The post LMS era: Suite of Tools learning networks

*This post is essentially a compilation of work I’ve been spreading out amongst many different mediums, both here on this blog and elsewhere around the inter-webs.  This also isn’t the most logically connected argument, I just needed a break from code.

The first step to changing the ocean is to stop looking to it and instead step in.  Properties of basic physics and hydrodynamics kick in and you are in effect changing the environment that you previous only observed.  Instead of talking about the LMS, the MOOC market, or anything else that I often see learning designers discuss.  Let’s skip ahead a bit. 

Let’s talk about the post LMS society that we wish to create.  The how, where and why.

How do we get to a post LMS era?  I’ve talked about what I felt would cause the eventual end of the traditional LMS before.  Talk is cheap, so diagrams about how to accomplish this would be the next best thing, right?

This video then goes on to show these diagrams produced as a fully functional prototype, with video introduction to the work.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY7U0cDVtlY&feature=share&list=PLJQupiji7J5f2S0jy05aFjMwGYGEpB4GF

And this talk, which is a rebroadcast of my DrupalcampNJ presentation “Using Drupal to Transform Education” http://vimeo.com/60084560 consolidates the entire thing into one presentation.

The structure and nature of education system deployments is wrong

This is probably one of the more controversial statements that I stand by but typically don’t say.  It shows my generally libertarian, small central authority mentality, for one, and for two: no one is doing anything but it.  Come to us, we are the hub, we can provide everything you need in one place says every vendor out there, and the new MOOC platforms are simply replicating this model in a different location and calling it open.

The structure needs to start at a central point but that center ring needs to be as small as sustainably possible.  It needs to help knit things together and keep the “LMS” data that is currently stored in large buckets, spread out and accessible to new buckets (through a process of LTI resigning).

Opening up new off ramps

This is where I’m hoping LTI will be the Trojan horse it appears to be, as someone noted at my talk in NJ (which I wish we had the audio of).

So, you are advocating that people use these tools that you ship them off to and increasingly, they’ll use the LMS less and less.  Eventually.. you’ll do so much outside the LMS that you won’t need an LMS anymore.

Eureka, we have a winner.  If we build enough off-ramps out of the system that while meeting some people’s needs, doesn’t meet everyone’s, we will eventually connect to other areas that people want to hang out.  This pattern is quite similar to the western growth and expansion of America in the early 1800′s.

People slowly were moving away from the major cities to parts unknown after the revolution.  What changed that caused population migration to explode? Mike Rowe will have you believe it was booze, but I’d contend it was gold and rail-roads.

Well gang, LTI is the railroad, and glittering prizes await those that create proper off-ramps for different tool sets that people are dying to get access to.

But, but, but privacy

Absolutely an issue.  What happens when we start letting people go anywhere and everywhere?  The same exact thing that happens now, we just introduce calculated risk instead of unknown risk.

Huh?

Innovation is happening with faculty every day, every where.  This often times I’d guess is at the expense of telling others about it.  The number of threads you can find on the Internet about cool new tools and different edtech applications is staggering.  If we don’t provide a solution to new cool shiny object xyz, people will find a way around the systems in place to get students into the new bucket they’d like to use.

 

 

Systems

So I’m doing my part to provide options, how bout you?  These 4 tools are all being developed simultaneously (which completely wrecks me mentally some days, hence this brain dump of a post) but it doesn’t mean that all tools in a network NEED to be Drupal.  It’s just to say that it’s the only system that a single developer could even attempt something this insane through automation.

Actual drush command to build 183 drupal sites with a single command. Setting up a massively extended, LTI aware series of new buckets to be accessed after creation. This was a test run at the time of publishing.

Course information system (ELMS:CIS) – Center point and middle-ware communications hub that bridges old world to the new one.

Content tool (ELMS: MOOC) – The instructional design centric course outlining tool.  This is the content outline that all instructional flow and material is attached to.

