Sunday, 8 January 2017

Planning for Effective Teaching with Technology

Ensure that the benefits of integrating technology justify the investment

The benefits of integrating technology with your teaching must justify the significant investment of your time and the costs. Bates recommends that you start with thinking strategically about the goal of technology use and how it fits with your program, departmental and institutional mission and mandate. Will it facilitate more active learning and development of your students’ research and analytical skills? Will it address such challenges as large classes or workload management? Will it open up new markets or improve accessibility to underserved groups such as part-time learners? Will it enhance quality, address unmet needs or reduce costs? Whatever the rationale, the case should be well researched and documented to attract institutional support to render it sustainable.

One approach is to include a discussion of technology use in any curriculum or course review. Departmental workshops might include teaching-focused strategic planning exercises (environmental scanning; analysis of goals, values and priorities), technology demonstrations and small group discussions to develop a vision for teaching in the future.

Bates and Poole introduce a helpful framework to oversee technology integration and instructional design. The SECTIONS framework considers the following criteria for choosing and applying technologies for teaching:

An example from the University of British Columbia of how to use this framework can be seen here (link is external).
- Student needs
- Ease of use and reliability,
- Cost considerations,
- Your approach to Teaching and learning,
- The desired level of Interaction for students,
- The Organizational support needed,
- The Novelty factor, and
- The Speed with which the technology can be adopted or materials adapted.
Develop a teaching plan
Bates recommends having a comprehensive teaching plan encompassing both curriculum (what) and delivery (how). Inclusion of a delivery plan ensures the integration of any technology use into regular college or university curriculum planning exercises.
In addition to curriculum, a teaching plan addresses issues such as your preferred approach to teaching (e.g. problem-based or inquiry methods); time allocations for lectures, seminars, labs, clinics, practicums, field work and other activities; whether courses will be offered face-to-face, online, or in hybrid form (reduced class time with online interaction); scheduling for any face-to-face teaching; and who will teach.
Plan for course design and development time
Good teaching always requires preparation but developing a fully online, hybrid or technology-enhanced classroom course takes extra time to develop before the course begins. Depending upon the subject, learning activities, choice of technologies, resources available and current teaching workloads, it may take up to a year to develop a new course.
You may take a systems approach whereby the whole course is laid out and then each element designed and developed before teaching begins, or a more open-ended approach relying less on pre-prepared content and more on collaborative learning, class discussion, and building on the existing knowledge of learners. Bates’ key message is that deciding on a teaching approach, laying out a plan, choosing appropriate technologies, developing and/or choosing learning resources, and ensuring the necessary support and infrastructure requires significant time and must be considered part of your teaching workload.
Seek specialist assistance and support
Course quality starts with your knowledge of the learners and your subject matter expertise but benefits immensely from other specialist support. Cross-functional communication among faculty, instructional designers, media specialists, Web programmers, copyright officers, and learner support professionals to facilitate course development provides a dynamic environment for innovation in teaching but requires some consideration of the form of collaboration required.
Bates describes different models of course development. The Lone Ranger approach is where a faculty member works independently to integrate a new technology, sometimes with some institutional financial support. A Boutique Model provides professional assistance on a project-by-project basis from an instructional support unit such as a teaching and learning centre. A Collegial Materials Development model involves academic colleagues working collaboratively on course development. A full Project Management Model involves a team of inpiduals contributing specialist skills working with a defined product, budget, timelines, and team leader to manage the process.
Model choice depends upon the size of the project (module, learning activity, whole course or program), design complexity, and level of technology integration. Adding one element of technology to a face-to-face course may be handled quite easily with one-on-one assistance from a specialist whereas a project management approach to a fully online course with significant integration of various technologies probably yields the best quality and cost effectiveness. Once you have worked through developing a course with specialist help once or twice, you will be well positioned to work more independently.
Manage the teaching workload
Bates stresses that technology use should reduce class time, not add to your overall teaching load. Using online technology for a face-to-face class to share the syllabus and links to learning materials such as journal articles should not take extra preparation time and may even save time and resources. However, if you want to go beyond this basic use of technology in a course, it is important to carefully consider the cost and additional teaching time needed.
The investment required to plan, prepare and facilitate a course that incorporates pre-prepared modules, multimedia elements and/or online interaction such as class discussions or group projects will outweigh any significant gains in quality if the technology is not used to reduce face-to-face class time.
Collaborate
Use of online technologies opens up many opportunities for collaboration in teaching, within and across institutions, even across continents. Further, as Bates points out, combining efforts pays off in productivity and quality of teaching. Shared open educational resources can also reduce developmental costs significantly.
Courses or content common to a variety of programs can be identified and learning materials and resources developed and stored in readily accessible shared virtual spaces. As with research and publications, faculty with subject expertise in a particular area from one or more institutions can work collaboratively online to develop core materials and/or source learning resources from increasingly available open educational resources.
Working collaboratively with colleagues, you can share ideas, jointly develop and share resources, and provide critical feedback to one another, thereby improving teaching practice. Equally important to content is developing learning activities, assessment tools, and multimedia and interactive modules. Best created by a team, these will save resources as well as significant time for inpidual faculty members.
Ensure that course evaluation and maintenance are planned
Evaluation and maintenance of technology-based courses go hand-in-hand. As Bates points out, because technology-based courses are new and different, it is good practice to evaluate them regularly for educational effectiveness. Evaluation can take a number of forms, both formative and summative. Information about enrolments, grades, completion rates, feedback from students and faculty, as well as observations of student behaviour in the course are essential to course maintenance.
All technology-based courses require at least some minor maintenance. For Bates, once a course or a learning resource is developed, it should be kept live and dynamic to maintain quality. The content must be updated as new resources, such as journal articles, become available, assignments and learning activities revised, URL links checked and student feedback incorporated.
Keeping whole programs or many courses updated is complex, requiring resource allocation and a planned maintenance schedule. Just as development requires faculty time, so does evaluation and maintenance. The teaching plan (described above) should include an evaluation and maintenance strategy and schedule for technology-based courses that does not add to teaching load.

