{"id":4871,"date":"2012-04-19T19:08:56","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T23:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=4871"},"modified":"2012-04-21T10:17:06","modified_gmt":"2012-04-21T14:17:06","slug":"kale-chips-and-the-lms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4871","title":{"rendered":"Kale chips and the LMS"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last three Thursday mornings, I’ve sat through presentations by a combination of developers and sales teams from three different learning management systems (or LMSs), since USF’s IT department wanted to look at the institution’s choices and asked faculty and students from around the university to help organize an evaluation of different LMSs<\/a>. ((The group of faculty and students have no power to make decisions here, but my impression is that IT staff are taking the input extremely seriously.)) We currently have Blackboard 9.0, and the options being considered are to upgrade to Blackboard 9.1, use Blackboard’s newly-acquired Moodlerooms hosting service for Moodle, or switch to Instructure Canvas.<\/p>\n

Before I lay out a few first impressions for each option, a broader observation: I was struck by some data IT staff gave out in some early organizational meetings, showing that for the majority of listed features in Blackboard 9.0, very few courses use the features (and that is true in many cases for face-to-face, blended, and online classes). Because of this, an additional question that came to mind at several points in the last few weeks has been, “Okay, that looks like an interesting added control no one has at USF right now. But turning that on looks like it requires some effort, and I wonder how many would really use it.”<\/p>\n

Many of the features I saw strike me as the LMS equivalent of kale chips. What are kale chips, you ask? So did I when I saw a package in a health-food store earlier this year, so I bought it as an experiment–kale is incredibly healthy, but it tends to require a lot of preparation time and energy. So why not give it a whirl?\u00a0I have decided I do not like kale chips. At least in that first bag, kale chips are what you get when you boil the essence of kale bitterness into a triangular bit of fiber that has been baked or fried to have the mouthfeel almost precisely of tortilla-chip-textured cardboard. It is an amazing product from one perspective, but it’s not to my taste, or rather, not worth the effort in time or money.<\/p>\n

If you think about using a particular feature of an LMS or other online system, you have to learn how to use it and what to use it for. There’s always some investment, and some things look really cool if you don’t remember that for each of the 20 assignments in a course, you would spend a few minutes tweaking the settings for that cool feature (let alone the other cool features), on top of everything else you do. So just because an LMS will let you set up special discussion-board subscription options for the students who declared “piercings\/body mods” in their list of personal interests, that doesn’t mean any faculty member is going to use that option. That sort of thing feels like kale chips–somebody may love it, but not too many somebodys.<\/p>\n

More importantly, USF shouldn’t choose an LMS based on kale-chip features. It doesn’t matter how granular you can set up some features if no one is going to use them. So in thinking about the options, I’ve decided it’s the big picture that counts, what will happen in most courses and for most students and faculty. Please keep in mind that the following observations are personal, not the result of conversation with anyone else in the group IT has used to help plan the review process.<\/p>\n

Blackboard 9.1<\/h4>\n

Blackboard 9.1 improves moderately on 9.0 — it adds the ability to create grading rubrics, it removes some clicks from how you hide assignment grades from students (important for hand-graded assignments as you submit grades to the system), and it allows the creation of template course organizations so faculty and teaching assistants can just “get in it and drive.” It has some ability to draw in media from Youtube and Flickr (and probably a few other sets), though the only items that are easily embedded (and not by default, either) are the items you can search for publicly. (Otherwise, you embed media through the same HTML hack that’s available in 9.0.) In other words, it’s an incremental improvement of the old, clunky Blackboard.<\/p>\n

The main advantage to sticking with Blackboard is the cost of transition. I am worried less about the typical faculty member who has created content in Blackboard (which can migrate to other systems fairly easily, for most stuff) than the departments and colleges that have invested considerable time in choosing proprietary “cartridges” that work well in Blackboard but probably would not work well (or at all) in either Moodlerooms or Canvas. That’s a transition issue. At least at first impression, there is no overwhelming reason to stick with Blackboard other than the transition problems that could result. But it is important to acknowledge that those transition issues are significant for some departments and colleges.<\/p>\n

Moodlerooms<\/h4>\n

Moodlerooms is a service that combines the open-source Moodle platform with added features the company (now Blackboard unit) calls Joule. At least from my first impression, Moodlerooms and Moodle are what Blackboard could have been but will probably never be–the feature sets are broader and deeper than in Blackboard, and it feels about 20% easier to move around and just get things done. But having said that, the basic look and feel of Moodle\/Moodlerooms is very similar to Blackboard — courses are organized into little boxes that you can call folders\/weeks\/modules\/whatever, and in the boxes you can add different things students do, whether read, view, complete, or interact with. Moodlerooms had the course organization templates long before Blackboard, and there are more of them to help you get in and drive the course as a teacher.<\/p>\n