Social critique tool (ELMS:CLE) – A completely free-form social submission space.  Students openly submit and critique as well as receive instructor feedback in this space.  This posting spends time detailing how and why to build this system.

Interactive Course Object Repository (ELMS: ICOR) – A dumping ground of unique and interactive instructionally significant pieces of material.  This could be polls, quizzes, time lines, slide-shows, content players, media, or really anything that might fall outside the norm that can be embedded as a widget in material via an iframe.

Systems waiting in the wings

Asset management system – (we already have this, but re-envisioned for today) and plugged into the LTI network.  This would ideally be integrated with Red5 and FFMPEG for free media encoding and streaming (yes free) of video with secure delivery via RTMP.

Copyright management spider – content production != copyright management on the fly.  Often times these is a significant legal process that needs to happen in parallel to course development.  Also, imagine a world where people are using resources and you have no idea what they are (like oh I don’t know… always).  The copyright management spider is essentially a spider that crawls and ingests all courses in the learning network and digests them.  Once digested, people go through and fill out all required legal information for the media, or help improve upon the earlier justifications for usage.

Analytics engine – Something that sits off by itself and that all other tools can write to.  I believe that a spec like TinCan seeks to achieve this but not sure.  For the time being I’m writing logical chunks where I could tap in and send off relevant analytic data for processing by another system but haven’t done any work here yet.

Interactive Rubric tool – We’ve built and used one through about 3 iterations of the tool, this would actually use LTI (and other Drupal system capabilities if in Drupal).  It would also be optimized for mobile and responsive design.

 

These are just the tools that I’m working on now or am envisioning for the future.  Fortunately, there has been a lot of positive buzz around LTI and Drupal so I guess we’ll see.  Ahh, mind is much clearer now that I’ve dumped all these ideas on to this adorable blogging platform.

Drupal is a social movement

I’ve stopped talking about Drupal as the dominant platform recently.  Now it’s not because I don’t feel that it is — even though I’m blogging from WordPress right now I feel that Drupal is the best platform.  But the thing that shines brightest in the Drupal community is just that… the community.

• Drupalcon Szeged 2008
• Drupalcon Paris
• Drupalcon DC
• Drupal Camp PSU (internal to PSU faculty / staff / students) 120+ attendees

Sure, the hook and alter system are fantastic.  Sure it’s extendable and ultra flexible.  If you really know what you’re doing you can bend Drupal to your will without breaking a darn thing. But none of that would be important without the people who get up and drive the Drupal bus every day.

The people in the above photos are just a few of the thousands who have stood for DrupalCon and Drupal Camp photos over the last many years.  Every event I’ve gone to someone inevitably tries to get a group photo.  Partly I think because they can’t believe the sheer volume of people there, interested in learning about a web development platform.  Now it’s time to spread this community to the education world.

I started a discussion thread on groups.drupal.org recently that seems to have caught some fire and I hope continues to burn (see article Forming a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium).  Drupal already has a major foothold in many universities and colleges but I don’t know that people really understand the scale to which this has taken place.  A recently study by w3techs.com found that:

“Drupal is used by 27.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know and that use .edu as top level domain.” http://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-edu-/content_management

So how to best keep this momentum going?  I’ll be putting together a document soon and sharing it with the community about how I think we should be positioning Drupal in higher education. Here are a few of the main points so far:

• We have seen nation wide budget cuts and need to continue to innovate in the face of tight budgets, increasingly doing more with less
• Standardizing on Drupal and we can unite staff roles and technology stacks on the web under a common platform.  No other web platform could power websites, intranets, learning management systems, content management systems, knowledge bases, blogs, asset management systems.  Train your staff once, deploy against multiple web projects.
• Hang out in common IRC channels, unite social media presences under consistent hash tags, as well as form a website that can aggregate to all drupal.{myschool}.edu sites participating in the consortium.
• Create a list of best practices such as reasons to use certain modules and distributions as well as those recommended for use in education
• Pay knowledge forward, ultimately we’re all trying to serve the interests of faculty and students so let’s help advance things forward together

I’ll have a more complete document for my vision for what a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium would look like but these are my key thoughts at the moment.  You’ll notice most of them are structured around the people impacted by the world of today as opposed to “views is awesome and drupal is king”.

