Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1787] LMS discussion
From: Albert Ip (albert@DLS.au.com)
Date: Wed 06 Jun 2001 - 08:39:16 MEST
From: "Albert Ip" <albert@DLS.au.com> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1787] LMS discussion Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 16:39:16 +1000
Paul (Paul Shrivastava), your line of thinking is very similar to mine.
However, I think we also need to make the distinction between the creation
of learning objects/material and the assembling of these learning
objects/material into courses.
This is a technical view only. By that I mean the creation of the course
material and then linking these material into a coherent course. Content
management system together with SCORM compliant authoring tools such as
dreamweaver (or whatever you prefer) should support the creation of course
material. CMS comes into play here as IP management and version control are
the necessary part in any mid-size to a large project. Distributed authoring
is also preferable even if the whole project team is located in the same
room. Inevitably, people will be working on different parts of the course
at the same time. Distributed authoring with proper version control makes
everybody's life much more easy.
You can then assemble the course material based on IMS content packaging
specification and apply quality assurance (should be more often, but at
least at this point). Load the course into a Learning management system and
off you go.
There are two issues here:
1. the art "to bring a richness of resources to stimulate/facilitate the
knowledge/wisdom creation process of education" (from a posting by Mary
Rickman-Taylor on Wednesday, 6 June 2001), and
2. the issue of tracking the learning process.("logistic issues" again by
Mary).
The second issue can be handed by ensuring compliance of SCORM specification
during the creation of learning material. Any SCORM-compliant LMS should
handle the tracking properly - that's why SCORM compliant authoring tools.
The most interesting issue is of course the first one. The art is to build
pedagogically interesting and sound online courses. I would argue that it is
more than bring rich resources into an "information shovelling" process.
In a recent paper, (submitted but waiting on the refereeing process) a
colleague and I look at the issue of "experience" in several pedagogical
designs. We argue that there are two types of experiences: first person and
third person. I failed to see any common features that a technical learning
architecture can build to support the creative utilisation of first person
experience. (BTW, we called third person experience stories) The use of
stories - like the use of any other rich and stimulating learning resource -
is an easier problem to solve. Easy in the sense that I can see a solution
in the far distance (e.g. a lot of work is currently occurring around
learning object metadata which potentially can help course developer
discover better and richer learning objects/resources, but LOM needs to
recognise the subtle differences
1. between teaching material and learning material,
2. between "educational descriptors of resources" and "descriptors of
educational resources" - more on that for another occasion. :-) ).
So back to the LMS issue, obviously, we need to delineate a clear boundary
between the "logistic" stuff and the "educational" stuff. Supporting the
"logistic" stuff calls for integrating the LMS with the existing backend
system of any reasonably sized educational institute. I don't think LMS can
(and should) replicate the business logistic of educational institutes. LMS
should "grab" the student information from the backend system and use that
information to do its job. The question is "what job" - the logistic stuff
or the educational stuff? and what exactly are these stuff?.
In this posting, let me just babble on the educational stuff and leave the
logistic stuff for another people's posting or a later posting,
The scenario I described above is very much in line with what "Paul
Shrivastava" <paul@esocrates.com> : Thursday, 7 June 2001 3:02 wrote:
> Learning Management Systems - allow posting basic course materials online
> and administer courses and learning activities e.g. Blackboard, Web CT,
> eSocrates,
But, are we going to settle for just "posting basic course materials
online"? I would argue that some sort of plug-in mechanism to support
structured collaboration activities would be required.
At present, most LMS support collaboration via threaded discussion
conferences and/or real time chat. I refer to these as generic
collaboration space. They are useful, just like a classroom is useful.
However, I also see different collaboration space (like theatre for
performing arts) where specific collaborative tasks (role playing etc) need
to take place online in ways that the generic collaboration space would only
provide the makeshift solution. Again, like providing services for CMS,
should we be asking LMS to do these structured collaboration (by the way,
structured collaboration engines are complex systems by themselves)? or
should we be asking LMS to provide standard interface so that structured
collaboration can run inside the course?
Of course, rich courses not necessarily have to based on collaboration. For
example, should LMS also provide all "cognitive tools" for learning? or
should these tools be used and friendly to use inside the LMS environment?
I love to hear other people's opinion.
cheers
Albert
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