Tamsyn Gilbert
William Cope
Reda Sadki
Jason Berg
Duane Searsmith.png "Rita van Haren")
Rita van Haren
Deidja Ngabo Alain Constant
Fazal Rizvi
Adam P Rusch
Heather A OchmanNew Learning’s Updates
On e-Learning Platforms
Looking for feedback on our forthcoming chapter...
- Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, "Platformed Learning: Reshaping Education in the Era of Learning Management Systems,” in Varieties of Platformisation: Critical Perspectives on EdTech in Higher Education, edited by Duncan A. Thomas and Vito Laterza, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
From the conclusion: Suffice it to say for now, the mainstream learning management systems are technological dinosaurs. They must be thrown away before we can realize the affordances of Web 2.0 or 3.0. Of course, this will not be without dangers (Cope and Kalantzis 2016). But if we manage to navigate the shoals of platform capitalism, there are possibilities for a new kind of learning and a new kind of society. Educators must take a leading role in the design of the next generation of learning management systems, lest the engineers yet again recreate in technology the classrooms of their childhood memory.
Langdon Winner can have our last word. “The important question about technology becomes, as we make things work, what kind of world are we making?” (Winner 1986: 17)
Full text here:
You also have to remember that most of the product managers that build LMSs have no background in the learning sciences. When product managers share user stories to the engineering team, it's not supported by evidence in the learning sciences, mostly just backed by a few customer surveys.
Additionally, the senior leadership at organizations that approve LMS purchases, don't know what to ask or look for when seeking a new system. Many are unfortunately sold by the bells and whistles the marketing team spat out, and cannot analyze the system, because they don't understand basic learning principles, nor what enhances digital learning.
All to true, Ivana! With CGScholar, we're trying to demonstrate that other things could have been possible... and could still be possible.
Bill and Mary,
Can you flesh out the term ergative?
By ergative, mean work-oriented or evidence of learning in the form of knowledge artifacts. We contrast this with evidence of learning in the form of inferences about cognition. See: https://cgscholar.com/community/community_profiles/new-learning/community_updates/158165
Hi Bill and Mary,
As you are aware, I have been engaged in a variety of learning platforms during my career, and have worked in distance learning since 1990. Our first foray into distance education in veterinary medicine was using the nascent AOL platform! As a veterinary educator, I have used Blackboard and its predecessors both at the University of Georgia and the U of I (I forgot who they bought out), and I have passing knowledge of Canvas. As you hopefully also know, am fully on board with the need for learning platforms to end the sage on the stage in medical education. It is a hard slog.
For the last 7 years, our efforts to develop a learning resource center for veterinary medicine that is both international and open source led us to selecting Moodle. You note in your discussion that Moodle is the leading LMS world-wide and it was important to us. Even though Moodle platform support has become more expensive recently, the open-source development community does provide a rich variety of plug-ins to provide various functionalities. I don't recall that the other more closed box LMS platforms do anything like this. Moodle also supports multiple languages.
For the first 6 years, we were supported by a company called Moonami that was bought out by Moodle to become Moodle US. They provided essentially unlimited technical service on the server end, for a quite reasonable annual price, but this all ended when they were bought out. I was disappointed when they didn't even seem interested in keeping our small community on their site. They have an AWS-based model of partial support, but even that was more expensive than what we were paying before.
So, this led me to personally invest a bit more time in understanding the Moodle architecture, and the core system of Moodle is actually very self-annealing allowing one to easily introduce plug-ins and themes. As with most platforms, you have to be content to test combinations of plug-ins to see how they might conflict. This is hard to predict. For example, a plugin utilizing ChatGPT (OpenAI) was recently created that can use the ChatGPT functionality to provide technical support. It works great on a plain vanilla Moodle site, but not with some themes or plug-ins. So, while most educators would not want to go down this technical road, it is quite amazing how many have taken this road. In fact, a high school educator I became acquainted with was able to develop and support a home-schooling site. Most web hosting platforms including AWS can self-install the core Moodle software. The rest of the maintenance can be handled with FTP or file level access to the server. One major technical consideration that leads to higher hosting requirements such as cloud hosting is the need to run cron the function that updates, at least once a minute. I suspect most LMS with active users have the same requirement. At any rate, I wanted to put a plug in for the open source aspect of Moodle, and the possibility of venturing out without high-level developer support.
To your points about pedagogy, most of the features that enhance the interactivity are third-party plug-ins, and you are right, do not change the primary look and feel of the LMS as a repository of information. Our choice of Moodle was in part because our mission at https://vetmedacademy.org was to provide such content building blocks to educators. Also, in the medicine sector, as you know, it is hard to skirt the issue that our students need to be introduced to a lot of content, and can only discover a small portion of what they'll need to be conversant as a practitioner. Cheers, Duncan
Thanks Duncan, you have here a very helpful case illustrating the pros and cons of Moodle. As you know, we are currently working on LTI functionality for CGScholar, which will allow Moodle to host CGScholar and CGScholar to host Moodle.
As a teacher at an tech university in Chicago, I personally state that I am a 'victim, and a survivor of Blackboard'. The subjects I teach are somewhat niche oriented... Blockchain, Internet of Things, Entrepreneurship. (NOT reading/writing/arithmetic). Like other institutes of higher learning, the organization struggled with going on-line during the pandemic. In my opinion, it became an exercise in trying to take the classical St. Benedictine version of teaching/learning, firstly replicating that system in Blackboard, and then modifying the content to make it more 'interactive' using a discussion board, setting up teams for group projects, and occasionnaly creating breakout discussions during class.
From a teacher's perspective, it feels a lot like force fitting something that works reasonably well in a traditional classroom to the constraints of an online platform. It also appears that there are many masters in this system... The system that accredidates the school, the school's business model, the content of the class, and the student's desire for knowledge, as well as thier learning style (reading/listening/doing), the functional capabilities of the LMS, in this case, Blackboard. In the end, it's not clear how to accommodate every master in the educational system using an online platform. On top of all of this, layer on remote students that you never meet in person, and that have another native language... i.e. Chinese or Korean or Spanish.
From a student's perspective (are they not the end customer?), we need to focus on their needs, and how learning addresses these needs. Thinking back to my own journey in grade school, high school, undergrad and then graduate university classes, my needs were many. I needed to learn the material, progress to more advanced levels at each step of the journey, and it provided a method to meet friends, some of which have been life long friends.
Competitive learning channels such as YouTube, and it's value proposition: targeted advice for 'free'... as well as google search: you can pull the needle/answer out of the haystack/knowledge with several keystrokes on the computer, begs the question of what role a modern university plays going forward in education. It is clear that our system is ripe for change, mostly due to the technological advancements over the last several decades.
The overview of CGScholar is a good one, I have known of and peripherally watched the development of it over the last 15 years. To really understand the idea of the value it provides to the learning/teaching process, it would be useful to implement a 'community' or 'course', say on Blockchain, and see how well it works for all the 'master constituents' listed above. Another big, unaddressed area of my current university LMS is the social interaction portion. How well does that work?
Blackboard is fine at 'platformizing' St. Benedictine's rule of teaching. Google is quite good at cataloging existing content and giving access via a search engine. Neither is very good at addressing the social interactions between community constituents. It sounds like CGScholar does that well.
In all, I like the chapter (I used Plato when attending UofI in 1973-77, and remember those red, pixelate screens, which I used mostly for Space Invader-like games), and it has caused me to reflect on my own situation, and how CGScholar might provide and new and very useful medium for my message.
Our system is ripe for change - you are absolutely correct, Dan. We'd be very interested to see how CGScholar might connect with Blockchain - let's talk!