We need to rethink the next generation LMS and online course. I do believe that online education can be better than classroom education for many reasons. Mostly because we all learn at different speeds and engage at different times. I’m very interested in WordPress and Buddypress. I think a very light simple elegantly designed courseroom can be created using WordPress.

Think about how the smart phone looked before the iphone came out. The same opportunity exists with the typical old school LMS.

While I’d love to see a more dynamic and customizable LMS system, it’s got to take into account the fact that few faculty can handle anything more than a basic dropdown menu interface.

The thing I’ve often said about the ScholarPress Courseware plugin is that it isn’t “learning management.” It helps do the often tedious, but necessary, logistical stuff: set up reading lists if you want, add assignment if you want, make a public schedule that’s easier to ingest into other systems and applications. It says or does little with regards to what actual learning takes place. You can use other plugins if you want. And I think that approach has helped, but the plugin itself can be greatly improved in all of these areas. And I’ll be the first to admit that SP Courseware can be greatly improved. It was really written, as is most open source software, because I had an itch a few years ago, had some needs when I started teaching my own class for the first time. There was little user testing, surveys, etc. I definitely agree with Mark’s last comment about coming up with “design goals that do not suck” before even talking about courseware in general. This is something ScholarPress Courseware has not really done.

I’m also wondering if there some room to discuss the possibility of reorienting courseware from a portal to a network. I love Jim Groom’s notion of “a domain of one’s own” for each student, and think that courseware that a student actually controls, for her/his own needs, would be much more valuable than one imposed on an instructor by the institution, or even one imposed on students by the instructor.

At least on my own campus, Blackboard seems to be like that foul smell coming from the biology lab down the hall: nobody finds it pleasant, but we all put up with it. (Though some of us do don our own protective gear, e.g. WordPress, Drupal, etc.)

I like what Steve is proposing, and I think the most productive schematic would actually be a series of schema. There are general pedagogical goals, more specific disciplinary goals, technological goals, community-building goals, and perhaps one or two other categories. Most courseware seems to be devoted to technological goals (file-sharing, communication, etc.) to the exclusion of other goals, and this may be the fundamental cause of their suckiness.

Maybe a good initial question for us to consider, then, is not what do I want courseware to do to help my students’ learning? but what do I want to do to help my students’ learning? Before we can begin to design a courseware system that does not suck, we need to take the courseware totally out of the equation, and design goals that do not suck.

What are some of the things that teachers actually need? A way to share files with students (and auditors!) only, space for (semi) private discussion, optional extras like wikis, blogs, etc. None of these things are terribly hard, but when they’re bundled together into one package that makes your choices for you, they become oppressive for anyone who knows better.

Also, this showed up in my feed reader this evening: an instructor who teaches using drupal shared some of her student’s comments (in short, they love it).

What Jeffrey says is worth consideration too- it is nice as a student to log into one place and see all your “stuff.” I’m hoping one day there will be a way to make back end tech transparent to students while giving teachers the freedom to use the features that fit their classes.

I wonder, however, if we might also try to keep in mind as we have this conversation those people for whom the ease of a structured CMS is appealing, though not seductive or all-encomposing.

I’m not talking about the administrators who like these packaged systems for the ostensible control/FERPA-safety/copyright freedom that Chad mentions above, and I’m not talking about those faculty who live entirely in (for?) those closed Bb and other worlds.

I’m talking about keeping in mind those faculty who use the courseware in front of them because it’s there and because it meets basic needs and because it doesn’t require learning a new tool all the time. I’m also talking about addressing the needs of the few students I’ve begun to hear from who are tired of the sense of tech DIY in so many of their class. [A student in the school newspaper actually called for faculty to use Blackboard more.]

I bring this up because regardless of what THATCampers might be willing to put up with/create/do, widespread change is likely to require those faculty and students in the middle of tech curve.

That said, conceiving from scratch the types of things we need, what we need to accomplish with the place our courses live on the web sounds like a conversation I want to participate in.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think it explains why even the good ones suck.

And that’s why I really want to radically rethink the whole thing by asking some basic questions — not just “how do we make it lighter?” but “What are we trying to do again?” Really, I feel like we have some underlying assumptions about what we’re trying to do (and that some of those ideas might suck).

It’d be helpful to go back to the drawing board and think about the extent to which it’s even possible to provide a single framework that would serve a majority of courses without being so wide-open as to be vapid. Is there such a thing as a feature set that is truly common between (almost) everyone?

At last year’s THATcamp, I talked about using Drupal for doing all my course stuff. And even though I use it in even cooler ways now (I think), it’s occurred to me that its advantage over, say, BlackBoard is not that it’s Drupal, but that I built it myself. In other words, it works for me, because when it doesn’t work, I can fix it.

So when you say “highly minimalist courseware system,” I think “Drupal,” but maybe that’s just me being a fanboy. 🙂