World-Shaker

Using the Facebook group as a learning management system: An exploratory study →

A really interesting academic article. You can download the PDF here if you don’t feel like clicking through to read the whole thing.

Five Tips for Faculty Working with an Educational Technology Designer

1) Trust me. I know how to use at least two different learning management systems, including the one at our school. I can train you to use at least a dozen different technologies to help you create interesting multimedia or content for your online course. I’m familiar with all the things that do and don’t work about Blackboard. This is my job. I’m good at it. Trust me.

2) Have some humility. It’s okay if you don’t know what a measurable objective is, or how to write a rubric. I do. I can teach you how to do that. It’s cool: You’re a college faculty member, which means you didn’t jump through the hoops of pedagogical training and teaching licensure that your K-12 colleagues have. And I’d be happy to show you the best ways to do these things if you would just…

3) …Stop fighting me. You think this course won’t work online. So did all the other faculty I’ve worked with. With respect, I’m going to prove you wrong. And stop complaining about objectives. The reason you don’t like my way of doing them isn’t because my way is wrong (it isn’t), it’s because it’s not easy. Writing objectives the right way is hard. It’s time consuming. So is making a proper rubric with defined criteria, appropriate levels of proficiency and clear examples of what it means to meet them. I know how to do this, and I will take the time to share what I know with you. Stop fighting me.

4) Follow my process. I don’t like wasting time. I’m probably building a few other courses alongside yours, or at least working on about two other projects at any given moment. My process is refined and structured to be as efficient and easy as possible for everyone involved, especially you. No, you can’t start building your schedule or syllabus until you’ve finished your course level objectives. Why? Because those objectives should define and guide every learning activity and every piece of learning material that goes into that course. If you do it the other way around, it’ll be a huge mess, you won’t have any focus, and I’ll be adding in content at the last minute as you scramble around trying to figure out what you forgot. Because you didn’t follow my process. Follow my process.

5) Keep some perspective. While my job responsibilities may include helping you build your course, you are not by any means my only project. When you miss your deadlines, it puts me behind and steals my focus from other work I have to do. I am not here just for you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have my full attention at our meetings (you do), or during the time I block out to build your course and content. But if you don’t meet your deadlines and provide me with content, I can’t build it for you. I also have to divert time from my other responsibilities to finish something I could have done for you earlier. Please don’t think you can put off working on your course, or miss a deadline because you are under the impression that your course is the only thing on my plate.

Those are my top five. Anyone have anything else to add?

Coursekit, a Student-Created LMS, Officially Launches →

It’s a pretty compelling idea, even more so given that it was student-developed rather than corporate. Click through if you’d like to learn a bit more.

I’ve asked several times this year (here, here, and here) if the education world really needs another LMS. Regardless of how boring the Blackboard-bashing has become (to me personally at least), the number of new entrants in the LMS field does indicate that folks believe there’s room for competition and improvement. Certainly there is still a strong (and overwhelmingly negative) response to the incumbent players. As such, almost everyone in the learning management system industry now says that they’re rethinking what an LMS should do.

That includes, of course, Coursekit, which is taking a more social approach than administrative approach to the LMS. “Our goal is to turn courses into communities online,” says CEO Cohen. Doing so “transforms the learning experience from something that happens twice a week into a continuous conversation.”

"We have some concerns,” says Sam Segran, chief technology officer at Texas Tech University. “Any time somebody goes into private equity, one of the concerns we have is profit motivation and less motivation in terms of meeting educational needs."

—

You’re just now starting to have this concern with Blackboard?

News: Blackboard Gets Bought - Inside Higher Ed

The Real LMS Failure (Hint: We Should Look in the Mirror) →

Interesting read over at Inside Higher Ed:

The fact is that it matters little to our students if the LMS is proprietary or open source, and the advanced features we spend so much time wishing for are useless without investments that result in good course design. If we want to get the most out of whatever LMS we have on campus we need to:

• Invest in people to partner with our faculty to help design, develop and run courses. These people include learning designers, media specialists, educational technologists, and librarians.

• Engage in systematic course re-design, particularly for our large introductory lecture courses.

• Be willing to move to models of blended learning that invert the classroom, freeing up precious face-to-face time for discussion, debate and hands on work, and moving much of the lecture portion of the course to asynchronous platforms.

• Utilize analytics from a range of learning outcomes to discover, reinforce and scale best teaching practices and methods, and to facilitate targeted early intervention for students who are at risk of having poor outcomes in gateway courses.