Drupal is much more then just technology much in the same way that I am much more then just a programmer.

To me, Drupal is an idea that aligns heavily with the fundamental mission of education — empowerment.

Some additional thoughts on this topic

Open Source Learning Environments, they’re about STUDENTS DUMMY!

I was recently reading a literature review about open source in higher education.  If you can get your hands on a copy of the document I highly recommend it.  To summarize, Williams van Rooij identifies five reasons that all literature cite as to why open source in higher education is awesome-sauce:

• Social and Philosophical believes (Education is thought it should be free so code / systems should be too)
• Software Development Methodology Benefits (design in the open, collaboration)
• Security and Risk management benefits (many eyes on code, collaboration again)
• Software adoption life cycle benefits (less chance of lock in, constantly updated / improved by others, collaboration…again…)
• Total cost of ownership benefits (reduction in cost because of distributed programmer base and their…collaboration)

Does anyone else notice a problem here though (other then Williams van Rooij)?  Other then collaborative and strategic mission blah blah, blah, WHAT DOES CODE COLLABORATION HAVE TO DO WITH STUDENT LEARNING?!?  Nothing.  She identifies that all these papers talk about how great open source is but they all attack the problem from the same angle — money, collaboration, lock in, risk assessment… essentially a whole lot of awesome manager bullet points on a PowerPoint slide.

• We participate in Open Source
• Our Students Use Twitter
• Our Teachers Use Facebook
• Our IT staff saved X dollars last year
• We were able to do more with less resources
• Insert bottom line and philosophy crap here

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Those are some great reasons to adopt open source software (OSS).  Open source technologies are all about community development and a culture that fosters open development; often times breeding more successful solutions.  My issue is exactly what the author find to be lacking in the research: pedagogical Reasons for educators to adopt OSS.  How does OSS improve the instructional transaction between instructor and learner?  How does it solve issues related to open education? How does it solve the growing divide we see between haves and have-nots when it comes to education?  Can it solve these issues? Can it even begin to address these problems or is it purely something great for tech circles to engage in and IT philosophers to write papers about?

The backing is coming in time. Admittedly what I’ll be posting is mostly collaboration commentary but phrased how we all need to be shaping the conversation — collaborative efforts directly impacting learning experiences.  Here’s some of the ways that  the whole educational process can benefit from a distributed learning environment.  OSS in house as well as free / open services available on the web.  I group all of these  under an umbrella term I am deeming an Open Source Learning Environments (OSLE):