Reference

Bates, T. (2013, Oct. 08). Planning for Effective Teaching with Technology. Retrieved Jan. 09, 2017, fromhttp://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-teach-online-student-success/understanding-building-blocks-online-learning/planning-effective-teaching-technology available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Basic Computer Skills: Microsoft Excel Exercise#2

Reference

St. Paul Community Literacy Consortium, Basic Computer Skills Curriculum. Retrieved Jan. 09, 2017, from http://spclc.org/curricula-resources/computer-curriculum available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 3

Part 3: How Personal Learning Environments Contribute to Success in Teaching and Learning

All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.

This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.

The first instalment, Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems, looks at the ubiquitous Learning Management System to undercover the many ways this multi-functional tool is used to support teaching and learning, as well as some of the challenges.
In the second instalment, How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning, a variety of social media and networking applications are explored to highlight their strengths and limitations.
This final instalment, How Personal Learning Environments Contribute to Success in Teaching and Learning, looks at the expanding uses of personal learning environments by students and faculty.

A personal learning environment (PLE) is the set of tools, coupled with the competency to use them, used to navigate, teach, learn, explore, communicate, and amuse ourselves in the online world. The tools of the PLE include LMS systems and social media applications, but they expand beyond these to a personalized collection of informational retrieval, creation, and communication tools by which we both interact in the digital world and develop and maintain our web presence.

Obviously, these tools are used in our formal roles as teachers and students but, more importantly, they are foundational tools upon which our personal network ecology is based. Given the growing importance of digital activity and resources, each of us benefits from improving and enhancing our personal learning environments as tools of lifelong learning.

