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.