• Open software leads to open standards – If your unfamiliar with open education, SCORM, and OER, I suggest looking into them further.  These are all concepts born out of the open source movement in education.  They directly impact the student / teacher relationship because it reduces the number of times resources have to be re-created.  Someone, somewhere has written a lesson or whole course on everything from String theory to what is Chord progression.  It’s out there, search for it and let the open standards move that content between systems.  Or better yet, if it’s truely open just point your students to it for a lesson or two.  Seeds of my previous article are being planted all over the place…
• OSLE embrace social media formats — Enter Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Blip.tv,… need I go on?  Sure, these technologies are often times distracting, but OSS breeds transmission standards and formats that allow things like Vimeo and YouTube to display their videos within your course just by knowing the url (ala Embedded media fields in Drupal).  There’s a wealth of [legal] educational material on YouTube that provide a great way to have students react to documentaries and other articles.  For example, the white-house posts all most all media there in some form for a civics discussion or students can watch parts of Discovery and PBS programming for science concepts.
• Improved teacher to student communication — We’ve reached a point where e-mail is impersonal and students don’t want us bugging them on their FaceBook, mySpace, and twitter social spaces.  But there are still great opportunities to leverage the power of social technologies to benefit student – teacher interactions.  We added online rubrics (open Drupal project) to several online classroom settings and now students get richer, more detailed feedback then ever before possible online.  New modules are created everyday for Moodle, Drupal, WordPress and the rest that hook better and better social services together.  Imagine an internal Gigya service for education and the potentials of optional, cross-posted participation.  Or, [and I just started looking into this] a diigo environment specific to a course environment in Sticky Notes (Drupal).
• Improved student learning through collaboration — remember when collaboration was just setting up a wiki, giving people accounts and telling them to edit stuff?  Remember how painful that was to get setup, painful to manage, painful to teach people how to use the technology.  All those barriers are melting away.  Sites are 1 click creation, accounts are pervasive (openID, LDAP, co-sign), and the wall between the student and the teacher known as technology has turned into an open plain.  Students can set up their own OSLE on blogger or WordPress to create a semi-professional learning resource of their own.
• Instant Online Portfolios — “I have all this great work I did in class” no longer has to be a problem.  Ideas aren’t trapped in endless Word files, presentation scripts, Drop Boxes (*dig) and Power Point slides.  Projects are collaborated on in Google docs, they’re discussed in Blogger, they’re viewable on YouTube.  Students can leave higher education with a toolbox showing everything they’ve been able to accomplish while in school.  Are you enabling their work to be portable through Views and pointing them to post to social services? Or are they still dumping their knowledge to a drop box?  The knowledge economy of the future will demand they be able to sell themselves and their ideas before they graduate.
• Production Creativity — Do you remember early 2000 how long it took to produce a high quality learning resource?  Never mind the mindlessness of uploading HTML in DreamWeaver or Homesite (old school); how about creating a high quality video?  The cost of creation is so much lower (which is what social media is all about) but think of how much higher quality resources we can create as education providers now then before?  And for that matter, how many MORE educational opportunities we can create.
• Distributed Learning Environments — How often do you see  “experience using FILL IN SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGY” on a job application and it not be something generic like Word or Word processors? For the longest time I heard from people “we need to unify the student experience” and I have ALWAYS disagreed.  Students are tweeting, IMing, texting, watching a movie, taking your course, and thinking about what they’ll do in an hour when they’re done reading…all at once.  They are distracted and constantly moving between frames of reference and environments.  Your branding changing a little bit when linking off to another system isn’t going to kill them; if anything it’s only going to help them be more marketable.  Diversify the learning environments and engage students in a variety of systems so they learn to utilize a wider skill set.  The more experience they have using a multitude of systems the better off they’ll be, their work environments are only going to be changing at an ever increasing pace.
• Learning Experience Design — This is a philosophy that’s becoming more apparent at my place of employment — Learning Experience Design.  We don’t just want students to come to our bland –insert default theme here– course / learning environment.  We want students to get sucked into the material.  The more engrossing and engaging the EXPERIENCE, the more likely you are to get them to close twitter, their phone, turn off TV and focus on your content.  Embed YouTube and they’ll be in your material watching YouTube, not on YouTube watching LOL-Cats videos in between your lectures thanks to “related videos”.  Leverage open tools so you can leverage the magic that is good theme design.  Remember, like it or not we’re not just selling knowledge, we’re selling a commodity.

I’d love for someone to write articles proving some of the claims above so that they are more then just ‘best practices’ but that’s part of the point of writing this.  To get you to ask yourself, are you leveraging any of these approaches above or just a few?  Are you fully embracing the potential of an OSLE or are you just playing here and there to make your management happy?

Are you working towards another bullet point, or towards actually changing the lives of your students?