U. of Pennsylvania Students Build Course-Management Software →

Joseph Cohen says he’s fed up with Blackboard. The leading course-management software is overloaded with features and dreadfully designed, making simple tasks difficult, says Mr. Cohen, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s not much kinder to other solutions: “It’s ridiculous,” he says, that some professors still post syllabi as clunky Microsoft Word documents.

Mr. Cohen and a classmate, Dan Getelman, have launched Coursekit, a stripped-down online learning-management system that offers a discussion board, a calendar, a syllabus, and related resources for courses at Penn. Mr. Cohen says he hopes Coursekit’s simple interface and Facebook-inspired tools will help make online discussions in a course as social as the course itself.

“It’s the classic example of a bloated and bad industry,” he says, “and we think it’s about time that it ends.”

TH-ROWS THA HAMMA DOWN!

No, but seriously. How long until Blackboard buys or sues them? Repeat after me: Competition is good.

Google: Groupon? Not Blackboard? →

Google should buy Blackboard and take the following actions:

• Move gBlackboard as quickly as the market will bear to an all cloud-based, multi-tenancy delivery system. This will drastically reduce implementation costs, allowing the price of the software to drop quickly.

• Deeply integrate gBlackboard with Google Apps for Education, gDrive (Google Storage), and the content available on YouTube/EDU.

• Follow a plan to bring the licensing fee for public institutions to gBlackboard down to zero.

A no-cost high quality LMS, integrated with the educational content and collaboration tools developing under the Google umbrella, could significantly lower the costs for postsecondary education in the wealthy world — and extend educational opportunities to the rest of the planet. Google would give educational platforms away for free for the same reason it gives gMail and Google Docs away. Free is the best method to aggregate huge audiences, gather data on their behaviors, and deliver relevant advertising.

OOOOH, and I was with him RIGHT until the last part about advertising. Because nothing says learning experience like Cialis text ads?

Moodle 2.0 Boosts Integration and Web 2.0 Features →

The latest 2.0 release, formally launched last week (Thanksgiving day), adds a wide range of new capabilities as well as improvements to the core functionality found in earlier releases. Moodle 2.0 allows users to set up “community hubs,” which are searchable directories of courses for public or private use that allow teachers to publish and advertise their own courses. It also adds support for standards-based Web services throughout, cohorts (groups of users that can be enrolled in a course through a single action), prerequisites, and conditions for course completion. And it adds new content block types, including comments for any page, community monitoring, status updates, and private files.

Schoology Aims to Fix One of the Greatest Pain Points of Education →

Schoology is a startup that seeks to address many of the pain points of the LMS: Schoology is easy to use. It’s free. It offers data portability. It encourages communication and collaboration with look and feel of contemporary social networking sites rather than the bulletin boards of circa 1996. But it isn’t simply a social networking tool. Schoology provides the functionality of its big name competitors - Blackboard, Moodle.

This is a really cool idea, and I hope it’s successful. I just can’t shake this feeling that it looks so familiar…

Moodle 2.0 versus Blackboard 9.1 – a Brief Comparison →

Not as in-depth as I’d like to see, but a good “feet wet” kind of article.

Moodle and Blackboard are both popular online learning platforms with which educators can develop complete online course that can include multimedia content. But how do the two compare to each other and what are the benefits unique to each course delivery system? We will explore some of these benefits in this article, discussing Moodle 2.0 and Blackboard 9.1 respectively.

Getting Faculty Buy-in for the LMS →

According to Jeff King, in 10 years people are going to have a new understanding about the true value of the learning management system (LMS)—as a tool for keeping track of learning outcomes. “And that’s gold,” proclaimed the director for the Koehler Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas Christian University, a private college with 8,800 students in Ft. Worth. The Koehler Center’s job is to work with instructors in developing their teaching and learning skills. “If I’m the instructor, I’m assessing my students, and I’m making discoveries about my course design—and that really invigorates teaching.”

If it’s so great, why do only 80 percent of the faculty at Texas Christian use the LMS? Why not all of them? King wants to do all he can to get those one in five holdouts into the fold, short of a mandate by the faculty senate. That effort involves a multi-pronged effort encompassing faculty training, excellent technical support, a pedagogical refocus on learning outcomes, and ultimately allowing students to pressure faculty to use the LMS.

Here’s an interesting lunchtime read.

Blackboard Learn Certified for Accessibility by National Federation of the Blind →

It only took 9 major revisions and the complete destruction-via-buyout of all their major competitors, but Blackboard’s finally done something worthwhile.