LMS evaluation – Music for Deckchairs

What next for the LMS?

Kate Bowles September 27, 2014 16 Comments

All of a sudden it’s LMS week* in mostly-US higher education. Nudged by the imminent Educause annual conference, there’s a whole pop-up festival of reflection on why we still have enterprise learning management systems—and why we have the ones we have. Audrey Watters, D’Arcy Norman, Phil Hill, Michael Feldstein, Jared Stein and Jonathan Rees have all contributed to this thoughtful and detailed conversation; anyone who thinks universities just woke up one day trapped inside a giant LMS dome really should read each of these at least. And Mike…

Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation

Scare tactics

Kate Bowles May 11, 2012 11 Comments

OK, so clearly there’s a move on in the world of elearning conferences and events to shake academics out of our usual torpor. As everyone knows, we don’t have much to do, and what we do pull off shows not a skerrick of imagination or even rudimentary competence. So let’s get the email about Blended Learning 2012 out of the way first. The event seems like a reasonable affair, but it’s clear that the pricing structure doesn’t anticipate someone like…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, University marketing

Learning from failure

Kate Bowles May 6, 2012 7 Comments

The problem with edtech evangelism is that it assumes the most valuable lessons are learned from other people’s success. This is why our lives fill up with stories of exciting tools that have transformed this that or the other thing. Exhausting, really. Given the importance of failure to innovation, it’s interestingly rare to find blogs, lists, journals, or conferences focused on failure, in any field. The Ten Most Awful Mistakes in Online Course Design. Ten Tools I’ll Never Try Again. …

Change management, Edtech and online learning, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

The hardest part

Kate Bowles March 28, 2012 3 Comments

OK, so here’s a quick follow-up on yesterday’s post about Blackboard’s complex rebranding of itself as an open source visionary. Phil Hill thinks this isn’t the key point, and I feel that he’s right. As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Henderson has issued a significant challenge to higher education, in the form of an offer “to solve the hardest problems in education, comprehensively.” Educators are really familiar with being the experience of being told that we have a problem that someone…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

One professor at a time

Kate Bowles October 18, 2011 6 Comments

I’m still worried about the missed potential for edtech entrepreneurs large and small to engage in more substantial dialogue with educators at an earlier stage in their thinking. At the moment, the pattern of bringing a mostly non-negotiable product to the RFP table involves both parties in an awkward clash of expectations that Joshua Kim has aptly described as a “bake-off”, and that certainly has reminded me of MasterChef more than once. So the award for persistence in communicating with…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Waiting for disruption

Kate Bowles October 16, 2011 17 Comments

This week’s excitement has been the announcement by Pearson of their shakeup of the LMS experience. On the OpenClass website, where we’re told in very big letters that this is all Open, Free, Easy and Amazing, the promotional video starts with Adrian Sannier, Senior VP, making the big claim that the LMS “as you know it” is dead. Sannier brings serious university research and administrative experience to Pearson’s push into the edtech market, and I’m confident that he knows what…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Hidden values

Kate Bowles September 21, 2011 1 Comment

Joshua Kim at Inside Higher Ed feels that those of us who write about ed tech should mind our manners a bit. I want to like this argument a whole lot more than I do. The appeal to collegiality and respect is a winner, and I do agree that right at this moment it could be painful to be watching the global ticker feed on online learning if that’s your line of work, especially if you’re still at the startup…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation

Patched

Kate Bowles September 19, 2011 3 Comments

Tenured Radical is asking the question that should be required reading for every CIO, CTO, LMS suitor, and higher ed tech commentator: if computers are such a blessing to higher ed, how come their use is actively extending the working lives of their users to such a damaging degree? The series of events she describes will have elicited low moans of sympathy from all of us working in writing-intensive courses online: an innovative learning task set up to use a…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation

Competitive advantage?

Kate Bowles September 19, 2011 9 Comments

It’s not really my business, but it seems to me that the promise that competition delivers consumer benefits is in the “If I had a dollar for every time … ” category of overuse. Mostly this proposition seems to be based on the assumption that if I’m selling lemonade next to someone else selling lemonade, we’re going to compete for the lemonade market either by offering superior or cheaper lemonade, and either way, the passing parade gets a better deal…

Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Actual results may vary

Kate Bowles August 7, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s another quick finding in the tealeaves of educational technology prediction. Providing you can get through the argot of the deals, mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and patent showdowns, sometimes you find yourself face to face with the poetry of the safe harbor statement. It’s hard not to read it over and over to check that it still says what you think, and that it says it so beautifully. The safe harbor statement is a get-out clause currently derived from the Private…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk