The perils of learning management systems

A former student alerted me to this article, which is an interview with Kyle Jones, a librarian in Darien, CT.

It’s a great interview about using an open source tool like WordPress as a learning management system over Blackboard or other tools. I encourage you to check it out.

I hadn’t used Blackboard much as a student, but since I started teaching a hybrid class (2/3rds online, 1/3rd in the classroom) I’d become pretty adept at it. We switched to a new LMS this semester, but it’s still fraught with a lot of the problems I attribute to these proprietary “learning” tools.

The closed environment of IM, chat, message boards within most learning management tools are all offered as some way to increase student and teacher interaction and to simulate the classroom experience. But it doesn’t work as well as it should. With many students already adept with Twitter, Facebook and existing tools, I never understood why so many institutions felt it was necessary to implement (often expensive) third party applications that reinvent the wheel and lack the relevance of use other than as a medium for classroom “interaction.”

After three terms of teaching my class, I finally decided to experiment with the tools I’d already been using, especially since I teach a course to aspiring web professionals and so much of what we do takes place online. Students now create their own Twitter accounts if they don’t already have one and create a tumblr blog. In addition to the course books used for class discussions, there’s a course text in the form of a blog that gets updated several times a day with information such as articles, posts from me on whatever ties back to discussions we’ve had or ones we’ll have later in the term. Students produce most of their response papers via their tumblr blogs and future conversations are woven into Twitter.

The idea here, is to get students engaged into the conversations that are already happening in the wider world. So much of what happens in the classroom can happen in a vacuum and I felt like it was important to help them understand that other people were having many of the conversations we’d had, have asked many of the same questions and the places to find insights and information they might be seeking out.

While this is all one facet of the course experience, it’s a good way to provide extra value in the form of tools that might have value beyond the classroom. Whereas, an LMS doesn’t offer you much value when you’re done. You use it, you finish the courses and it stays behind.

Social media is not a must have

When people ask me about things like Twitter, Facebook or the value of other social media platforms, I’m always quick to tell them that social media is an investment.

What that means is, just because other colleges and universities are using social media, you shouldn’t jump into the media simply because you think you need to keep up.

Many of us in the higher ed blogosphere are early adopters or people who evangelize technologies because we’re adept at using these tools. But it’s important to understand your institution and your wherewithal to support the development and management of new content.

If you need to update content on your web site, you probably shouldn’t worry as much about whether you have a huge presence on Facebook or. Why? Because it’s not guaranteed to be here tomorrow. No social network is. Once you’ve made a huge investment extending your brand to the platforms, how do you recover it once they go away?

The three keys to remember about social media deployment are:

1. Doing it wrong can hurt you, more than it can help you.

2. Learning and maximizing any new technology takes time and money. Without the personnel to effectively deploy and utilize these tools consistent with your messaging, you’ll found yourself floundering on another platform. With more work to do.

3. All of the social media in the world won’t revive a moribund institutional brand with no focus. You have to create a cohesive message and promulgate that in all your other areas of marketing, to extend your value into social media.

Social media is not a must have, despite how many people will tell you that’s where you need to be. You have to make a commitment and provide adequate resources or your efforts are likely to fall short. There’s a great deal of value in these tools and it’s incumbent for institutions to start pushing the envelope; not just in how these tools are used, but how their teams are structured to maximize benefits, break down silos and create better information sharing within institutions.

But make no mistake, social media is not a low-investment, high-yield tool. It requires attention and dedication to achieve success.

Illustration by Matt Hamm, used under a Creative Commons license.