Faculty Panel: Exploring the State of the LMS in the CSU

CSU LPS Faculty Panel

Thursday, December 10th, 2015

3pm PT/ 6pm ET

Register here (it's free).

Panelists:
Carolyn Gibbs (CSU Sacramento)
Jackson Wilson (CSU San Francisco)
Paul Boyd-Batstone (CSU Long Beach)
Jaime Hannans (CSU Channel Islands)
Ben Seipel (CSU Chico)

This Thursday, December 10th, 2015 at 3pm PT/ 6pm ET, I will be moderating a 90-minute online panel that will include five faculty representing five of the 23 California State University (CSU) campuses. The panel is one link in a rich, semester-long series of events, blog posts, and sharing of resources organized by the CSU Learning Platforms and Services (LPS) Taskforce (click here to view all of these goodies, included archives of past live events).

The diverse CSU system has a system-wide contract with Blackboard, which has provided CSU campuses the option to adopt Blackboard via a more seamless process and at a lower cost. This contract is coming to an end and, as a result, the LPS Taskforce is organizing opportunities to review the state of LMSs inside and outside the CSU (click here to view the complete purpose of the LPS Taskforce). This review process is the precursor to a statewide RFP for a CSU LMS contract, in which campuses will, again, have the option to participate or adopt a different LMS (or suite of tools) that fits their unique needs.  Currently, 11 CSU campuses have a campus-wide license for Blackboard, 20 use Moodle, and the others use Canvas or D2L/BrightSpace (of course, this does not account for the pockets of faculty who use a different LMS or suite of tools than the majority of their campus peers). Click here to see a complete breakdown of LMS use across the CSU.

When I was invited to moderate an "LMS" panel for CSU faculty, I took time to think through my own experiences teaching with LMSs; which led to reflections about using web-based tools to cultivate visual, active-learning spaces; as well as my recent experiences providing professional development and support for online and blended faculty. These reflections helped me to realize how important it was going to be to design the panel as a conversation about teaching and learning with technology, as opposed to a conversation about using an LMS. 

The LMS as "walled garden."

As we know, the "state of the LMS" in higher education has changed dramatically in the past several years. Edtech discourse around the LMS has recently included more conversations questioning the value of having students learn inside a "walled garden," when they are expected to thrive personally and professional in the open web. This trend is also influenced by the increase of easy-to-use, free to low-cost technologies in recent years. This gradual shift from the LMS as "the" place for organizing content, communicating with students, and facilitating learning (particularly for blended and online classes) to the LMS as one of many important nodes in a "learning ecosystem" of educational technologies used by faculty to design learning environments brings opportunities and challenges for higher education organizations. The tools in this ecosystem is referred to in the CSU as Learning Platforms and Services (LPS) (Click here for more discussion about LMS and LPS.)

The LMS as part of a learning ecosystem.

As more faculty have begun experimenting with and adopting additional tools to supplement (or replace) their use of the LMS, the traditional institutional goal of identifying a single, enterprise-wide technology solution for an entire campus is being rethought in some contexts. As such, institutions need new, sustainable strategies for supporting a technology ecosystem and preparing a mostly part-time higher education faculty to effectively navigate this landscape and design meaningful, accessible learning experiences.  These are some of the themes that have been conveyed through the experts (and follow-up conversations within the webinars) who have presented in the LPS series (Phil Hill and Michael Feldstein, Chris Vento, Sasha Thackaberry, Patrick Masson, and CSU students).

I hope you'll join us for the panel on Thursday! I'm hoping to generate rich, thick data through open-ended questions that do not fixate on the LMS, but instead probe for themes in the experiences of faculty. We'll be using the webinar version of ZOOM for the panel.  Please register in advance and bring your own questions for the participants. Register here (it's free).

LMS graphics by Mindwires, CC-BY.

Online Learning: Are We Doing It Wrong?

Tomorrow, I will be making two presentations to two very different audiences. One is a free webinar I'm doing for the TLT Group (register here) -- the audience will be primarily college instructors and instructional designers. Another is for the California Community College Online Education Initiative -- the audience will be a diverse group of stakeholders collecting input about the important characteristics for a statewide LMS for California Community Colleges (for classes that are offered through OEI initative).

