I’ve been to a few conferences and presentations in the last few months, and there seems to be this idea that e-learning is all about putting your lecture notes and Powerpoint slides into your institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) and then you’re done. Now you can say that you use “e-learning” in your teaching practice.
There seesm to be an obvious flaw to this approach. How is forcing a student to go to your LMS and download a document to read that content on their computer, any different to forcing a student to go to class to receive a document to read that content on paper? It seems to miss the point a little bit. Isn’t e-learning more about finding new and innovative ways to change the teaching and learning experience? It seems to me that an LMS just moves the same classroom online.
The other problems I have with the LMS include:
- They are usually closed (few institutions use Moodle), which means that my learning identity is locked into the system.
- Following on from this, there’s no data portability. What happens when I graduate? I lose 4-6 years of learning objects.
- Because they’re inherently closed, there’s no internet facing component of my profile. Why can’t I choose which aspects of my student identity I want to open up to the world?
- It isn’t possible for students to connect to anyone outside of the network / LMS. Thus, there’s no space to develop a community or network of practice outside the narrow boundaries of that institution.
- They are slow to adopt new technologies and therefore lack the flexibility of using readily available tools (I can install laconica on my own server, but my university isn’t even close to incorporating this functionality into the LMS they’re building)
It seems to me that a Learning Management System is more about controlling the learning process, and less about choice.