• Your move

Global success, Global failure of the CMS/LMS needs to stop

We need to rethink the way we go about implementing and building large-scale university systems.  I started answering a post recently on Drupal.org about a Moodle / Drupal merger.  The commenter was saying that Moodle could be plugged into Drupal somewhere down the road as a module because of how much better Drupal is at…well.. everything (outside of LMS).  As I started to respond, it occurred to me that this fits in well with a system design I’m working on.  Let’s lay out an example of how you’re screwed now…

• You bought into a CMS / LMS (one package)
• People said “OMG this does everything possible but nothing well”
• This CMS / LMS is bought out, losses popularity, is no longer maintained, is too expensive to hire independent people / your own people to keep afloat
• You need to move to something new and soonish because everyone’s clamoring for it and you’re just waiting for the day something breaks that no one knows how to fix

So right now, your stuck in one system and want to start looking at another.  You can look at Moodle and hope that your SCORM packages will transfer correctly.  You can look at Sakai or any number of other projects and say the same thing.  OR, you can do what I’m doing currently and start looking at NO, ONE, SOLUTION.  I know you’re saying “but Bryan, didn’t you mean just the Drupal solution”, no. Drupal is not the answer. Plone, WordPress, Moveable Type, Joomla, PHPNuke, Moodle, NOTEPAD is not the answer.

We need to start looking at systems development based on a services and scalability perspective.  No one system is going to solve that problem.  We need to start looking at what systems do well and then play to those strengths in the creation of a service.  Right now I’m planning out the new version of ELMS (version 3) and it doesn’t involve just 1 Drupal site / system.  In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t even just involve Drupal.  It involves a star / ring based network of systems approach to network design.

Here’s a sample setup

• A lightweight, data transmission and organization system at the center.  This is either Moodle or Drupal (or anything open source that meets data / record keeping needs).  It also polls the rest of the systems to pull together a view of all data relevant to users in a portal type of display
• It then dictates to all the other systems in the network what users can access what, who’s in what course, what courses are running.  All that fun stuff.
• Other systems in this setup include:
  • A CMS. Something that presents course content and presents it very well.
  • A social media management system (SMMS).  I’ll be making another post shortly hashing this lightbulb out a bit more but think a SMMS that’s specific / internal to your learning ecosystem is the future.
  • Syllabus / course objectives communication system.  This is more of a traditional LMS with JUST the course framework and pacing components involved.
  • A Communications system.  Forums, FAQs, Email, all that traditional communications management stuff
  • Blogging platform — A space onto itself that’s a living community where students / staff can blog about whatever (or make course specific ones).  Free flowing, loosely knit together via track backs and comment streams
  • Wikispace for collaboration — kinda dur what to use here…

So, what I’ve proposed above is more of a communication between and across systems.  Things like single sign on systems and simple modules within each project could allow users to flow seamlessly between them.  RSS and XMLRPC calls could allow session / user display data to flow seamlessly across each.  The most important thing though is that any system can be any CMS/LMS choice.  Example of that….

• Core LMS / data system is Moodle
• CMS is Drupal
• SMMS is Drupal
• Syllabus system is WordPress
• Communications system is Plone
• Blogging platform is moveable type
• Wiki collaboration via Wikispace

All systems can now scale independently of one another both people, database and server wise.  We all have people around EVERY major university that have people with these skills right?  And one big barrier to switching to 1 standard is that ” we have Plone/Drupal/Moodle/WordPress/Joomla/Wikispaces programmers that will all be re-trained on Plone/Drupal/Moodle/WordPress/Joomla/Wikispaces”.  So avoid the barrier, play to your staffing’s strengths.

Will some need to be retrained? Definitely.  But there’s no longer a global success, global failure involved. We don’t have to worry about “what happens if we all go Drupal and the project fizzles?” and the same can be said for any other system.  I have my own personal preferences to different systems and coding practices (obviously) but a lightweight communications system could be cobbled together between each system to allow information to pass freely.

Everyone keeps their skill set, everyone keeps their system of choice, everyone wins! Thoughts? Comment here or on twitter @btopro