How Personal Learning Environments Are Different

Three attributes tend to differentiate PLEs from LMS and social network sites:

PLEs are designed by individuals to establish and support their learning goals. Thus, for example, a central tool in almost everyone’s PLE is a word processor to create text documents; however, many users add graphics, photo, sound, slideshow tools and website authoring tools to allow for multi-media creation.
PLEs are used to communicate with others, beyond those enrolled in a particular course. These begin with e-mail, but often expand to tools for video and audioconferencing, text chatting, blogging, and micro-blogging and many more tools to support one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many interactions.
PLEs are used to store, organize, select, and retrieve the digital tools and the documents that are created. Increasingly, this storage and organization capacity is moving from the users’ hardware (always susceptible to loss or a crash) to the cloud – susceptible to only potential privacy invasion!

Not many years ago, one thought of a PLE as being the set of software applications that runs on desktops or laptop computers. Today, the PLE extends to a variety of mobile devices and tablets. Tomorrow, it will extend to the Internet of things and a variety of digital devices such as watches, health and activity monitors and remote sensors to enhance the digital lifestyle we choose to create.

Finally, ever more sophisticated analytics and aggregation tools will allow us to automatically monitor and assess our individual PLEs.

Personal Learning Environments for Faculty

Why should a busy faculty member bother creating and maintaining a high quality personal learning environment? Obviously, this is a task that takes time and, unfortunately, is never fully completed as new technologies are introduced and digital needs and interests change.

The most compelling reason is the effective use of digital tools allow faculty and instructors to be more effective and efficient in both their professional and personal lives. The PLE may also enhance the quality and enjoyment of both personal and professional life, but there is a danger of over complication and a need to be able to switch off, as well as turn on, our PLE.

Web Identity: A significant component of a PLE is the digital resources used to develop and share a web presence. Each of us has a digital identity which we can easily glimpse a small piece of by doing a Google search on our own name. Most educators will quickly find a link to their institutional web identity. These are sites maintained by their employer and at least provide an e-mail address for contact, but are more useful when they provide links to CVs, courses taught, interests and areas of expertise.

Further digging in the search engine often finds data on personal identity, including references to activities on community group sites, in local newspapers, newsletters, profiles on social network sites, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and a host of other references and links.

There is very considerable evidence that this web identity is one of the most important components of a person’s social capital. A significant and positive web presence opens individuals to both planned and serendipitous connections with others.

Connectivist Learning: Teaching from both constructivist and connectivist learning theory implies teachers and learners actively communicate, share, and demonstrate their learning. PLEs thrive in connectivist contexts where the focus is on developing learning networks consisting of both content (artifacts) and people. PLE serves as the production engine through which content and learning activities are selected and developed, communication with learners and colleagues initiated and sustained, and archival records collected and organized.

Choosing the Tools: The choice of PLE tools is based on individual preferences and experiences as well as the course content, learning objectives and the teaching philosophy of the teacher.

Student PLEs for Learning

In our role as teachers, we need not only to build and effectively use our own PLEs, but we should also be helping students to create their own PLEs. The speed of technological induced change makes it very obvious that students need to be lifelong learners with the capacity and confidence to search, learn, manage, and create their own digital learning environments. By doing so, students take control and ownership of their own learning and the tools that support it.

One useful strategy is to introduce at least one new digital tool in each course. This can range ranged from blogs and wikis, to podcasts, concept mapping, threaded voice discussions, bibliographic tools, graphics and mapping tools, survey and analysis tools and many more.

The introduction of the tool begins with a demonstration of its potential, but also with words of warning that the tool will not be perfect, may require overcoming a frustrating learning curve, and may eventually not produce the desired results. Even if the tool does not find a place in each student’s PLE, the active investigation and subsequent reflection on its attributes, defects, and the learning experience of usage provide invaluable lifelong learning lessons.

PLEs develop and grow throughout one’s life and early exposure to both successful mastery and critical rejection of the tools are meaningful educational outcomes in any course of study.

User Control of PLEs

Both students and teachers are interested in the efficacy, ease of use and access to tools they want, often moving beyond uses intended by their developers. This capacity for users to evolve applications for tools is perhaps the greatest potential benefit of their PLE.

