Will that shiny new LMS support digital learning objectives?

Will that shiny new LMS support digital learning objectives?

While it is very clear that the U.S. K-12 ed-tech thought-leaders have coalesced around the necessity to advance teaching to a more student-centered, inquiry-based approach to instruction, the digital classroom ecosystem still has significant ground to cover to begin to address these changing objectives. Unfortunately, the latest go-to K-12 educational product of the day, the Learning Management System (LMS), does little to further the instructional process in support of these exciting and necessary pedagogical shifts.

The shifts include a departure from a textbook-style canned curriculum, as well as the teach-to-the-test rote memorization legacy instilled by the late-NCLB and high-stakes standardized testing. Requisite 21st century learning skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity, collaboration and communication are all the objectives of new teaching models which emphasize a less-structured learning environment capable of meeting each student's personal needs and helping them to elicit their passions. However, supporting these instructional strategies requires a lot of fundamental digital functionality not found in a K-12 LMS.

Most LMSs were born in higher ed, which have a significantly different set of learning needs than their K-12 counterpart. K-12 student populations are naturally more heterogeneous than in the higher ed environment, which has made it particularly challenging for school districts that are trying to support true personalized instruction for young adults who are still searching for their individual distinctiveness. The list of typical RFP objectives for a K-12 LMS is so broad that it raises the question of whether school districts expect an LMS to be the major platform for transforming instruction. The problem is that the LMS is not a teaching and learning tool, it is an administrative tool for managing courses and communications. Ask any school district in the U.S. if they feel that their LMS is meeting their digital instruction needs, and I suspect that the answer will be no, not many. School districts are frustrated by their LMS and generally feel that their goals are being hindered by it rather than facilitated. So, why then is the LMS being approached as the single platform answer to much of what a school district needs to solve its highly challenging and complex migration to digital teaching and learning?

One answer can be found in that school districts in the past have been burned when they have tried to cobble together multiple vendors' products to achieve a holistic solution. This has led many to try to find or build single solutions to do everything. The notion of having "one throat to choke" was so desirable that attempting to integrate best of breed solutions felt too daunting and risky.  However, I would suggest that with the ubiquitous adoption of the IMS Global technical interoperability standards in K-12, the attempt can now reasonably be made to achieve 100% of the objectives of even the most progressive Curriculum and Instructional departments.  Further, some districts are already embarking on this digital journey without an LMS, which is of course if you don't consider Google Classroom to actually be an LMS.

Classroom, Classroom, Classroom

Google Classroom does a few things typically ascribed to the LMS space extremely well, such as assignment management, digital communications and calendaring. They are executed so elegantly that users who have an LMS seem to use Google Classroom for these features instead of their district's procured LMS.  With just these primary functions, it would be hard to call Google Classroom an LMS, and it doesn't need to be one.  Google Apps for Education (Google Drive, Google docs, Gmail and Calendar) have achieved such popular adoption in U.S. K-12, which in turn has provided a solid springboard for Google Classroom to gain real traction and utilization. Microsoft has now launched its own Microsoft Classroom, seemingly similar in functionality to Google Classroom, while Apple's Classroom addresses a different set of mobile device needs.  Well that's not too confusing, is it?

Since personalized learning and concept mastery are primary objectives of any instructional plan, an effective strategy which supports how students and teachers should find and access high-quality curated digital resources is certainly one of the top of the priorities. LMS's don't manage learning objects, Learning Object Repositories do.  Digital resources come from many different sources including educational publishers, video streaming libraries, Open Educational Resources (OERs), district-created lessons, teacher-created learning activities, student-created content, playlists, item banks, reference databases, web apps, games, music, images, virtual reality content and more. Managing these digital resources from various perspectives is essential in order to access them quickly and easily. 

Smart Learning Objects

Good learning object level meta-data is probably the most important element for finding the right digital resources. The best way to appreciate the value of learning object meta-data is to think about what happens when it isn't present.  Have you ever wanted to show a picture on your iPhone to someone you're with, but then had to give up on sharing it with them because you or they grew impatient after scrolling through scores of pics and not finding it? That's because the iPhone doesn't give you an opportunity to meta-tag each of your photos.  This lack of organization impacts every curriculum developer or teacher who is trying to find learning objects which aren't meta-tagged, or a student who is looking for curated resources which aren't tagged. Media Services professionals say, "If it's not catalogued, we don't own it." When the right content isn't found, precious instructional time is wasted or the teachable moment is lost. 

