Greetings. I am a web developer at an non-profit educational R&D -- we do such things (among others) as on-line professional development courses for grade-school teachers, and collaborative on-line learning environments for grade-school students. As you might expect, this topic is of considerable interest to me and my organization; indeed, we would very much like to be involved in the formulation of any "elearning" standards.
Our perspective is slightly different from that of those people who have already commented about the corporate learning environment and how ill served it is by the "training" model inherent in most LMS's. Our work manages to be even less well served by LMS's: we are "constructivists" (a philosophy of education which stresses "hands on" and "inquiry based" learning, as opposed to didaction or lecture) working in the areas of mathematics and science. Yes, hands-on and on-line: for some of the courses we have developed with a university partner as part of their Masters in Education program, when a student enrolls, they are shipped a box of lab supplies to use in their own home. A crucial part of this program of study, is that the students upload their data from their experiments to the web site. Another key part of the program is the student -- who, remember, is learning how to teach this material -- must design a course plan for teaching this material to a grade-school class, and upload that course plan for review and comments by fellow students. Now try implementing that through BlackBoard 5. I have heard it often said that one must not confuse a CMS for an *application* server. But that is *precisely* what is needed in the on-line *education* market -- as opposed to "training" market. Let us clarify a few things. What gets lumped under "learning" -- "e" or otherwise" -- actually can have several very different characters. The issue is *not* whether it happens in industry or in school or in some other context. Instead, the issue is what activities the student does as part of that "learning" process. The problem with LMS's is that they presuppose a very small repertoire of student learning activities: they provide means for textual or graphical information to be presented to the student for reading/studying; they provide means for (mechanically scorable) tests to be administered to the student; they may provide a forum/webboard for discussion amongst students and/or teachers. That may be adequate to "train", for lack of a better word, a person to do a task. But that's hardly education. Activities such as the cycle of review and revision of an english paper, or the aggregation of lab data from all the students in a class, or participating in a peer "round-table" one anther's work, or using modeling applications to study geometry, physics or engineering -- to name just a few -- are essentially *ruled out* by any LMS -- or CMS -- which is not also a web application development environment and server. Michael Bronder brought up Neil Stephenson's novel _The Diamond Age, Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_. Even over-simplifying the Primer to an on-going educational game, that trivial an application is ruled out by an LMS which is tied to a didactic model of what education is. Which brings us to an important point. Education is a *profoundly* political topic. One of the things which must be understood by CMS players looking to move into the LMS arena is that these are treacherous waters. The problem is that education methodologies and philosophies are "hot" issues. Fads rip through the field of education. The pendulum between "lecture" and "hands-on" swings on a ~20 year period. It is not *teachers* who get caught in these fads and trends -- it is administrators and the general public. Worse, it becomes difficult to even have a discussion about what seem to outsiders to be neutral topics. For instance, asking a potential content developer "Is your material going to be 'hands-on' or 'lecture-and-test'?" could be a hot-button issue. If 'hands-on' is 'in', they may assure you that *of course* their material is hands-on -- but then it turns out that means they have a couple of flash movies to put on the website. Similarly, there are no standard terms for discussing different styles of class/training -- and what terms there are are not "value neutral". This makes it astonishingly difficult to extract user requirements! Another issue is that it is critical, when discussing LMS's, to differentiate between the management of learning materials, and the "meta data" of the student's usage of the system. Keeping track of what courses the student has completed is not management of learning materials. Perhaps that might be more properly considered the province of a "Registration Management System". Which is not to say that such a hypothetical RMS wouldn't run into the same basic problem, of presupposing a single universal structure of assets which overly constrains organizations which attempt to use it. I am told MIT elected to implement its own registrar system in-house, because it uses a unique unit system for its classes -- no off-the-shelf product would accommodate them. Likewise, the RMS for a program of self-study (i.e. the student works through a series of web pages and takes an automated test, all without direct interaction or supervision of a teacher/trainer) probably needs to be quite different from one where a teacher supervises the activities of the student, and assigns grades to the student's work. To say nothing of programs which don't use grades. -- Vanessa Layne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Web Toolsmith TERC * 2069 Massachusetts Ave. * Cambridge, MA * 617 547-0430 -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