The potential of the PLE to serve both current and future learning and performance needs far exceeds that of the LMS. LMS tools are designed with great attention to the existing work patterns of their intended users – PLEs are designed by their owners to easily morph into whatever task, challenge or opportunity arises.

Looking at the Three Pillars of Educational Technology

To summarize, the effective 21^st century faculty member or instructor:

Is able to skillfully use the secure and institutionally protected LMS system at their college or university to provide structured formal teaching and assessment.
Is able and willing to augment their courses with appropriate social networking that expands the learning context to new places and new participants, as well as scales the temporal boundaries of a single term of study.
Has a well-developed, yet continually changing, PLE by which they create high quality content, communicate effectively in multiple media and build their personal and professional social capital.

Teachers demonstrate this capacity through their own web presence, in the effective production, selection and maintenance of content and in the learning outcomes achieved by their students as they create and utilize their own PLEs.

Reference

Anderson, T. (2016, Oct. 24). Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 3. Retrieved Jan. 05, 2017, from http://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-use-technology-effectively/three-pillars-educational-technology/three-pillars-educational-technology-learning-management-systems-social-media-part3 available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 2

Part 2: How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning

All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.

The first instalment, Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems, looks at the ubiquitous Learning Management System to undercover the many ways this multi-functional tool is used to support teaching and learning, as well as some of the challenges.
In this second instalment, How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning, a variety of social media and networking applications are explored to highlight their strengths and limitations.
The final instalment, How Personal Learning Environments Contribute to Success in Teaching and Learning, looks at the expanding uses of personal learning environments by students and faculty.

A recent EDUCAUSE paper [1] announced that: “The LMS is both ‘it’ and ‘not it’ —useful in some ways but falling short in others.” As described in the first instalment in this series, the learning management system (LMS) has become ubiquitous in higher education and serves a variety of both pedagogical and administrative tasks. However, EDUCAUSE notes, the pedagogical challenges of living within an educational “walled garden” – an environment tightly controlled and closed to all but selected users. They argue the requirement for a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment “is to move past this either/or view and, instead, enable a learning community to make choices about what parts are public and what parts are private.”

Social network sites and tools share some of the same characteristics as learning management systems. They are, of course, all online, accessible from most anywhere and available 24/7. However, unlike LMS systems which are largely populated (and controlled) by the institutions and faculty, the content and organization presented in a social network sites are generated by all users – perhaps even by users not enrolled in the course.

Moving Outside the LMS

The research literature is filled with case studies describing how faculty have left the security of the LMS to teach the online components of their courses using social media. One of the frequent arguments for this relocation is they are merely going where the students already are – or at least seem most comfortable - based upon the near ubiquitous use of major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google Groups. These activities move the learning beyond the virtual classroom owned and controlled by the institution into the commercial world. However, openness itself creates not only opportunities, but also new challenges, including the recalcitrance of some students to use commercial social media like Facebook and the potential for misuse and academic misconduct.

Using Social Networking Sites

Facebook: Perhaps the most common exploration beyond the LMS is the creation of Facebook groups. Many programs, courses and institutions have Facebook groups that can be created by administrators, library and student support staff, and faculty, or by the students themselves.

When used by the faculty as a component of the course, the Facebook group is almost always closed and accessible only to registered students. An American Delphi study[2] found students’ most valued use of Facebook was (as expected) for communicating with other students, but they also used it to create and support study groups, receive reminders of exams and assignments, and send messages to faculty members.

Student-created Facebook groups are often used as a “faculty-free” space to ask questions of classmates, vent frustration and share tips and expertise. A key advantage of the open, student-led group is it can persist beyond the class and morph into a network of both current and past students, benefitting both next term students and those wishing to retrieve or contribute content or opinion after class. In addition, guests can easily be invited to join the group.

Twitter: In a similar fashion, a Twitter microblogging feed can be set up and used by faculty and students to push announcements, promote events and activities or instantly link to emergent resources that are shared by the class. A Seneca College course in Marketing offers an example of using Twitter and Facebook for content, communication and assessment. At the University of Windsor, open Twitter debates in an Ethics in Sports class often trended in the top ten Twitter events and continued long after class time.