Smart learning objects are correlated to state curricular standards so they can be accessed and used in support of these standards. Access also means federated search...searching across multiple databases and producing search results from within the same interface. 

Digital learning objects and activities also require thoughtful technical management so that the files can be accessed by a teacher on the large classroom display or by students from any device in BYOT environments.  Therefore, video files must be converted to multiple formats and bitrates, and various document or interactive whiteboard files should also be available in multiple formats, such as PDFs.

Student Agency and Choice

Another fundamental precept of personalized learning is providing students with choices for how they want to learn key concepts. The even more progressive notion of student agency, empowering students with a voice in their own learning to set goals and timelines, requires a certain level of independence which can be supported with choices for foundational curated resources. They can then move on to use the learning object repository resources again to create their own presentations to demonstrate competency on a given topic. Giving teachers and students choices for the kinds of learning activities they prefer to engage with is generally preferable, and it is the reason that I believe the days of school districts purchasing a complete course from one educational publisher will come to an end. The transition will take a few years, but it will happen, and the big three U.S. Educational publishers have demonstrated that they know this and are preparing for it.   

Bite-sized Chunks

HMH and Pearson are supplying some of their courses with Thin Common Cartridge functionality, precisely for the reason of providing flexibility to educators and students to be able to mix and match their learning objects into other platforms and other learning activities. "The need for publishers to break up their online or digital content into small consumable pieces to interface with software providers is key to the ever-changing classroom environment...",  observed Kyle Berger, CIO, Duncanville ISD in Tech & Learning's School CIO. "We want every piece of their content (educational publishers) to be individual learning objects...the emphasis is on personalization", offered Jeanne K. Imbriale, Dir. of Enterprise Applications, Baltimore County Public Schools in Education Week.

According to Leo Brehm, formerly the CIO/CTO at Newton (MA) Public Schools in School CIO, "The journey to digital instruction has been a learning experience unto itself. "We determined that what our district needed was not just another LMS. What we really needed was a robust and powerful repository of content that would allow delivery to any LMS-like platform that we chose. When we learned that the digital tool we were seeking is called a learning object repository (LOR), we quickly added the acronym to our working vocabulary. In seeking an LOR we knew that our LOR would have to be robust as well as user-friendly. It had to be capable of not only holding information that we developed ourselves, but also information we purchased or subscribed to from other content providers such as HMH, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. The assets could be organized, archived, indexed, and delivered via a reliable and holistically managed infrastructure, the very purpose of the LOR."

What is the objective of the LMS?

There are a growing number of educators that are questioning why their LMS is failing them. One of the impediments faced by LMSs is the lack of interoperability with third party systems which meet the instructional needs of educators and learning needs of students. How does the LMS facilitate searching for digital resources in multiple databases simultaneously and then to easily access the search results for use in an assignment or lesson? This type of federated search functionality is the domain of a properly functioning Learning Object Repository, not an LMS.

Brehm also writes, "For teachers to effectively use digital assets migrating into their classrooms, the assets must be organized, archived, indexed, and delivered via a reliable and holistically managed infrastructure. This is the power of the infrastructure that is known as an LOR.  In classrooms the LOR often integrates with an LMS, supplying the toolkit of features from lesson delivery through evaluative assessment. The LMS is typically responsible for the tracking of student progress, forecasting of institutional need, and other administrative functions. The LOR, then, is responsible for aggregating and delivering resources, compiling curriculum, and facilitating resource sharing among educational designers. In some circumstances, the LMS and LOR are jointly responsible for overall curriculum management."

Perhaps, all of this is why Educause in December, 2015 wrote "...while the LMS is valuable for handling the administrative duties of a course, it is less successful in effectively facilitating learning...This creates a disparity between the LMS's role as an administrative tool and the need to explore new learning models."

