To LMS or not to LMS

I’ve become increasingly unconvinced about the benefits of LMSs – such as Blackboard and WebCT. Basically these environments seem to put unnecessary restrictions on how material is made available, and how it is accessed, without adding much benefit.

It’s interesting that these pieces of software are called ‘Learning Management Systems’. In the UK, the idea of the Virtual or Managed Learning Environment’ took off, and still there is a tendency to refer to LMSs as VLEs or MLEs. This, for me, is to miss an important distinction. Blackboard, WebCT and the like are correctly called ‘Learning Management Systems’, as they somehow try to ‘manage’ the learning material. I’m not sure this is helpful, certainly not in the context of UK Higher Education.

So, I believe we should strive to create a virtual or managed ‘learning environment’, but we don’t need an LMS to do so. This should also make it easier to integrate library resources into the material, as there are no artificial barriers to doing this, and you aren’t tied into one particular technology.

So what do we need from a VLE? At the moment our needs are pretty simple:

Web space for courses
Ideally we need to be able to restrict viewing privileges to the students on the course. However, this may not be necessary in all cases…
Discussion group/bulletin board software
Email lists for courses
Ease of publishing/uploading material

I’d like to be able to provide tools for easy content creation by academics. Weblog software would seem ideal for this purpose – but I’m not sure about supporting this (if we were to install Movable Type or something). Possibly Microsoft’s ‘Sharepoint’ software would be worth investigating. Otherwise, perhaps we just need to treat this as another area where web content management software is needed.

Referencing

We are working with e-learning a lot at the moment, mainly on integrating reading/resource lists into the learning environment. We are making some progress on this (although unfortunately it’s all behind closed doors, so I can’t demonstrate here).

Anyway, one idea which came up was that quite often references are not saved for the ‘reading list’, but rather put into the course material at the appropriate point. We thought it would be a great idea if it was possible to just ‘drag’ the reference from the library system by a very short, simple, snippet of code, which could be embedded in any webpage.

This isn’t 100% ideal (it still requires some ability to edit html), and after seeing the stuff that Art Rhynol has just come up with for his Lookup Helper, I’m quite jealous. However, since I’m talking about web material here, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say ‘and now paste in these 2 lines of code’.

So, how about a solution similar to the one Andy Powell and Pete Cliff came up with for RSS-xpress Lite. This is seems really neat – just very simple.

Speed could be an issue, but I’ll worry about that later…