Curating Tools: Opening a window beyond the LMS can also be done through the use of curation tools that allow students or faculty to create collections of web-based artifacts (pictures, articles, media clips, etc.) that are sorted and annotated to create learning resources. This curation is supported by general tools like Pinterest (link is external), a website that mixes photo sharing and social networking, or those specifically designed for learning such as Learnist. (link is external) With the increasing availability of open and commercial educational resources in video and other formats, it becomes challenging to organize these resources into topic lists for class use and re-use. Helpful services include playlists on YouTube and using tools such as Delicious (link is external) for social bookmarking.

Blogs: Another commonly used social network tool is the blog. To enhance connectivity, many faculty members create blogs using tools outside the LMS such as EduBlogs (link is external) or WordPress (link is external). Students can gain proficiency and perhaps their first public web presence by posting their own artifacts, reflections or productions. These can be shared with only the class or, more broadly, with the entire college and university or even internationally. Durham College now offers online courses in Social Media especially tailored to the specific needs and interest of students in several faculties; the original version used blogs, wikis and other social media tools so students learned through active participation.

Wikis: Another set of now venerable social network tools are wikis, Google Docs and other networked tools that allow students to work together to create documents. The value of collaborative work has long been recognized and new web tools attend to many of the mechanical details of collaboration, such as storing of earlier versions, allowing for multiple and simultaneous entry and, of course, 24-hour global access. Collaborative tools are not limited to text as collaborative drawing, concept mapping and even music composition tools are available.

Interactions beyond text: One of the challenges of online discussion forums is the reliance on text and still image interchange which lacks some of the social presence and immediacy of video or audio interaction. This live interaction usually comes with the necessity of real time or synchronous engagement which often fails to meet the demands of busy faculty and students. However, some social network tools such as VoiceThread (link is external) support the sharing of video, audio and text and images for non-synchronous interaction that takes place at times convenient to each participant.

Social Studying Sites: Among the most popular and fastest growing social networking sites are the so-called ‘social studying sites’ such as Piazza (link is external). Piazza works by creating a space where students and faculty can post questions and answers related to courses, addressing students’ needs for instant help, including from other students, to keep progressing in their assignments. Studying sites offer sophisticated features such as anonymous questions,

e-mail or text notification of new questions or answers, delays in posting of faculty answers until a number of students respond, and student analytics. Many of these features go beyond the possibilities of the raised hand in a classroom. One faculty user expressed surprise that students began taking over the class. “They started to create their own learning environment, organized their own learning sessions and maintained and kept order in this virtual environment.”[3] This activity resulted in an increase in participation in not only the Piazza site, but in the classroom as well.

Facing the Challenges

Social networking has many potential advantages, but also presents challenges. As with any innovation, it is often best to start small, with an application that provides interest, content relevance and hopefully excites the users. Often an incentive (a small mark or bonus award) is needed to motivate learners and to reward contribution. Like gardens, successful social websites are thoughtfully designed and regularly cultivated, weeded and thinned by the engaged faculty member. Finally, providing opportunities for students to reflect upon, provide feedback to, and develop new learning activities in the social media environment supports their continuing active engagement.

Although many of us perceive students are already spending too much time on social networking sites, a recent study[4] showed the more students use social media, the more they are interested in using these powerful new tools to aide their formal education activities.

Reaping the Benefits

In summary, effective use of social networking sites provides a number of benefits to both faculty and students. The LMS provides a secure environment, supported and sanctioned by the institution that can effectively store and manage copyright content and confidential student data, as well as provide a variety of communication tools. However, the LMS comes with some drawbacks that can be compensated for with social networking tools.

Firstly, contributions do not disappear at the end of the term. Secondly the audience and the participants can grow beyond those registered in the course. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the process of creating, sharing, commenting upon, and evaluating content empowers and challenges learners to be owners and co-creators of knowledge in the networked classroom.

