The Top Five Things I Hate About People Complaining About Learning Management Systems

Nipun Sharma wrote about the "Top 5 Things People Hate About Learning Management Systems" (eLearning Industry, 8 March 2018). In response, here are my top five problems with people complaining about LMS:

1. Design As An Afterthought

Rather than designing their course to be easy to use, in a logical, sequential manner, course designers (or academics who think they are courses designers), just load up a mishmash of stuff and blame the LMS when the students can't make sense of it. When designing a course you have to carefully curate and sequence the experience.

2. Expectations Of Social Interactivity

Social learning is something which has to be designed into a course and students have to be trained how to work together, be it online or in a classroom. Social learning is not something you can delegate to the LMS to do for you.

Even under the best conditions, learning is a hard, mostly solitary, frustrating experience. Giving students the expectation it will be easy, fun and social, is doing them a disservice and may be dangerous to their mental wellbeing.

3. Expectations of a Fun User Experience

Learning is not fun, it is hard work. Courses which have a false send of jollity are intensely frustrating for the student.

4. Expectations Of Accessibility

The best LMS can't make up for a lack of accessibility of educational content. Most LMS will now reflow content for mobile devices. But course designers need to ensure their content fits on devices and networks students use.

5. Inadequate or Excessive Use of Tracking And Reporting Features

Most LMS now have features to allow students to track how they are doing. However, learning designers needs to switch on these features. Also this doesn't remove responsibility from the instructor to keeping track of how their students are doing and provide feedback.

Some instructors go to the other extreme and closely monitor how and when the students use the LMS. Use, or lack of use, of the LMS should not be used as a proxy form of assessment.

Corruption Found in Acquisition of Ultranet e-Learning System

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission of Victoria has found corrupt conduct by pubic servants in the acquisition of the failed Ultranet online teaching and learning system for all government schools.

"In 2006, the then Premier of Victoria announced a commitment to ‘revolutionise learning’ through the development and implementation of the Ultranet, an online teaching and learning system for all Victorian
government schools. The Ultranet was to be a virtual learning portal through which schools, students and parents could access and deliver curriculum content, student reports and other information.

The Ultranet project was closed down seven years later in 2013. It was described during this investigation as ‘a shambles in every sense of the word’. While the exact cost is unknown, IBAC heard evidence that the Ultranet was likely to have cost somewhere between $127 million and $240 million. ...

The investigation found evidence the tender
process for the Ultranet was improperly influenced and therefore corrupted, through improper relationships that senior departmental officers had ..."

Mobiles for TEQSA Regulatory Course Compliance

Greetings from mLearn 2016  at UTS in Sydney, where Anthony Chung from mobileLearning gave one of the more practical and less academic (in a good way) sessions on "How does a Mobile Platform Address TEQSA and Other Regulatory Compliance for Online Courses?". Anthony went through some of the TEQSA requirements and how these could be facilitated with mobile devices. What was interesting about mobileLearning's approach is that they provide  mobile interface to the institution's native educational applications, rather than replace them. The idea is to make it easier for students and staff to do what is educationally useful. One example is to encourage the student to engage with the learning. This can be difficult where a Learning Management System (LMS) design for static desktop pages is used. The mobile interface can make it easier to access the materials and interact.

Other sessions at the conference took a different approach, arguing that students spend their time in social media websites so the learning needs to happen in those social media applications. I have concerns as to the privacy and distractions for the student, as well as the difficulty to continually adapting the learning materials for whatever is the current social media platform. It would be possible to build a LMS interface to social media, and a default mobile interface outside the platform, but there would still be a very high privacy risk due to the social media interface.

EdTech Overload

Recently I agreed to tutor some student groups in an innovative new program. The catch is that as well as the usual tools (Moodle and Mahara), this is also using piazza.com for student communications and  a Bitnami based Wiki for course materials. It is taking some time to work out how to use each tool and work out what goes where.

Accessibility Problems with Massive Open Online Courses

Park, Kim and So (2016) found problems with the accessibility of Coursera, edX, and Khan Academy for users with a disability. Particular problems found were with drop-down menus (toggled on mouse is roll-over), dynamic webpage structures (quiz  feedback without page reloading), repetitive elements (course description at the top of each page),  illogical focus movement (such as back to top of screen not to next item). Many of the problems appear to be with quizzes. Also the mobile versions of the interface were less accessible than the PC based versions. Also user comments appeared to favor down-loadable content (as in more conventional distance education courses).

What the authors did not address is if Learning Management Systems, such as Moodle, which are not designed for MOOCs, have more accessible interfaces.