The big value added by Moodlerooms in the past year is a unique feature called Personalized Learning Designer. This is something like a combination of adaptive\/responsive material release and targeted emails, but on steroids. Based on events in the system, a faculty member could open up material, or alert or email students, including an in-system “mail-merge” setup allowing a student to receive something like the following:<\/p>\n

On entering a course: “Hello, Sherman! Welcome to XIV 9384, Introduction to Complexification Studies. I am so glad you are taking the course, and here is what I recommend you look at first…”<\/p>\n

On poor performance in a quiz: “Dear Sherman, you scored under 70% on Quiz 4. I have opened up a special review for concepts from the quiz, Quiz 4 Review Materials, and I would encourage you to review that before clicking on the next link, Quiz 4 Retake….”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Personalized Learning Designer is an awful name, but it’s a very powerful tool, and it is the major advantage I see for moving to Moodlerooms, even beyond the active user community for Moodle.<\/p>\n

Canvas<\/h4>\n

Instructure Canvas is somewhat different in look and feel from either Blackboard or Moodle. While there are structures to build inside a course, there is far less effort required than the multiple-click experience of either Blackboard or Moodle. For example, in an area of a course designed for discussion (discussion boards in Blackboard, forums in Moodle), in either of the systems you need to click to add an entry, type in the entry box, and then scan through all of the varied options while hunting for the submit button. In Canvas, it’s much closer to the experience of adding a status update to Facebook or a Tweet in twitter: click inside an empty box, type, click submit. Or click on an icon to record yourself talking with a webcam or (for audio only) a microphone. Unlike in BB or Moodle, links to Youtube or the equivalent become live embedded video rather than clicks to links. The reduction in friction in general makes Canvas a qualitatively different experience.<\/p>\n

There are a number of other places where that reduction in friction is evident — Canvas has a side-by-side display of student work along with places to mark a rubric or other grading feedback — and while any one of them may be mimicked by the other systems, it appears to be baked into the Canvas user interaction much moreso than with Blackboard or Moodle. Blackboard and Moodle shows every single one of their kale chips. Canvas may have kale chips, but they’re generally hidden. In general, it looks like where there is evidence available about perceptions of\u00a0faculty and students at other universities, the response is very similar to my first one: everything just works easily, and in its first few years the company has been very responsive to user feedback.<\/p>\n

Snapshot impression… the choice depends on priorities and a shrewd guess about the future<\/h4>\n

At least right now (Thursday evening, April 19th), I can see some clear distinctions between the three platforms. We could stay with Blackboard if the transition issues dominate the decision-making. If the most important quality of a course management platform is not to disrupt existing published material, then sticking with Blackboard would make sense.<\/p>\n

We could move to Moodlerooms if the existence of the algorithm-driven interaction (Personalized Learning Designer) is the most important feature. I can see how this could help a number of key functions at a university, and if the complexities and remaining “user friction” of Moodle is less important than the potential uses of that algorithmic capacity, then we would move to Moodlerooms.<\/p>\n

We could move to Canvas if the modern interface and removal of friction is the most important feature. I can see how some of the behind-the-scenes mechanics could be as important as Moodlerooms’ algorithm functions, but it’s the “wow, it can be this easy?” factor that would make Canvas a very different experience. If removing most of the friction of using online tools is critical, we would move to Canvas.<\/p>\n

It is important to keep in mind that current functionality is not what we’re working with: part of the decision depends on some shrewd guesses about the future. Will Blackboard’s new owners follow through on their commitment to Moodlerooms as it exists now and might in the future? Will the rudimentary rubric tools in Blackboard become as sophisticated as they exist in Canvas? Will either Blackboard or Moodlerooms make embedding media as simple as it is in Canvas? Will Canvas develop an algorithmic tool like Moodlerooms’? To some extent, the decision depends on the platforms as they currently exist, but not everything. I just hope they don’t depend on kale chips.<\/p>\n

Comments most<\/em>\u00a0welcome<\/h4>\n

If you teach or take classes at USF, please feel free to follow the link to the LMS review page<\/a>, view any of the presentation sessions, and comment below.<\/p>\n

Note: <\/strong>The University of Central Florida is also evaluating LMS options<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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