Thus, the most effective faculty (and also the bravest) use the LMS for what it does best – effective managing of the educational process – while using social media for what they do best – allowing students and faculty to create, explore, and communicate across the world wide web.

[1] Brown, M., Dehoney, J., & Millichap, N. (2015). The next generation digital learning environment, a report on research. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative paper.
http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/6/whats-next-for-the-lms (link is external)

[2] Magro, M. J., Sharp, J. H., Ryan, K., & Ryan, S. D. (2013). Investigating ways to use Facebook at the university level: A Delphi study. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 10, 295-311.

[3] Qasem, A. (2012). Using Piazza to Encourage Interaction. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/using-piazza-to-encourage-interaction/39317 (link is external)

[4] Lim, J., & Richardson, J. C. (2016). Exploring the effects of students' social networking experience on social presence and perceptions of using SNSs for educational purposes. The Internet and Higher Education, 29, 31-39. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751615300075

Reference

Anderson, T. (2016, Oct. 24). Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 2. Retrieved Jan. 05, 2017, from http://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-use-technology-effectively/three-pillars-educational-technology/three-pillars-educational-technology-learning-management-systems-social-media-part2 available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 1

Part 1: Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems

All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.

This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the Learning Management System (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.

This first instalment, Getting the Most from Learning Management Systems, looks at the ubiquitous learning management system to undercover the many ways this multi-functional tool is used to support teaching and learning, as well as some of the challenges.
In the second instalment, How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning, a variety of social media and networking applications are explored to highlight their strengths and limitations.
The final instalment, How Personal Learning Environments Contribute to Success in Teaching and Learning, looks at the expanding uses of personal learning environments by students and faculty.

Using the Learning Management System (LMS)

Early learning management systems were designed and used for fully online delivery of programs and courses. But now, they migrated to become near ubiquitous tools used in colleges and universities across Canada and around the world. A large 2014 study in the United States revealed that 99% of educational institutions support at least one LMS[1], with the majority of faculty (74%) making use of it and 71% finding it useful for teaching. This LMS usage is limited to mostly content sharing, announcements, coursework submission and grade management, rather than many of the more advanced features.

Any LMS must support four core activities:

Content delivery: Media distribution for lectures, readings, examples, case studies, etc. The LMS provides a central place for each course where students can retrieve essential documents associated with both learning and administration. Many of these resources are cached and made available for each section or for subsequent versions of the course.
Assessment: Easy quiz generation to measure student learning and ensure students do the offline work. Many LMS testing systems allow for sharing of questions amongst multiple course teachers and the import and export of questions from textbook suppliers and other third parties. Quiz questions can be randomly selected from a test bank and allow for random number generation for quantitatively-based questions, so it is possible for each student to receive and be assessed on different questions. Assessments may also include self-assessment and formative usage so students can practice skills to reach mastery and receive constructive feedback throughout a course.
Interaction and Communication: Synchronous and asynchronous communications tools for teacher-student and student-student group work. The most common interaction tool is the threaded text discussion that increases the communications possibilities for shy and introverted students and those lacking verbal language skills. Real time interaction can be either text/chat or voice-based and used for private or group discussions. Many systems also support breakout rooms for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction, thus allowing students to communicate while completing group projects.
Analytics: A suite of analytics tools that allow faculty to monitor learning activities and to track their interventions in support of effective student learning. LMS systems are rapidly increasing the functionality of the analytics packages they supply with their product. Many systems also aggregate participation data across classes providing department or institutional glimpses into student and teacher activities.

The application of each of these capacities must, of course, be easily accomplished and without undo demands on limited faculty time and without requiring high levels of training and support. Teachers and designers need to experiment and monitor LMS use to ensure each tool and LMS-based activity contributes to effective learning.

Most LMS systems offer these basic tools, though some include advanced tools such as videoconferencing and analytics, and may come with additional user fees or through linking to external programs. The functionalities of the various commercial and open source LMS systems are very similar to each other, with competitors matching each other’s advances.

