Hacking the Academy: Four Lines of Attack on the LMS

So I’m starting a series in which I do my best to take a look, seriously, at Hacking the Academy (or at least the section on educational technologies), and I want to start with the various attacks on the LMS (especially Blackboard). This is just one of the themes (which include alternatives to the LMS, alternative diagnoses to the problem, and at least one partial defense of the LMS), but I wanted to begin by tackling the attacks and the arguments behind them.

I’m not a fan of Blackboard. For me, that’s a default stance. I have a strong dislike for large-scale proprietary platforms. Blackboard is hard to modify, it doesn’t play well with others, its support for open standards (especially open e-learning standards) largely appears to be fictitious, and while it has a lot of great features, they are hard range from hard to really hard to implement. What’s more, its various acquisitions have left it a bloated and confusing system. Various versions and implementations have disparate features, and having a meaningful conversation about what’s available with other professionals in the field is sometimes nearly impossible. I am very much concerned about the tacit design agenda of Blackboard and its proprietary and open-source competitors and think they’re very much at fault for growing homogeneity of courses in large e-learning programs and the deskilling (and deprofessionalization) of designers and producers in e-learning. This has lead to largely static rates of pay over the past 10 years: since 2001, course-based projects pay between $2000 and $3000 for the design of curriculum, instructions, and assessment, split between faculty experts, instructional designers, and production staff. A recent survey of colleagues doing work in e-learning programs for higher ed publishers, for-profit universities, and traditional colleges and universities shows this has stayed largely static for the past 9 years.

LMS vendors also have a long and annoying tradition of referring to anything developed in the past 50 years as “state of the art.”

I also have struggle with the absence of serious engagements with the LMS and the issues surrounding them in much instructional design education. They’re a fixture in higher education, K-12 education, and corporate training. Quantitative, qualitative, and critical responses to the LMS model(s?) are essential to helping new designers critically negotiate the systems, their affordances, and constraints.

“Hacking the Academy” begins its critique with Matt Gold’s 2009 blog post Against Learning Management Systems, itself spinning off of Jim Groom’s short piece A Plague on Both Their Houses.

Gold’s major argument is that the words “learning management system” don’t belong together.

Learning is not something that can be “managed” via a “system.” We’re not producing widgets here — we’re attempting to inspire creative thought and critical intelligence.

It’s worth noting, as too many commentators too link to have noted, that the LMS is built to mimic the classroom. It’s confined, structured, and favors instructor power and administrative tracking. These are values supported by some instructional approaches still in use. I’ll note my personal bias against these models, but also add that they’re efficient for teaching basic skills (though they are definitely not efficient at fostering critical and creative thinking, and I’m not currently aware of evidence that they generate transferable skills that students can take into environments in which they learn to be critical and creative). So Gold’s key question here is “Having found our way out of one box, must we immediately look for another? Can we imagine no other possibilities?”

Skipping down, another LMS critique is found in Mills Kelly’s Will the Center Hold? Kelly narrates a faculty/staff meeting at his home university on distance education projects in which it becomes apparent that there will be no financial support for faculty who don’t use the university’s LMS (Blackboard, though the version is unspecified).

Kelly’s argument:

The problem is that the tendency to centralize curriculum development around a single platform means that all innovation by faculty members will be restricted to the capabilities of that platform. Nothing is possible unless the platform allows it.

To take an approach to “innovation” closes off access to all the products of the open source and open access movements. Anyone who has been paying attention in the past few years can see that much, if not most, of the exciting innovation in software has come not from big companies like BlackBoard or Microsoft, but from the open source community.

Thus, it’s a real puzzle to me why we have chosen to choke off any possibility of innovation beyond the vendor we are locked into….

So Kelly’s critique seems to echo Gold’s: The LMS presupposes a specific type of teaching-learning relationship.

Breaking with this string, Jim Groom posits that the real problem with the LMS (or at least the commercial LMSs and their advertising campaigns) is that they co-opt for capital and its assertion of ownership over technology the results of the work of the people via the technology (and my apologies to him if I’ve misunderstood). I think, in other words, that it commodifies the platform that it did not create and that had previously been free.

If the technology is what is important, than what do we say if a faculty member or student notes that Bb can do what del.icio.us can, or can “mash up” YouTube, Flickr, and Google Earth maps like WPMu, or can make content at long last open, or has a slick AJAX interface, then we what what can we say about the technology? …. BlackBoard makes an inferior product and charges a ton for it, but if we reduce the conversation to technology, and not really think hard about technology as an instantiation of capital’s will to power, than anything resembling an EdTech movement towards a vision of liberation and relevance is lost….

Corporations are selling us back our ideas, innovations, and visions for an exorbitant price. I want them all back, and I want them now!

Groom is right, of course. The liberationist vision of many ed tech professionals is frustratingly and confusingly entwined in the revenue visions of both traditional, proprietary, and other non-traditional universities and the companies that they rely on. However, I think it’s important to note that Google (owner of YouTube and Google Earth), Yahoo (owner of Delicious and Flickr), and WordPress.com (a major sponsor of WordPress’s development) are all proprietary, for-profit enterprises, committed to selling us a vision of their openness and to disguising their profit motives and structures. None of them emerged in academia, and most (if not all) of them are deeply invested in ensuring that academe does not extricate itself from their hidden profit models. In other words, it seems unlikely we can get them “back” because they didn’t belong to us to begin with, though they’re deeply invested in encouraging us not to think that.

So here’s my proposal: If it is impossible to extract capital from our education system (and it seems firmly if invisibly entwined in our pre-Internet educational spaces and technologies, so the disentangling seems a long project), then what we need are principles that guide us in negotiating with its presence.

Luke Waltzer takes a third tack in The Aesthetics of the Virtual Learning Space, critiquing the aesthetics of the LMS course site, and defending the urgency of aesthetics to ed tech:

The point is that we are dealing with spaces here, and virtual though they may be, how they look and act impacts the way we teach in them and the ways that students learn in them. When we’re in the classroom, there are different methods we can use to engage students: mastery of the material, ability to spin a tale, and asking probing and demanding questions are a few that come to mind. Those methods are still available to us in the virtual space, to be sure, but face-to-face contact is not. Just as the personality of the teacher is an important element of his or her ability to engage a class, so too is the personality of an online teaching space. This personality is developed through an attention to aesthetics.

Waltzer notes that the generally superior aesthetics of blogs, and in Towards the Next Stage of EdTech at CUNY…, Waltzer links to a set of plugins that create LMS functionality in WordPress.

This critique is, to my mind, less trivial than it may appear at first. As I’ve discovered before, products like WordPress and Drupal

And taking a fourth line of attack, Stephen Downes’s Buntine Oration, in discussing what he feels was his initial naivete about learning objects, implicates LMSs as well. The LMS is not merely a closed imitation of the technological classroom-based models that preceded it: in being a closed imitation of the technological classroom, it fundamentally is unlike the Internet. They Internet is chaotic, exploratory, disordered, driven by links, searches, and deeply personal semantic connection. The LMS is sequenced, hierarchical, non-adaptive and built largely for producers and publishers of “content.”