42 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. . While LMS vendors seek to create an environment that provides an all-encompassing PLE, the fact that they are closed networks and that they are platforms built to meet the needs of entire institutions means that they usually are not personalised enough to meet the needs of a connected learner, who is (most often) already used to the flexibility and ownership web 2.0 tools provide.

      This is important. I have been saying for awhile now that without properly planning an LMS space, it is merely a repository (much like an old dusty library but without the interesting discoveries).

  2. Dec 2020
    1. Microsoft says it will make changes in its new Productivity Score feature, including removing the ability for companies to see data about individual users, to address concerns from privacy experts that the tech giant had effectively rolled out a new tool for snooping on workers.

      It's great that MS has reacted so quickly to the outcry around the privacy of workers.

      I thought it would be super-interesting to see how academics might have responded to the idea of institutional administrators keeping tabs on the number of hours that they'd spent in meetings (via Teams), composing and reading emails (via Outlook), writing articles (via Word), and so on.

      And yet these would be the same academics who do this kind of monitoring of student work.

  3. Nov 2019
    1. Twitter offers two distinct benefits to engaging learners. First of all, it allows learners to respond to classroom discussions in a way that feels right for them, offering shy or introverted students a chance to participate in the class discussion without having to speak in a public forum. Secondly, it allows students to continue the conversation after class is completed, posting relevant links to course material, and reaching out to you (the educator) with additional thoughts or questions.

      The article explains how social media, student learning through digital experience, and Learning Management Systems can be beneficial to the learner/student. Article Rating: 3/5

  4. Nov 2018
    1. An Adult Learner Reflects on Technology in Higher Education

      Elizabeth Cox describes her experience as an adult learner and how technology has positively impacted that experience. She specifically mentions a few learning management systems and online tools and how they were excellent at making the course content available any time and any place. Rating: 5/5

  5. Nov 2017
    1. an environment unlike anything they will encounter outside of school

      Hm? Aren’t they likely to encounter Content Management Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Intranets, etc.? Granted, these aren’t precisely the same think as LMS. But there’s quite a bit of continuity between Drupal, Oracle, Moodle, Sharepoint, and Salesforce.

    2. mandate the use of "learning management systems."

      Therein lies the rub. Mandated systems are a radically different thing from “systems which are available for use”. This quote from the aforelinked IHE piece is quite telling:

      “I want somebody to fight!” Crouch said. “These things are not cheap -- 300 grand or something like that? ... I want people to want it! When you’re trying to buy something, you want them to work at it!”

      In the end, it’s about “procurement”, which is quite different from “adoption” which is itself quite different from “appropriation”.

    3. institutional demands for enterprise services such as e-mail, student information systems, and the branded website become mission-critical

      In context, these other dimensions of “online presence” in Higher Education take a special meaning. Reminds me of WPcampus. One might have thought that it was about using WordPress to enhance learning. While there are some presentations on leveraging WP as a kind of “Learning Management System”, much of it is about Higher Education as a sector for webwork (-development, -design, etc.).

    4. Five Arguments against the Learning Management System
    1. “I want somebody to fight!” Crouch said. “These things are not cheap -- 300 grand or something like that? ... I want people to want it! When you’re trying to buy something, you want them to work at it! [Instructure] just didn’t.”
    2. two quarters of pilot courses on Instructure’s Canvas platform
    3. To the surprise of those behind the initiative, about two-thirds of faculty members said they were satisfied with the Blackboard system, deployed on campus in 1999.
    1. the terrible, horrible, no-good university administrators are trying to build a panopticon in which they can oppress the faculty
    2. If you recall your LMS patent infringement history, then you'll remember that roles and permissions were exactly the thing that Blackboard sued D2L over.
    3. (At the time, Stephen Downes mocked me for thinking that this was an important aspect of LMS design to consider.)

      An interesting case where Stephen’s tone might have drowned a useful discussion. FWIW, flexible roles and permissions are among the key things in my own personal “spec list” for a tool to use with learners, but it’s rarely possible to have that flexibility without also getting a very messy administration. This is actually one of the reasons people like WordPress.

    4. Do you know what the feature set was that had faculty from Albany to Anaheim falling to their knees, tears of joy streaming down their faces, and proclaiming with cracking, emotion-laden voices, "Finally, an LMS company that understands me!"?

