There’s a great discussion going on at Jon Mott’s Blog about how to improve course management systems. Jon’s original post made the very correct observation that CMS vendors often fail because their customers are not students, but institutions. I have seen this as well as I have researched CMS technologies, and it often means their focus is not really on learning, but on efficiency. If they can make the lives of faculty members or IT administrators easier, then they will sell more of their product. And who cares (it seems) about what the students are learning?
In a series of articles I wrote about some research I did on Blackboard implementation, I reported that efficiency benefits were very high—students and instructors feel the technology saves them time. But when we asked them about how much it improved learning, we found mixed results. Classes where the instruction was very lecture-oriented felt a CMS DID improve learning–because it made it easier/quicker to absorb the information. However, instructors who attempted more student-centered learning approaches, based on constructivist or collaborative learning ideas, were often very frustrated. One instructor who impressed me with his dedication to collaborative, student-centered instruction described how hard he tried to bend the Blackboard technology to facilitate the kind of instruction he wanted to do, but it just wouldn’t work. As we talked as co-authors, we realized that trying to force a CMS to facilitate student-centered online learning is like trying to facilitate this same kind of student-centered learning in a classroom with the chairs bolted to the floor, facing the instructor. It just doesn’t work very well, although you can do it with great effort.
So what can we do to improve CMSs so they better support other models of learning besides content-driven ones? I think the biggest improvement would be if the designers of these technologies shifted their thinking from focusing on the instructors to focusing on the students. If that happened, then the technologies would open up, not be connected to courses or instructors, but be connected to students. Jon describes these ideas, so I’m borrowing some of his thoughts here. As he puts it, the learners would need to own their learning spaces, and their access to the content and relationships would need to persist over time. He is absolutely spot-on. A huge hurdle for students is that anything they do in Blackboard or any other CMS is then lost when the semester ends. And we claim in higher education to be promoting lifelong learning—what irony when the technologies we make students use are semester-bound and then gone forever!
Marion Jensen, in a comment to Jon’s post, mentions, “It is interesting to me that a lot of the things we want students to do, they are already doing with tools of their own choosing. We want students to communicate with each other, which they do on Facebook. We want them to write about topics, which many of them do on their blogs. We want them to do research, which all of them do proficiently on Google. We ask them to create and do projects, which many of them do on youtube.”
This is also so very true, and the best CMS environment, I feel, would be one that incorporated what the student already was using and doing. If the student has a blog, or a Facebook page, or whatever, it would feed into the CMS. If the student shared video, text, or anything somewhere else, it would feed into the CMS for the students’ fellow learners to see. Perhaps this could be done by having students create profile pages in the CMS, upload their usernames and passwords for their other social networking sites, and then every time they used a particular tag with one of those sites (such as “Psych101”) that piece would feed into the CMS class they were part of that semester. At the end of the semester, they could still access all of the relationships and discussions because these all occurred OUTSIDE of the CMS, with the CMS only acting as an aggregator and facilitator.
One final thought: It isn’t just the CMS technologies that have the problem of being not open enough for their users. Unfortunately, because they all have a product to sell, all social web technologies seem to close their services from each other, with only some exceptions. Hopefully one day there will be a way to have my Facebook page, my blog, my instant messaging service, email, youtube account, twitter account, etc. all talk to each other so if I posted or updated something in one place, it would appear in all of these other networks. Does it bug anyone else that you have to update your “status” in twitter and each instant messaging account separately? Or that you have to maintain several different Linkedin and Linkedin-imitation accounts to be able to be connected? Why can’t I just have one profile, one status message, and one set of blog posts and photos that feed into all of my accounts? That would really make the social web usable and useful.
Hey Rick, I just posted the following comment to Jon’s site. I’m interested to hear what you think about it:
In response to the idea that educators should use the same tools the students are already using (Facebook, e.g.):
At first glance this doesn’t seem like a bad idea. When many of these initiatives are implemented, however, they often run into problems. Among other things is the phenomenon known as the “creepy treehouse.”
Yes, communication, community, relationships, and more are very important to students’ use of social media tools and websites. So it seems so natural to use them for education! But another important draw for many students is those sites are also places where the normal authorities aren’t around. In other words, at least part of the draw of Facebook is kids can be themselves, and don’t have to act the way their parents, teachers, or employers want them to act. Did your parent ever chaperone a high school dance, just so they could spend more time with you? This is the same idea. When professors use Facebook (or many other social media sites) for educational purposes, students feel more than it is only out of place. They feel it’s . . . creepy.
For more on the “creepy treehouse” see:
http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2008/04/0…
http://acrlog.org/2008/05/17/creepy-treehouse/
Jason, I see your point, and I think in K-12 settings, this is probably the way many kids feel. However, I think (hope!) in higher education that it is not as much of a problem. I have a friend who Facebooks his students—I’ll have to ask him how that works out. I know in my own experience that nothing deterred me more from participating in a class discussion than being told I’d have to use a new software, technology, or tool, with a new username/login, to basically do the same thing I was already doing on my blog.
I think Facebook might not be the best example, perhaps, either. Facebook is great for networking, and I could see students using it to quickly query and answer each other about their classes (e.g. “Jon, what’s up? Hey, did you figure out #6 of tomorrow’s Chem assignment?”). However, the deep discussion that an instructor might participate in would not be something that could happen on Facebook I don’t think. It’d be more likely to happen with people’s blogs. I could see a student perhaps creating one blog to do all their school talking on, and then wanting to be able to continue to use the same blog for all of their classes. This is more of the scenario that I’m talking about.
The important thing that I think Jon was getting at, and that I agree with, is that students should be encouraged to create personal learning spaces of some kind, and to be able to carry those personal learning spaces with them from class to class and beyond. A class CMS, then, would simply be the aggregator or organizer of these individual spaces–pulling them together for one moment in time, but not limiting them from continuing to expand after the course ends.
Rick,
Thanks for keeping the conversation going. I particularly appreciated your observation that:
If we think about the goals of CMS developers (e.g. seamless integration with SISs, efficient course content publication, secure grade booking, etc.) we shouldn’t be suprised that CMSs do a good job with those sorts of tasks. CMSs have generally NOT been built with the facilitation of learner tasks and activities as their raison d’être, so we should likewise not be terribly suprised that they don’t tend to yield significant learning gains . . .
For that we’ll have to turn elsewhere.
You’re right, Rick – the important point should be that CMS technology should take care of the student first.
But I’m not sure that students in higher ed are any different than younger students, in their feelings about authority figures intruding on social spaces. We may wish it were different, but in most cases I don’t think students perceive professors as peers/collaborators/co-researchers/co-learners/or anything other than a person who wields power over their grade.
Some students in grad school are able to work through this, but even then not all. But for undergrads, I think the research indicates students perceive the power relationship between them and their professors as very unequal. And I don’t see that changing any time soon, unfortunately, because the majority of a university’s culture and policies are designed to maintain that difference. Meaning individual attempts by some professors to break through the “unequal power” wall are likely to backfire.