Both of these presentations will incorporate my experiences and my students' experiences with using VoiceThread as an asynchronous discussion tool since 2007. 

"Experiences" is the key word here. This is not about a tool. It's about how teaching with a tool not typically found within an LMS toolkit can create a learning environment that impacts the student learning experience differently.  It's about the importance of relationships and affective learning in an online environment.  It's about the power of the human voice when a person is trying to figure out a new idea or delivering feedback. It's about supporting and inspiring students to be vulnerable.  It's about what gets lost if online instructors rely only on the LMS toolkit.  It's about how LTI integration with web-based tools saves faculty time (and money) and lowers the barrier of adoption of emerging technologies by providing embeds with a click, secure activities, grading from the gradebook, and automatically generated student accounts (with a single sign on), and the ability for students to generate their own creations that can be shared with a public audience (or secure to just the class registrants).

Below is a presentation you may review that provides the current (through Spring 2014) results of four consecutive semesters of anonymous online student surveys about how using asynchronous voice/video conversations impacts their experiences.

As I reflect on these findings, I am left with one question: Are we doing it wrong?  What are your takeaways?



To be clear about my relationship with VoiceThread, I am a college instructor and instructional technologist who has taught online and face-to-face with VoiceThread since 2007.  I supports faculty with the effective pedagogical application of the tool. The community college at which I teach has a sitewide license with LTI integration of VoiceThread into Blackboard and so does the university where I work as an instructional technologist. In the past, I was a paid higher education consultant for VoiceThread (to develop a higher ed webinar series) from 2012-2013.  In 2013, I authored a self-published eBook with compensation from the last months of consultancy at VoiceThread.  This eBook is available at no cost to VoiceThread site license holders and it is available for sale or rent to the general public. I receive royalties from the sales of the eBook.  I am a doctoral student working with VoiceThread as my research site to explore how the use of an eBook as a faculty support resource for a web 2.0 tool impacts faculty perceptions about the tool. Currently, I receive no income from VoiceThread.

Tackk, meet Blackboard; Blackboard, meet Tackk

Tackk.com/education

Teaching online in higher education requires most instructors to use an LMS (Learning Management System; i.e. Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, etc.). According to ECAR, 99% of higher education institutions report LMSs use as ubiquitous on campus. Understanding how an expensive LMS displays content on mobile devices (used more and more by students to access content -- as well as a huge opportunity increase interactions with and among our students) and ensuring the user experience of a course designed with an LMS is up to par with user experience created with  free, more social, and easier-to-use technologies that are surfacing like wildfire these days in the edtech startup arena are important topics for higher education administrators, instructional designers, and faculty to remain aware of.

I shared some of other thoughts LMSs in a recent post (to be fully transparent) and will reserve those for the moment, as my reality for today is the same as that of many other faculty -- I can use external tools but I also have to use an LMS.  So, how the question becomes we bring these two worlds together in design that makes sense for our students?

And, most importantly, what can the LMS community and edtech startup community learn from our experiences as educators?  I hope this post will illuminate a few insights for both communities, as well as for faculty who share my own interests.

Life as a Hacker Teacher

Often we hear about new tools and their potential for learning.  That may mean they create more visually engaging content than the content within our LMS, which can be flat and simply boring. It can also mean a tool could inspire new options for engaging with students including opportunities for content creation, which can be clunky and even down right impossible with some LMSs.

But then there is the somewhat uncomfortable introductory moment...when you must figure out how to integrate that awesome new tool with your LMS in a way that creates a fluid experience for your students. If you can't do that, it's not worth it.  And, to me, this can be the most difficult part. I often tell people, teaching with Blackboard has taught me some pretty impressive hacking skills.

This week, I am experimenting with Tackk.com/education. I learned about Tackk after follwing the ISTE feed this year. There was much awesome chatter about it! Then yesterday, my good friend and colleague Anna Stirling shared a post on Facebook about it, which nudged me to take another look. It was enough to get me to spend the day exploring, thinking, and wanting to redesign much of my class.

