I am a little late with my submission for week 9. I had a difficult time finding another blog that I wished to critique for this weeks topic. The blog I found is not one unrelated to a company and is not necessarily a professional blog as rules state we must use. However it is written by Dr. Tony Karrer of a firm called TechEmpower. At the site http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/01/learning-materials.html
the question of what belongs in an LMS is answered. Advantages of having the content kept in the LMS as opposed to just providing the courses via SharePoint. I was not impressed by the content at this blog, but I did enjoy reading the responses to the post.
For those of you that are not familiar with the terms LMS and LCMS I posted my discussion submission as a way of explaining. See below:
LMS and LCMS are similar, but the LMS is a platform that records progress while the LCMS is a platform for learning. In education LMS platforms can be used to keep track of professional development opportunities and hours earned. In my school system we use My Learning Plan. We are able to enroll in professional development opportunities as they become available and the system logs hours acquired at the completion of the events. We are able to get reminders of courses we have signed up for and we may also complete surveys at the site to evaluate them. The site offers other features like tracking financial expenditures, but I am not familiar. The LCMS is different because in addition to the tracking feature, it is a place where learning content is offered. An example would be ATutor. This is an award winning open source site that allows students to access content uploaded by their instructors. Learning objects would be tools and resources used to aid teaching and learning. This could include digital items like iPods or web-based applications like blogs. Learning objects could also include more traditional items like calculators or simple graphic organizers.
References:
My Learning Plan. (2004). Product info. From http://www.mylearningplan.com
Atutor. (2008). Atutor learning content management system. From http://www.atutor.ca/
Tracee,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the comments to your post are quite interesting at http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/01/learning-materials.html. It seems the participants were concerned about the tracking feature of their LMS. The company had an intended purpose of putting their compliance and accreditation testing into its native format to track using the LMS. But, elearning courses meant to be hosted outside the LMS got referenced from the LMS catalogue. Since this was not the case for all courses, some courses could be accessed to free non-tracked sources whereas other courses could be tracked and accessed only through the LMS. The LMS charged a fee. This made some courses free while other courses had a fee. I thought this fee-based distinction was significant for an LMS.
Once this fee was in place, another participant found that the LMS that did not allow course content to be moved from the LMS very easily—a limitation. This barrier to movement affected what was accessible outside the LMS. The LMS users wanted more flexibility in accessing their courses and information outside the LMS environment. The participants did not mind the LMS pointing the way to outside information, but rarely did so when fees were involved as compared to the free courses outside the LMS. I thought this type of LMS flexibility for users was significant.
The argument that content was of great value as compared to the LMS where it is maintained and tracked made a lot of sense. This content referenced to the next generation of SCORM issues. SCORM is more interested in providing monolithic applications so courses can be broken down into modular functions/services and infrastructures that want only the best of the breed applications. So, this participant wanted to keep LMS for only course management and delivery while using a separate course repository for all content functions. Content compliance has more visibility when it is not part of the management and delivery modular infrastructure way of doing things. The reason is that monolithic views are less flexible than dynamic, or multi-lithic, views of course content.
Another participant felt that the LMS should be regarded as a course management system only. But, social learning and Web 2.0 learning forces us to move away from the LMS at this time. Tracee, do you think LMS will become more of a social learning instrument in the future outside of just managing and tracking course content and tracking course usage? I enjoyed the blog comments you found for us to review.