no significant change

Unsurprisingly, neither of these domains has led to significant change to the traditional roles of or relationships between teachers and learners.

The unstoppable democratization of the web

backward design

exoskeleton for the mind

We must utilize the tools we have at our disposal to finally close Benjamin Bloom's 2-sigma gap in achievement between personally tutored students and students in a traditional classroom.

we face an urgent societal need to fully, efficiently, and effectively help all individuals realize their potential as learners and practitioners across an expected lifetime of learning

the NGDLE offers a way for institutions to more easily extract and share their learning community’s personal data with a wide range of sources, something that should deeply disturb us in the post-Snowden era. But the real kicker is, how do we get anyone to not only acknowledge this process of extraction and monetization (because I think folks have), but to actually feel empowered enough to even care.

NEO Learning Management System: The World’s First Comprehensive LMS

And instead of putting our resources and skills into imagining what those spaces could become for teaching and learning, we began spending a lot of money on learning managements systems and other educational technologies.

But when the LMS goes beyond merely providing administrative and management features and instead is offering features designed (perhaps badly) to build community, share information, and collaborate with others, it is obviously influencing pedagogy.

, LMS are also experiencing a paradigm shift from course to curricular management

Rather than existing as single applications, they are a “confederation of IT systems and application components that adhere to common standards ...that would enable diversity while fostering coherence.”

are limited in capacity, too narrowly focused on the administration of learning rather than the learning itself.278

dynamic social exchanges

These are positive, incremental improvements in the quality and flexibility of our classrooms, but are nowhere near being transformational (Laurillard, 2007). This is not the use of technology that I’m interested in

There is an increasingly diverse student population in today's colleges and universities, and a wide variety of modalities and course models. "Try to imagine a single application like an LMS that could possibly do justice to the wide range of needs," Brown said,

The traditional approach suggests that open online learning will consist of courses. While courses may well persist (there are occasions where a linear, focused, and deep study of a subject continues to be a good idea), they are occupying a smaller and smaller space in open online learning.

This is not easy. Well-designed educational technology has often lacked a learning sciences base, and many research-based education products have lacked a compelling user-centered design. How can world-class user experience (UX) design— grounded in a fail-fast culture—and educational research— grounded in rigor—peacefully coexist?

State of learning management systems ‘verging on embarrassing’

but what about links people might have made to my Fall course content? I won’t be updating the Fall course anymore (I’ll be updating the Spring course)

Scary stuff. Apart from the questionable ethics, it actually disempowers students by removing their agency in the learning process.

they don’t even know that their “learning pathway” is being manipluated via machine learning.

and pruning the content we could access easily.

branching

The implication is that any depth must exist within the instructional materials accessed through the system.

Canvas’ defaults encourage a simplistic, linear course with step-by-step navigation for all tasks.

An institution could retain theLMS as a core component, preserving its value as an administrative tool and a linchpin for learning data. But learning pioneers would be able to experiment and innovate by hooking apps and other functions onto the LMS. Contact with the LMS would be more indirect than direct for most users.

a fundamental flaw in combining all things labeled LMS as a single market

Making and Breaking Domain of One’s Own: Rethinking the Web in Higher Ed

Both will, however, ensure that students feel more thoroughly policed.

This page does not exist yet.

Quiz questions can be exported in IMS QTI 2.0 format.

About a decade ago, there was surge of impatience with the LMS, similar to what we are seeing today. So the community banded together and jointly wrote code to create an open source LMS, called Sakai.

Configurations Canvas Moodle Blackboard Sakai Desire2Learn

Tomorrow’s system environments will better integrate collaboration and engagement features into the user experience, allowing faculty to easily make these features an integral part of their courses and providing students with flexible, varied, and ongoing means of engagement.

the LMS is valuable for handling the administrative duties of a course, it is less successful in effectively facilitating learning, especially as higher education actively develops new course models and pedagogical approaches.

Am I asking too many questions?

Hartl’s Tenth Rule of Typesetting Any sufficiently complicated typesetting system contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of LATEX.

the LMS’s institutionally friendly attributes have an important role in shaping our thinking about teaching and learning.

Most LMS environments are not designed as places where students do work; rather, they cater to the needs of instructors. 

Limitations of any Learning Management System

Dammit, the LMS

At the core of the personal API is the radical mission to put control over data (and its access) in the hands of students. This is both a pedagogical act and a creative opportunity, informing students that they can access their own information as well as create interfaces to do with that data what they please. It gives them a seat at the tables where the edtech powers sit, moving them one step closer to a status of equality rather than that of a passive consumer.

Slack is communication software popular for handling workplace information flow, project management, customer support, and all kinds of other things.

Technologies that live within closed systems create roadblocks in students’ learning pathways.

Resolve the tensions with Moodle HQ (one way or another)

The Learning Management System (LMS) pervades the EdTech space.

course design is more important than the LMS

logical home for an open source project of just about any learning tool

a rationale for a group of large Moodle hosts to collaborate on testing plugins with an eye toward requirements that other Moodle users might not have

if one or more of the larger companies were to leave the Partner program.

most part

students’ blogs to be the LMS

LMS INTEGRATION - Soomo seamlessly supports single-sign-on access and gradebook integration with your school's learning management system.

But as David Kernohan remarks, sometimes innovation can be "the art of circumventing large monolithic systems to actually get some stuff done."

Five Arguments against the Learning Management System

An external tool can ask for an xAPI callback URL, and then POST back an interaction activity to Canvas. This will update the activity time for the user in Canvas, and add a page view for that tool. Page views will show up in the course analytics section as activity.

Traditionally, a learner's data stays within the LMS or the organization running the LMS. Unlike an LMS, the LRS and the xAPI enable the sharing of data between LRSs and other xAPI-enabled tools. This means a learner's data can follow them wherever they go, from school to school and job to job.

“Above all else, our vision of a next-generation learning experience is one where the needs and preferences of learners are placed directly at the center,” Katie Blot, senior vice president of corporate strategy and industry relations at Blackboard, said in an email. “This means an environment that is not only personalized and collaborative, but also flexible, intuitive and driven by data to help learners -- and those who support them -- make good decisions along their educational pathways.”

“The biggest elephant in the room is that a lot of the systems that are used in higher ed are very course-centric in nature,”

Finally, the report recommends learning management systems abandon the “walled garden” approach -- that “a course is either public or private.” Instead, the systems should let students move freely between public and private online spaces and capture collaborations no matter where on the internet they occur.

“We can’t just have one big chunk of code that’s going to do everything for everybody,” Brown said. “Legos work because that specification is so clear and unambiguous. As long as you observe those specifications, you’re going to snap together.”

The next-generation learning management system shouldn’t be a system at all, but a “digital learning environment” where individual components -- from grade books to analytics to support for competency-based education -- fit together like Lego bricks, a new white paper recommends.