The LMS and the adolescence of web learning

I am noting this semester that although our surveys still show a substantial preference among students for Moodle over Blackboard, more students than before are whining and saying they want just Blackboard.

The main reasons are that they’d prefer having all their classes in one system (convenience), and they don’t want to be confused by using a new system (ease).

I am concerned because I sense that the “one LMS to rule them all” viewpoint is getting more and more traction, and that the new argument (as opposed to administrative, top-down, management arguments) is going to be that students prefer it. Diploma mills like to standardize their LMS configuration for all their classes to control content and teaching, but they justify it by saying that it’s easier (read: better) for the students. This thinking is bleeding into public education.

While I understand the desire for convenience, I have long argued that when students take classes online, they are learning not only the subject matter but technology skills. Being exposed to more than one system means they are learning transferrability of those skills, which I think is important in the workplace. And it’s more important than the inconvenience of using a second log-in (which they do anyway because they have Facebook open at the same time).

On the issue of ease, there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here:

Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category.

Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course.

Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

And they haven’t been exposed to enough good online classes, or enough online classes that customize the system sufficiently. If you take five classes in Blackboard, and in each one the instructor has left the course menu items pretty much intact, than that is what you think a Bb class looks like. You know where all the buttons are.  The students don’t know this, but the way I would use Bb, my class could look just like it does in Moodle:

Well, pretty close anyway.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence:

1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.)

2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world.

3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)

In a world dominated by look-alike online classes, the tendency will be to assume all classes should be that way.

In a world featuring variety and creativity, the tendency will be to assume these as part of learning online.

I’d much prefer to both learn and teach in the latter.

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