) in post-secondary. Blackboard was at ISTE as well and was making an obvious K12 play.
But the market is no longer about these 2 players (despite their important roles). The market is about finding that one platform to rule them all and ensure that students and teachers have access to learning resources (say it with me, you know what's coming) anytime, anywhere.
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Talkback
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
Moodle is easy to customise and runs all our advanced interactive multimedia modules as SCORM.
Moodle is a shining exception in the dross that is usually open source.
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
I've worked a few LMS over the years and Moodle is most certainly my preference.
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
While I think Moodle is absolutely awesome. You can hardly say that all the rest are "holes in the ground you pour money into." We use Moodle at our college, but I have recently been test out Canvas and it is leaps and bounds ahead of Moodle in the UI department. I know many schools struggle to get their faculty using Moodle. I think this is due to its complexity. It could be said, perhaps, that none are as powerful as Moodle with as many options as Moodle. But this is part of what makes Moodle complex. It has so many options that it can be bewildering for some.
By contrast, Canvas, while powerful has the most intuitive UI I have seen and incorporates the most needed and most used functions of any LMS. We are contemplating moving to Canvas from Moodle.
Canvas recently opened its source and is now available as FOSS. Many of you will recall that Chris wrote on this a few months ago. It is well worth a look...
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
No it wasn't just your University, those complaints have been aired so many times in so many Universities that we could settle with the conclusion that they are not bugs but Blackboard idiosyncratic (if not idiotic) "features".
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
If it does not work on Apple, then I am guessing it is Safari...try firefox and see how it goes...
Thank God you still don't have an "LMS"
The boxy and ugly design, the confusing user interface getting in the way of the topic, the clunky performance, the inability to accommodate my own communication options from within the platform itself, the brainless "choose the right option" exercises, the rigid and linear progression...
Isn't it funny that the more we progress into the digital age the more these so called learning tools resemble both a monotonous and rigid Victorian classroom in its form and a shambolic UNO tent-school in its execution?
But who's to blame? Educators? Hell, no! They haven't seen anything better yet, the bar is still placed pretty much at ground level when compared to all the cognitive and educational studies produced so far and is nudged a millimetre at a time by the people who engineer (without architecting) these tools. Is it the companies' fault, then? Absolutely not, as I said they are engineers, not educators, what can you expect from people who think in terms of algorithms instead of cognition? Those LMS engineers must go back to the classroom, that would be a start.
If you want to make a quick buck on education my advice is go get an LFS, a Lesson Filing System, as I think these platforms should be called given what they are really delivering and put all your boring powerpoint presentations and word documents out there and sell it as "training". If you want to really work on online education, stay put, don't buy anything and wait until competition gets to a point they have no other option than produce something that is fit for education indeed instead of those engineer-created, marketing-laden monstrosities we unleashed under the label of "learning" in the digital realm. Hide your kids.
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?
Hooray competition!
I'm so glad you wrote this post; there is a dire need for shrinking such an inefficient market and bringing a more competitive edge to the landscape, and indeed, it looks like a lot of innovative companies are starting to enter the space to bring educators tools that are better, faster, and cheaper.
It is high time :)
Hear hear!
RE: ISTE take-home message #3: What do you mean you don't have an LMS yet?