5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 6/21)

One advantage of a poor quality in a free-content resource is that you have the freedom to improve it!

Monolithic learning management systems are a barrier to widening access to education through elearning

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and I suspect that they’re constraining innovation in education. I am an eLearning practitioner and have previously been responsible for leading eLearning strategy in the university environment and have extensive experience with many LMSs - so I’m not an eLearning luddite with a nostalgic reluctance to adopt technology in education. On the contrary, I firmly support Sugata Mitra’s advice that we must use the most advanced digital technologies for the most disadvantaged learners. I’m on the side of eLearning here.

My disillusionment with LMSs fuels speculation among my peers and colleagues. I see the looks of surprise when I chat with my colleagues suggesting that LMSs are the barrier to eLearning. Their unspoken diagnosis of a temporary bout of digital amnesia is tangible. I observe the disappointment most among my free software associates that have slaved for years in the implementation of free software LMS solutions. In my view, we made an error in judgment assuming that unrestricted access to the source code of free software LMSs would facilitate innovation in eLearning. Unfortunately we have reached the point where every eLearning problem is a nail - because the only tool we have on campus is a large LMS hammer.

I think we can learn a lot from the Personalised Learning Environment cohort and the work on the eFramework - essentially a description of a web services architecture for eLearning. However this work is essentially a framework specification not an implementation. Given our experiences on the eLearning XHTML project, which has developed an authoring tool using internationally accepted specifications for interoperability, I’m not too optimistic that we will see an e-framework implementation as mainstream technology very soon. I have yet to see an elegant deployment of the LMS/SCORM specifications in any LMS (both proprietary and open source). When you view a SCORM import in all the LMSs I have tested - you feel that you are viewing alien content that is not part of the instructional strategy.

Why go through the pains of an SCORM export/import when you can simply upload and reference the relevant web content on a server using W3C protocols? (Even better, start using RSS/RDF content feeds.) The reason is that some local authority has taken responsibility to manage your freedoms to educate. We don’t tolerate these intrusions in the traditional classroom, yet under elearning we accept this in the name of cost-efficiency (or some other “justifiable” reason). This is why LMSs won’t survive - they are not aligned with the Web 2.0 culture of enabling individuals to teach as they see fit. LMSs are typically organisational installations and restrict educational freedom to work as individuals across institutional boundaries. In my view, this is why we will witness exponential growth in the technologies that service these educational needs. The phenomenal growth in Youtube, MySpace, Open Wiki installations, Flickr being an early example of the shift from organisation to you as individual.