LMS Developments

Given this competitive environment, new tools are regularly introduced to commercial and open-source LMS products. Most promising are:

Extensive learning analytics systems that teachers can use to actively monitor individual and group progress through the series of learning activities they orchestrate.
Easy to use wikis or integration with external group creation tools such as Google Docs. These tools allow students to collaboratively create and edit documents either at the same time or asynchronously.
Project management tools that allow teachers and students to create and assign students to groups, set time lines and cooperatively complete projects.
Peer marking tools that control the exchange of documents so students both learn from and offer advice to their peers.
Individual and group blogging and reflection tools. Having students monitor and comment on their own learning increases their capacity to become self-directed learners.
The capability to search out from the LMS and import multi-media content from both open learning object repositories and restricted text book publishing sites.

LMS are nearly always owned and operated by a college or university, although there is growing interest in contracting the administration of these systems to cloud-based providers. The branding of the LMS as an official and supported institution-wide tool provides a sense of continuity between classes as students become familiar with the design and content. As well, use of the official LMS provides faculty and students with reasonable expectation of privacy, security and lack of exploitation by external users or companies. As these systems have matured, it is easier to both promote and enforce usability and accessibility guidelines – often based on universal design principles (link is external) or the more extensive and newer Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. (link is external)

The extent of the system capacities and their centrality to course delivery, assessment, communication, and administration explain the importance and predominance of their usage in colleges and universities.

LMS Challenges

Effective adoption and support of these widely and often critically important learning management systems do present ongoing challenges. As with other sophisticated software tools, as the number of features increases, so does the complexity and challenges of easy adoption and effective use. Thus, most institutions employ both technical and instructional design staff to train, inspire and support faculty. However, studies continue to show many LMS tools are used minimally or not at all and teachers are often unaware of the pedagogical or time saving features available within the LMS.

The use of learning analytic tools for monitoring of student behaviour presents privacy concerns for students but can also be used by administrators to monitor teacher activity. In addition, information technology staffs are experiencing ever increasing costs to maintain and support systems as they grow in size and complexity.

An ongoing challenge is determining and supporting what faculty members using an LMS need to know. At a basic level, what is found to be essential is that faculty take the time to learn (individually or in scheduled sessions) to be a competent LMS user. This does not imply the capacity to use every possible tool nor be an expert in any, but like with a word processor, what is needed is the capacity and competence to use the tool effectively. The goal is to learn enough to use the LMS efficiently to meet essential needs, a sense of ability and comfort in at least the first stage of troubleshooting and knowing who and how to ask for help when needed.

Many teachers find it helpful to attend training sessions sponsored by their campus teaching and learning units or from external providers. Valuable as these can be, the professional development research[2] is showing us what is more effective is learning networks of teachers that meet regularly (on and offline) to share, support and inspire each other as they struggle to enhance their students’ learning - without drastically increasing their own workload. Such networks rely on bottom up effort of individual teachers, but, equally as important, need to be supported by a vision, a plan and active support from administrators and faculty leaders.

But perhaps the greatest challenge is the inherent “school focus” of the LMS. The LMS is designed as a tool to both replicate and simplify the type of teaching and learning that has evolved in closed classrooms. It handles document dissemination, quizzes and grade books with ease, but many of the networking, social capital building, open content dissemination and crowd effects are eliminated by the closed institutional firewalls behind which the LMS operates. This institutional focus is apparent in the organizational structure based on term length courses and the lack of creative power of students to own, share or even comment on many aspects of the course content or design.

These enhanced network effects are the domain of social media which, when used in formal learning contexts, open up whole new levels and intensity of learning opportunity.

We turn to the use of these social media and networking tools in the next instalment in this series.

Reference

Anderson, T. (2016, Oct. 24). Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments Part 1. Retrieved Jan. 05, 2017, from http://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-use-technology-effectively/three-pillars-educational-technology/three-pillars-educational-technology-learning-management-systems-social-media available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.