If we all accept that the concept of personalized learning is an urgent instructional objective, which allows every student to learn in the manner, pace and level which is most effective for them, then supporting that goal should drive the decisions regarding the digital classroom ecosystem.  There are many questions to ponder. Where do the learning objects and activities come from?  How do the physical objects and equipment fit in? Where does the assessment come from? How do progress monitoring and analytics loop back into differentiated instruction?  How do the creativity and collaboration tools integrate with content?  Are the classroom lesson presentation tools interoperable with lesson resources? I believe the job of connecting all of these digital resources, educational applications, classroom presentation tools and district enterprise systems, is the gestalt of the Digital Learning Platform...and the beauty of a Digital Learning Platform today is that it doesn't need to be housed entirely inside one vendor's solution...its most powerful and important work is done behind the scenes and is seamless to the user. The work of ed-tech is now about connecting several different systems using interoperability standards so that teachers aren't wasting their time trying to connect systems which don't play together.  This enables students and teachers to use the learning objects which they prefer and every school to use the devices, cameras and displays they have purchased. It facilitates the integration between the SIS, the digital classroom ecosystem, assessment and adaptive tools, digital resources, and even hand's-on physical objects.

IMS GLC: The Digital Road Builder

Therefore, for the educator and student, the Digital Learning Platform is the seamless integration of several digital solutions which a school district integrates successfully to help achieve the learning outcomes desired. School districts are fortunate today to have a set of fairly well-paved roads in place to connect vendors' systems using the IMS GLC interoperability technology standards, which have now become a requirement of virtually every major K-12 technology RFP. IMS standards include the ubiquitous LTI standard which serves as a Single Sign-On (SSO) standard eliminating the necessity for a user to do multiple logins for multiple educational applications. LTI also provides a means for learning tools from one system to be dropped into another system. IMS also has the Common Cartridge standard embraced by the major educational publishers, making it far simpler to pull their high value digital resources (or links) into a Learning Object Repository so they can be co-mingled with other educational resources, easily searched and placed into playlists or lessons. The QTI standard has provided standards to pull assessment information, grades, etc...from one system to another. The value of all this for schools is one of the most encouraging things to happen in the K-12 technology vendor community.

But, the roads aren't all built just yet...more standards are being completed and adopted. IMS is working on a new federated search standard, which will provide even greater interoperability to find digital resources from various databases. The new IMS OneRoster standard makes integration with Student Information Systems and the transfer of student rostering information far more elegant than what exists today. 

LMSs are solid administrative tools, but they don't support classroom instruction. Their interfaces are not designed for real-time classroom use and suffer functionally because they don't handle video effectively. 

Use More Law

LMSs don't handle video well because they are all cloud-hosted, and rich media consumes way too much bandwidth in schools today to be hosted effectively on the internet. School districts have limited internet bandwidth and need to preserve their internet for all other needs. You've heard of Moore's Law, ostensibly the doubling of computing power every 2 years...consider now the Use More Law for schools with mobile devices...provide students and teachers with more internet bandwidth and they will attempt to consume it at twice the rate as you can supply it! And 80% of that bandwidth will be for video! A properly designed LOR hosts video on caching servers placed on premises from within the school district's Wide Area Network (WAN) where the bandwidth is typically 5-10x's more plentiful than the internet.

Therefore, since LMSs are simply good administrative tools to manage courses and are not point-of-instruction presentation tools, they are merely a minor cog in the complex digital classroom ecosystem. There's no drawback to placing lesson resources inside an LMS now, so long as the LMS supports the bulk export of your files later on using portability standards (IMS Common Cartridge Producer & Consumer) when you decide to move them elsewhere for any reason. Is an LMS a necessary purchase for a school district?  It depends on the timing and objectives of their personalized learning strategy and the other tools they have available to them.

david yarnell

producer at dyproductions

6y

I always thought of you as super smart this essay proves that evaluation is totally inadequate .... you should be the secretary of Education .... let's get you there

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I would like permission to use this article with the schools I am working with

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Fred Whitehouse

Owner at Whitehouse Consultants

7y

Andrew, I really enjoyed reading your article make me miss working with Safari. Hope you are doing well. Fred Whitehouse

Vincent McGinnis

Computer & Network Security Professional

7y

Andrew that was very informative.

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Kevin Pawsey

Product/Technology Leader @ Prometric / Edtech 💻

7y

Nicely put. Good stuff.

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