Wednesday, March 4, 2009

LMS

There is a lot of writing out there about the problems with an LMS. Until recently however I had never really considered any of this. I have been working with Moodle for my job for the last little while and these ideas seem to be at the centre of my attention.
I guess the concern is that an LMS by nature is not open enough, there isn't enough sharing going on with the outside world. The term walled garden gets thrown about quite a bit. It is interesting that tools like wikis and forum chats are used in LMS systems and yet they are totally isolated to one group of students. The whole idea of these tools is to learn through collaboration. I appreciate that not everyone wants to share ideas with the public at large it just is a strange thing. The two ideas seem to be at odds.
Another concern is the institutional control over an LMS. In this world the people who created a course would have ownership of that course and be the ones to decide how to share it. But I also realize that institutions are essentially out there to turn a profit. They want to have some kind of control. If every course follows that cookie cutter pattern the institution knows what its product is. There is a clear way (at least on a surface level) to measure if a course is doing what it is supposed to do. Knowledge has become something which is owned not shared and it makes sense for an institution to want to be the owner. It was a sad day for me when I realized that a course or curriculum you design for an institution is not yours but the institution's. I don't really know though how to solve this problem or if there is a solution.
Obviously control is necessary for an institution. They need it for all kinds of reasons including public accountability. But also a certain amount of freedom is necessary for new and fresh ideas and learning to take place. There must be some kind of happy medium.
I guess it is that same old problem of measurement. It would be lovely if we didn't have to measure.

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