What I Learned:

What I learned (view the 9-minute video above for a visual tour!):

1. Tackk's user interface is simple and intuitive.
2. Tackk offers cool features including a simple URL paste option for plugging in online videos and a nice RSVP feature that allowed me to ask my students if they're planning to attend my online orientation. The content items on a Tackk can be moved up or down with a simple arrow (similar to Blackboard's drag/drop feature).
3. The overall design of a Tack is more coherent and visually appealing than content designed using Blackboard. I've tried for years to create content with Blackboard that is visually appealing and I have simply given up. I'm not a web designer and neither are more than 99% of college instructors. Creating content should be simple and intuitive, and it should look beautiful. Period.
4. I also learned that the YouTube videos I have manually embedded into my Blackboard course do not render on either my iPad or iPhone. This was disappointing, to say the least, considering that the majority of my students own these devices (a fact I know because I've surveyed them for years). Each of my learning units includes a welcome video that I have taken the extra time to record and YouTube videos that demonstrate complex photographic processes. Does this gap prevent students from viewing the content? Or at the very least create a missed opportunity for reaching my students (that I wasn't even aware of)?
5. The very same videos render beautifully in a Tackk embedded into Blackboard.
6. While a Tackk can be embedded into Blackboard, there are only three embed code options provided by Tackk and the largest one is tiny. It does not render a visually appealing experience in Blackboard. I edited the HTML code (to 800 wide x 1200 tall) and it then it rendered well in both Firefox and on an iPad. Tack needs more embed options that play well with LMSs.
7. The embed code created a scroll bar, which resulted a double scroll situation in Blackboard. This is a problem that also needs to be resolved.
8. There is no option to add alt-tags to images in a Tackk. Alt-tags are critical additions when creating web-based content because they are read by screen readers (accessible devices used by blind students when navigated the web) and are a necessary element for creating accessible web content.  This needs to be resolved on Tackk's end (and I would add, nearly all ed tech startup tools I experiment with).

Moving forward

This semester, I'm considering using Tackk for some of my content in my online class. I'd like to hear from Tackk about some of the suggestions I offered above to see if they could be implemented.  Next semester, I'm considering having my students create visual learning journeys with Tackk. I think it's a promising learning tool!

A Threat of Higher Ed's Love Affair with Closed-LMSs

© 2012 Bryan Mills, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

Michael Berman (whom I am fortunate to work with at CSU Channel Islands) has been blogging about "LMS Futures," a topic he presented on at BbWorld in Las Vegas this month.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term LMS, it stands for Learning Management System and refers to the application used by nearly all colleges and universities to administer and teach online/blended classes, as well as organize digital content for face-to-face classes (examples of the most popular LMSs include Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Moodle).

The post Michael shared yesterday got me thinking more deeply about the "closed" nature of the LMS.  When I say "closed," I am referring to the way the activity and content within an LMS is disconnected from the open web. I understand the development and adoption of the closed LMS is intertwined with compliance of FERPA policy. Yes, that's part of the conversation but, as we know, priorities guide change. And currently, there are important social shifts that are ignored when efficiency and compliance of policy become our guiding lights. 

I am writing this blog post in an effort to try to encourage awakening in those who use LMSs and may not be part of the usual conversation.  And to understand that the act of implementing a closed LMS within an organization and constructing policies around it, as well as teaching within a closed LMS constructs a "mental model" about using social media that positions social technologies as threatening and bad.  That, I believe, is the wrong direction for us to be headed as college educators situated on the brink of a new social era.

Constructing and Reinforcing Mental Models

A mental model refers to ideas, descriptions, and beliefs that guide one's actions.  Mental models may exist within a broad culture, a company, or a broader organizational context (like higher education).  Individuals are extremely committed to mental models, as they are guide us through our actions at an unconscious level. When mental models are challenged, one's first reaction is to act defensively.  This is one reason why we must be critical of how the technologies used at a systemic level can foster status quo attitudes, which can become intensely difficult to change over time.