Reference

Park, K., Kim, H. J., & So, H. J. (2016, January). Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Really Open to Everyone?: A Study of Accessibility Evaluation from the Perspective of Universal Design for Learning. In Proceedings of HCI Korea (pp. 29-36). Hanbit Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.17210/hcik.2016.01.29

Evaluating the Usability of e-Learning Systems

Two papers in The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning discuss the usability of e-Learning Systems. Junus,  Santoso, Isal and Utomo (2015) look at the use of Moodle for teaching computer science students at Universitas Indonesia (Fasilkom UI). Orfanou, Tselios and Katsanos (2015) look at Moodle and the less well known "Open eClass" (based on the open source software Claroline) in Greece.

The former examined the Student Centered e-Learning Environment (SCeLE), a repository of learning materials implemented in Moodle by Universitas Indonesia. Students were surveyed on their experience. The results were positive. The first recommendation for improvement is deceptively simple: upgrade to the latest version of Moodle. Many institutions keep old versions of software even after newer, improved versions are available. New features in Moodle, such as better mobile compatibility and finer grain feedback for students, are well worth the cost of an upgrade.

The latter found the System Usability Scale (SUS), a questionnaire based survey, effective for evaluating usability of learning management software. The use of a standardized, simplified survey, was found to be effective, even when using a small number of students.

References

Junus, I., Santoso, H., Isal, R., & Utomo, A. (2015). Usability Evaluation of the Student Centered e-Learning Environment. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 16(4). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2175/3455
 

Orfanou, K., Tselios, N., & Katsanos, C. (2015). Perceived usability evaluation of learning management systems: Empirical evaluation of the System Usability Scale. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 16(2). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1955/3262

Canvas Software for e-Learning

At an IT for schools conference in Canberra this week I cam across Conrad Spendlove demonstrating the Canvas learning management system. For the last couple of weeks I have been experiencing Canvas as a student of Robert Power's Dissertation Research Project "A Framework for Promoting Teacher Self-Efficacy with in Mobile Reusable Learning Objects" at the Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University, Canada Canvas seems to have been targeted at mobile devices, but works okay on a desktop web browser.

Video of MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

The recording of my webinar "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" is now available, courtesy of the SA e-Leaning Unit of the National VET E-learning Strategy. Also available are the notes and slides. See the National Calendar for other National VET events. My next presentation on ICT trends in Education is scheduled for 4:45pm, 12 November 2013, in Canberra, hosted by the Australian Computer Society. I will be in Perth 23 September to 18 October and available to speak there in person.

One Key Step to Your First LMS: Course Content

Jordan Barrish suggests when selecting your first Learning Management System (LMS) to: "Think Through Your Courses" and "Focus on Usability" ("Two Key Steps to Selecting and Loving Your First LMS", eLearning Industry, 26 August 2013). I suggest that the first of these is most important the second applies to any computer based application and should be a matter of routine.

Many make the mistake of selecting a LMS and then trying to use that to develop e-learning courses. The LMS is just a framework to put around the e-learning courses to help administer them: delivering the materials to the student and recording progress. The LMS is not intended for creating the actual course content.

Most LMS provide some content creation tools, but these are crude at best. Courses should be designed outside the LMS using specialist tools and then installed in the LMS for delivery. If you use the LMS to create the courses, then be prepared to use very simple formats and have to do much manual work to overcome the limitations of the tools.

As LMS are not intended for creating courses, tinkering with an LMS is not a good way to learn teaching or course design. Staff designing and delivering courses need training first in how to teach and then in how to teach on-line. Just giving a university lecturer who has never had any formal education in teaching an LMS is a recipe for frustration, for other the staff and students. Sending staff on a course on how to use the LMS will not help, as the LMS have built in assumptions about pedagogy and course design. Staff need to learn to teach, learn to design e-leanring and then using a LMS is  simple.

Usability can be evaluated first by use of the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (W3C WCAG) with someng like A Checker, Mobile device compatibility (W3C mobileOK Checker) and Markup Validation Service. These will indicate if the tool implements web standards and will be usable on a wide range of devices and network speeds.

MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution

I will be speaking on "MOOCs with Books: Technology Plus Traditional Teaching for an On-line Education Revolution" in a webinar hosted by the National VET e-Learning Strategy, 1pm AEST 17 September (12:30pm Adelaide time). There will be a face-to-face version of the event hosted by the Australian Computer Society in Canberra, 4:45pm 12 November 2013.

TOPIC: MOOCs with Books: Synchronisation of large scale asynchronous e-learning
PRESENTER:  Tom Worthington,  Adjunct Lecturer, Australian National University

A quiet revolution is taking place in Australia's schools, TAFEs and universities, with education moving on-line. Award winning education designer Tom Worthington will provide an overview of the trends and its implications for education:

1. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS)
2. Social media for education
3. Open Source e-Portfolio software
4. Cloud based Learning Management Systems (LMS)
5. e-Book textbooks
6. Portable course-ware formats

See also:

1. Synchronizing Asynchronous Learning: Combining Synchronous and Asynchronous Techniques
2. A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online
3. On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century