      While this whole bit is over-the-top, à la @mfeldstein67, must admit that my initial reaction was close to that. For a very similar reason. Still haven’t had an opportunity to use Canvas with learners, but the overall workflow for this type of feature really does make a big difference. The openness aspect is very close to gravy. After all, there are ways to do a lot of work in the open without relying on any LMS. But the LMS does make a huge difference in terms of such features as quickly grading learners’ work.

    5. Why, they would build an LMS. They did build an LMS. Blackboard started as a system designed by a professor and a TA at Cornell University. Desire2Learn (a.k.a. Brightspace) was designed by a student at the University of Waterloo. Moodle was the project of a graduate student at Curtin University in Australia. Sakai was built by a consortium of universities. WebCT was started at the University of British Columbia. ANGEL at Indiana University.
    6. Let's imagine a world in which universities, not vendors, designed and built our online learning environments.
    7. the backbone of for a distributed network of personal learning environments
    8. the tools shouldn’t dictate the choice
  6. courses.openulmus.org courses.openulmus.org
    1. Currently, Canvas and Sakai are the only LMSs reviewed which has somesupport for xAPI (emphasis on some). Blackboard, D2L, Sakai and Canvas all have support for IMS Caliper, a more edu specific format.
    1. An institution has implemented a learning management system (LMS). The LMS contains a learning object repository (LOR) that in some aspects is populated by all users across the world  who use the same LMS.  Each user is able to align his/her learning objects to the academic standards appropriate to that jurisdiction. Using CASE 1.0, the LMS is able to present the same learning objects to users in other jurisdictions while displaying the academic standards alignment for the other jurisdictions (associations).

      Sounds like part of the problem Vitrine technologie-éducation has been tackling with Ceres, a Learning Object Repository with a Semantic core.

    1. Enhanced learning experience Graduate students now receive upgraded iPads, and all students access course materials with Canvas, a new learning management software. The School of Aeronautics is now the College of Aeronautics; and the College of Business and Management is hosting a business symposium Nov. 15.

      This from a university which had dropped Blackboard for iTunes U.

    1. Download Dr. Brad Wheeler leads university-wide IT services for IU's eight campuses. He has co-founded and led many multi-institutional collaborations with his current work focused on the Unizin Consortium, Kuali, and IU’s mass Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative.
    1. Information from this will be used to develop learning analytics software features, which will have these functions: Description of learning engagement and progress, Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress, Prediction of learning progress, and Prescription (recommendations) for improvement of learning progress.

      As good a summary of Learning Analytics as any.

    1. Better yet, tangerines and oranges.

      Is that about the colours favoured by both platforms? Does sound like it weakens the point (going from comparing fruits to comparing one citrus with another). The point, eventually, is that Canvas and Moodle occupy a similar space: course-based “learning” management systems.

  7. Oct 2017
    1. It’s precisely to meet these demands that Cegid recently launched a Learning Management System (LMS) specifically dedicated to Healthcare, a sector that is converting more and more to cloud-based systems.

      Norman's Law of eLearning Tool Convergence

      Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

  8. Sep 2017
    1. I think a lot of faculty are still at the point where they need a stack of papers and red pen.

      Emphasis on “still”. Direction of change?

    1. LMSs limit the visibility of copyrighted course content to only course participants for the duration that they need it. (Of course, this would become a moot point if using openly licensed OERs.)
    2. Over the course of many years, every school has refined and perfected the connections LMSs have into a wide variety of other campus systems including authentication systems, identity management systems, student information systems, assessment-related learning tools, library systems, digital textbook systems, and other content repositories. APIs and standards have decreased the complexity of supporting these connections, and over time it has become easier and more common to connect LMSs to – in some cases – several dozen or more other systems. This level of integration gives LMSs much more utility than they have out of the box – and also more “stickiness” that causes them to become harder to move away from. For LMS alternatives, achieving this same level of connectedness, particularly considering how brittle these connections can sometimes become over time, is a very difficult thing to achieve.
  9. Aug 2017
    1. This has much in common with a customer relationship management system and facilitates the workflow around interventions as well as various visualisations.  It’s unclear how the at risk metric is calculated but a more sophisticated predictive analytics engine might help in this regard.

      Have yet to notice much discussion of the relationships between SIS (Student Information Systems), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and LMS (Learning Management Systems).

  10. Mar 2017
  11. Nov 2015