Leading Through Change: Inspiring Awakening - by Michelle Pacansky-Brock Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Through my social media interactions, conference attendances, and presentations over the years, I have noticed a generalized difference in attitude between K12 and higher education educators on social media about teaching with social media (again, this is anecdotal). I blogged about this observation in 2011 after attending the annual CUE Conference, a large (and awesome) ed tech conference attended largely by a K12 audience.  Essentially, over the years, in K12, there seems to have been rising consensus of teachers who demand access to social technologies for learning. While, in higher education, where more than 30% of students took at least one online class in 2013, the story is somewhat different.

K12 leaders have advocated for access to social media for learning, arguing that, "Knowing how to build successful communities of learning and how to integrate social connectivity within a learning environment is a much more needed outcome than finding a way to control and monitor specific users and content." I wonder how this difference in attitude toward social media in K12 is informed by the lower LMS use. I realize FERPA is a big player in the conversation in higher education -- but, come on, in K12, we are dealing with users who are younger than the permitted age on the Terms of Use for the technologies  being references. The point is, our actions are driven by our mental models.

Closed for Learning

Image by Michael Berman

While there are many innovators in higher ed (whom I am grateful for and I learn from every day in my PLN), and there are colleges/universities that have made the jump to create social media guidelines that foster understanding and stress the value of openness, what I feel concerned about is how the mainstream integration of the closed-LMS system across higher education is constructing and enforcing a mental model in college and university faculty ("Here is your shell, go teach with it.") that undercuts values graduates need to succeed in the workplace today.   According to a 2014 report from ECAR about LMSs in Higher Ed, 99% of higher education institutions report use of the LMS is ubiquitous. These values -- community, sharing, relationship building -- are the very values employers expect college graduates to have mastered and demonstrate within the workplace, which is becoming more and more social each year. 

"The social network is the new production line."

The world has been deeply transformed by globalization and technology. As college graduates enter the workplace today, they are expected to demonstrate how they are unique from others and in what ways their contributions set themselves apart from others. One's digital footprint is an opportunity to do be one step ahead in life at graduation.  And the continuous reliance on the closed-LMS environment continously constructs a mental model for faculty, instructional designers, administrators, all members of higher education that using social media is, in essence, the wrong thing to do.  Moving forward, the mainstream use of closed LMS environments is creating yet another digital divide.

As I discussed in an earlier post,  Gartner predicts that by 2016 many large companies will begin to replace the use of phones and email with social networks.  Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, noted in 2013 that "the social network is the new production line." Value in the social era is cultivated around openness, collaboration, shared visions, and transparency. Individuals who demonstrate their ability to foster relationships through social technologies (which is very different from simply having accounts on or using social media) will be one step ahead of the rest.

Teach and Share Archive: Canvas, the Hot, New LMS on the Block!

Direct link to archive: http://youtu.be/dhVFRLj_xns

I just wrapped up our inaugural Teach & Share, my experimental effort to use Google+ Hangouts on Air to discuss "hot topics" in teaching and learning.  Today, I was joined online by Mike Smedshammer, Jennifer Garner, Tera Ulbert, Jacque Harris, Christine Sibley, and Brad Belbas who shared their experiences about Canvas. We also had up to 18 viewers of the live Hangout stream during the event.  

My big takeaways from our conversation are 1) the ways that Canvas is improving the faculty adoption barriers for integrating rich media into classes by streamlining media content into the LMS without an instructor needing to mess around with embed code and 2) how various features in Canvas (built-in of audio and video communications and a continuous, threaded collection of all communications an instructor sends to each student) can increase instructor-student relations (as cited in the feedback shared by Mike Smedshammer in this Hangout).

Thank you again for participating! I learned a lot from you and, honestly, now I'm aching to have the opportunity to teach with Canvas. 

I hope this archive is a resource to many! 

Have a topic in mind for a future Teach & Share?  Leave it here in a comment or Tweet it to @brocansky.

Join us for a "Teach & Share" Hangout about Canvas by Instructure

In my previous blog post, I wrote about using Google+ Hangouts for faculty development and learning, particularly to connect faculty beyond our physical campus boundaries and reduce some of the redundancy in our workload.

