Pulling Things Together

It's always a struggle to pull things together at the beginning of the semester in this course. But now we have blogs going, tweets tweeting (note the difference from "twits tweeting" and the fact that I didn't say that!), discussions active, and so on. We can now kind of settle down into the routine of checking various communications every couple of days, etc.

I thought I'd reflect a little on Coruse Management Systems and related issues, since the topic has come up in the online discussions. I make a semi-big deal about not calling them "Learning Management Systems" even though that is becoming the term of choice. To me a true LMS would focus on the learning and where they were going. All systems that I know of still focus on what the instructor needs and does first.

I think that a true LMS would have very different entry points for the the learner and the instructor. In each case, it would essentially be a dashboard. For the learner, it would show where they are in the course, make suggestions about what they should be doing next (e.g. "you haven't posted in a discussion for a while, here's one that is just getting started" or "are you ready to add to this wiki yet?" or "this assignment is due in two days, here's what you can read about to prepare.") It should show grades, points, etc, mumber of postings in discussions and all of that. Ideally, it would also be organized by things like learning goals, which could be set by the instructor, the student, or a negotiation. All the "content," activities, and so one would be there to support those goals. And the student would know how well they were progressing toward them.

On the instructor side, the dashboard would show very different things. Sure, you could go in and add thigns, etc. as you can now, but once the course starts, the emphasis would be on tracking student progress, opening up resources at the right time, and so forth. Again, the issue is whether we focus on learning or on the course materials, content, etc. There is a book out about designing online courses that I have not looked at yet because I cannot get beyond my loathing for the title "Conquering the Content." I think it looks at the whole field in exactly the wrong way. But, who knows, it could be a good book once you get beyond that.

More later.