This is my abstract for my JA-Sig talk
The current crop of Learning Management Systems are focused very much on meeting the needs of the institution in providing a basic, uniform technology platform for teaching and learning. However, faculty and students are often familiar with setting up accounts, joining various types of sites and adding themselves and friends to those sites, and figuring out new systems by trial and error. The next generation of Virtual Learning Environments needs to allow this type of organic "mash-up" and make it simple enough to place in the hands of the end users of these systems. In a sense Virtual Learning Environments need to adopt approaches like Facebook, iGoogle and YouTube for learning application integration. IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 is a standard under development which addresses this functionality mash-up use case. This presentation will talk about issues and approaches for building the next generation of Virtual Learning Environments.
Long Version as Originally submitted ------
The current crop of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is focused very much on meeting the needs of the institution in providing a basic, common technology platform for teaching and learning. While the creators of VLEs (indeed including Sakai) are interested in bringing the best possible technology to bear on teaching and learning, generally their first priority is to meet the needs of the enterprise in terms of identity integration, auto-population of courses, ease of institutional technology support, automatic grade processing, and similar issues that impact the enterprise’s abilities to provide a consistent and reliable system. This consistency of experience and ease of support is often reinforced, for example, when an institution is trying to convince recalcitrant faculty to use technology in teaching, and the faculty demands that the VLE system be very simple and that they are given training on precisely how to use the system. Here, the value of single sign-ons for users, auto-creation of class sites, and auto-population of class participants, simplicity and consistency across the institution in training needs, and automation of basic processes are very apparent.
However, faculty and students who are familiar with the Internet and Web find this homogeneity very limiting. They are often familiar with setting up accounts, joining various types of sites and adding themselves and friends to those sites, and figuring out new systems by trial and error. These users are more interested in support for their need to experiment with new ideas in their teaching and learning environments and then evolve/improve those ideas as they go along, often switching directions quickly and coming up with completely new approaches in the process. The monolithic VLE system is too hard to customize at the individual user level, and evolves far too slowly to meet the teaching and learning needs of those who actually want to use the Internet and Web creatively in their teaching and learning. These users ultimately want their teaching and learning environments to be under their personal control - just like the rest of the web.
Posted by csev at March 13, 2008 01:39 PM