Learning Management

Educause's recent survey  shows a tremendous increase in LMS usage among campuses.  Whittier is certainly part of that group, having "chosen" Moodle.  In 2007 we had no LMS (unless you count Luminis' paltry, resource-poor system).  By 2009 we were noting thousands of logins per week--quite a feat for a school of 1400 students.

You can read the quote below, but mostly what I want to underline is the increasing reliance on an LMS to teach.  Portfolios, federated logins, social networking and modular  are already or will soon be a feature of the LMS (particularly open-source varieties). 

I can't stress enough the usefulness--even in a small-class-size liberal arts environment--of the LMS.   Here's a quote from the survey:

The learning management system (LMS) has become a mission-critical enterprise system for higher education institutions. According to the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service: Fiscal Year 2007 Summary Report, 93 percent of all campuses responding to the survey supported at least one LMS. In fact, only 0.5 percent of respondents did not deploy and had no plans to deploy such a system.⁶ In Campus Computing 2008, Kenneth C. Green reports that the percentage of college/university courses that use an LMS has risen from 14.7 percent in 2000 to 53.5 percent in 2008.⁷ Accordingly, the LMS faces challenges and concerns similar to all other enterprise systems: acquisition strategy, local needs, rising costs, data migration, system integrity, integration/interoperability with other campus resources, and expansion to purposes for which it was not initially intended.
Although the commercial LMS providers (e.g., Blackboard/Angel Learning and Desire2Learn) dominate higher education, the percentage of campuses using open-source applications (e.g., Moodle and Sakai) has nearly doubled in the last two years.⁸ Given the rising cost of the commercial LMS, the current economic climate, and the pattern of consolidations in the commercial LMS market, the open-source LMS may be a viable alternative for some institutions. For those institutions with an already established LMS, however, the human and technical resources needed to migrate to a new system may be a concern.
Over the years, the LMS has evolved from a content (course) management system (CMS)⁹ to a more all-encompassing system that includes groupware and social networking tools, as well as assessment and e-portfolios to track learning across courses and semesters. Although the LMS needs to continue serving as an enterprise CMS, it also needs to be a student-centered application that gives students greater control over content and learning. Hence, there is continual pressure for the LMS to utilize and integrate with many of the Web 2.0 tools that students already use freely on the Internet and that they expect to find in this kind of system. Some educators even argue that the next requirement is a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) that interoperates with an LMS.¹⁰
At the same time, the question remains: is the LMS being used effectively at the institution, by both faculty and students? Institutions need to ensure that there are quality guidelines for the LMS, that both faculty and staff receive training,¹¹ and that assessment is conducted regularly.
Critical questions for Learning Management Systems include the following:

• What factors at the institution favor buying a commercial LMS or supporting an open-source application?
• What systems need to be integrated with the LMS: portal? e-portfolio? ERP? library resources? Does the LMS support the integration of these systems?
• Does the institution have the development and support expertise either to support an open-source LMS or to integrate open-source components into a commercial LMS?
• Has the institution conducted, or is it planning to conduct, an assessment of how effectively the LMS is being used? What training/support resources are available to help faculty and students make better use of the LMS features?
• If a change will be made to a new system, what plan is in place to ensure the smooth migration of existing materials to the new system?

Adult Workers Have a Lot to Learn...Online

The Financial Times has an interesting article up today about life-long learning.

Improving returns on that asset requires neither great sums of money nor greater flights of imagination. The key is to rethink and reorganise how busy but anxious adults can benefit from education and training opportunities. Technology makes meeting that challenge far more affordable, entrepreneurial and compelling. Adult education is a market ripe for rapid global transformation.

The internet is a paradise for auto­didacts. The intellectually curious can find doctoral dissertations on virtually any subject in any language, download seminars podcast from the world’s great universities and leading professional societies and view YouTube lectures by Nobel laureates ranging from the physicist, Richard Feynman, to economists such as Milton Friedman and Muhammad Yunus.

You need no creativity to picture how this growing wealth of multimedia material may be repackaged and customised for adult education courses . Organisations of all sizes can bundle their own blogs, webcasts and digital simulations as training tools to serve employees and job applicants. Why not invite candidates to participate in online training sessions to see how well they learn? Follow up the next day by texting them “pop quizzes” to test retention.

While I am somewhat immune to claims that technology is "changing everything," especially when such claims are meant to create fear, the above article strikes me as mostly true and pertinent. Indeed, the internet is a paradise for autodidacts--AND WE SHOULD ALL BE AUTODIDACTS. Of course, the FT mentions Milton Friedman, but one can also read Dean Baker, Max Sawicky and others. The internet, in contrast to our MSM, offers a plethora of choices to challenge and inspire.

If teaching in a liberal arts college has taught me anything, it is that learning never stops, nor should it. The last 10 years or so have been revolutionary for me as a teacher, colleague and as an engaged citizen, and much of my personal "revolution" has come thanks to technology. Who would have thought that cultural realia from France or Africa would be at my fingertips 24 hours a day? Who would have thought I would be teaching myself languages online? Who would have thought I would be blogging against X or Y or Z and for A or B or C on a regular basis? Who would have thought my students could see world changing events happening in almost in real time on youtube, or that such video would have a more democratic nature than CNN? (Yes, I know, a lot of people thought about and predicted these things. My questions are a reflection of my own constant amazement at the amount of information available.)

As imperfect as the world is (including the internet), there is much to learn. May the open source--and by that I mean open distribution of creative materials--revolution continue.

Firefox: Like Going To College

Downloading Firefox is like going to college according to Seth:

(h/t proactivebusybody)

A quick glimpse at just about any profession shows you that the vast majority of people who succeed professionally also went to college.

This could be because college teaches you a lot.

Or it could be because the kind of person that puts the effort into getting into and completing college is also the kind of person who succeeds at other things.

Firefox is similar.

Example: 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.

This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users... everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they're way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn't the default when you first turned on your computer.

That's an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.

If I ran Firefox, I'd be hard at work promoting extensions and power tools (I love the search add-ons) and all manner of online interactions. Think of all the things colleges do to amplify the original choice of their students and to increase their impact as alumni.

And if I ran your site, I'd treat Firefox visitors as a totally different group of people than everyone else. They're a self-selected group of clickers and sneezers and power users.

In the lingo of Nancy Reagan, Firefox is a gateway drug.

I'm not sure about all the correllations brought up here, but I will say that Firefox, along with Linux, has been the gateway to the most recent open-source revolutions. Sure, one can point to other things, but Firefox in particular has replaced IE and done so paradigmatically.