As a follow up, I'm arranging what I'm referring to as a "Teach & Share" which is simply a one-hour Google+ Hangout On Air dedicated to a hot topic in college teaching.  Here is our inaugural event -- I hope you can join us!

Tuesday, October 16 at 3:30pm PDT/6:30 EDT
Teach & Share: a Google+ Hangout on Air
Topic -  Canvas by Instructure: The hot, new LMS on the block

Canvas is a new, open source LMS from Instructure (http://www.instructure.com/) that has grabbed that attention of many institutions recently.  This "Teach & Share" is an open, informal invitation to faculty who are teaching with Canvas or considering adopting Canvas to share their experiences with other faculty who are beginning the process of evaluating it as a possible LMS solution. What do you like? What do you dislike? What works? What needs to improve?  Bring your ideas to share and questions to discuss with your peers!

What is a Teach and Share?

• A "Teach & Share" is simply an hour-long Hangout On Air in which faculty are invited to come together to share their teaching experiences about a particular topic and learn from one another.  The event will be recorded. 
• You must receive an invitation to the Hangout to be able to join.
• Have a suggestion for another Teach & Share topic? Share it here in the form of a comment!

Two Ways to Participate: Join (active participation) or View (passive/lurking)

• There are seats in the Hangout for up to 10 participants (including me).  So please be mindful about what your preferences are to ensure those who want to contribute have a chance to get a seat.  If you want to "join," be sure to follow the instructions below.
• If you just are interested in "view" the event, you may watch the live feed that I will embed on the Hangout page of my blog.

How to receive an invitation to join the Hangout on Air (this is for those who wish to actively contribute, rather than passively view the event):

• Log into Google+ with your Google account. (If you do not have a Google account, you will need to create one.)
• Search for Michelle Pacansky-Brock or click here to go straight to my profile page.
• At the top of the page, hover over the red "Add to Circles" button and select the Circle you wish to add me to or create your own.  Click here to watch a brief video that illustrates how to add a user to your Circles in Google+.
• Once you have added me to your Circles, I will "Add you back." When this reciprocal relationship has been established, you will receive invitations to join my Teach & Shares.  
• On the day/time of the Hangout, open Google+ and look for the invitation that will appear in your feed.  Click on "Join Hangout."  If it's your first Hangout, you will need to download a plug in the first time. 

Have an topic in mind for a future Teach and Share? Please make your suggestion in a comment below!

Pearson+Google vs Blackboard = An Interesting LMS Frontier

After a two year reprieve, I begun teaching with Blackboard again in August.  In '09 I was using Blackboard 8.0 and now I'm teaching with Blackboard 9.1.  Yes, some things have changed but, in essence, all the frustration and rigidity that restricts my ability to employ pedagogical creativity within Blackboard remains.  And, to me, the more I teach with Blackboard, the better hacker I become.    That's not right and the rigidity and bugginess of Blackboard is, undoubtedly, frustrating faculty and making creative teachers give up on experimentation which is not a good thing in the context of 21st century teaching and learning.  Can anyone out there relate to that feeling?

So, this morning when I read the news about Pearson (which has been funding Ning Minis for educators in North America for more than a year now, including two I use for professional development and community college teaching) and Google joining forces to launch a new, free, social learning management system called OpenClass, I was intrigued.  Still in beta, the description sounds intriguing.  What I'm foreseeing is an opportunity for OpenClass to engage faculty who are experimental, early adopters, attempting to force Blackboard to "accept" and "tolerate" Google Apps, VoiceThread, Twitter widgets, and other web 2.0 and social media infusions into its system -- with not a whole lot of success.  But institutions will shake their head and remain skeptical about supporting OpenClass, especially the institutions that have adopted Blackboard across systems.

This could be a turning point.  One that will truly separate those committed to a "learning" paradigm and those invested, still, in an outdated "teaching" paradigm (Barr and Tagg, 1995 - PDF).  While I have yet to even see OpenClass, I am sensing that the future of college learning just got a lot more interesting. 

Which path are you on?