Wednesday, September 27, 2006
C is for Course Management: Pros and Cons
Before I even begin, I want to say that I hope I am opening a conversation. My views, it should be obvious, reflect my own personal thinking about Course Management and do no necessarily reflect my institution's views. I hope those of you reading here at this institution or elsewhere, will participate in the conversation and let me know where you agree or disagree.
I'm going to begin the conversation by grounding what I have to say in a recent article ("Managing Courses, Defining Learning") from the Educause Review. The authors conducted a study across several campuses about their feelings about their Course Management Systems. It's a long and thorough article, so I'm only going to cover the first half, which discusses the survey results. Tomorrow I'll cover the second half, the commentary from the authors.
The general consensus of the survey seems to be that Course Management Systems do some things well, but that the systems are generally not able to keep up with current developments in technology, such as blogs, wikis, the use of cellphones and pdas, etc. Students are especially frustrated by this and cited a problem with the inability for CMSs to allow them easy access to other resources (i.e. searching the library databases from within the system). Integration with other campus systems is not as seamless as anyone would like, even with the addition of portal systems.
The systems also fell short in the area of useability. There were, faculty suggested "too many clicks" to accomplish simple tasks. Administrators and students both complained that the features of the system were not being used to their fullest by faculty. Administrators further suggested that faculty could not really integrate the feature functionality with "traditional teaching styles." I'll just note here that if you're trying to replicate "traditional teaching" within a CMS, it'll work, but it won't be very compelling for your students. This is one of my biggest complaints about the (mis)use of CMSs. They should, if they're any good, help a faculty member rethink the structure of their class. Unfortunately, I think they don't do this right now and faculty certainly don't always approach them as ways to motivate learning. At least that's been my personal experience.
One thing that CMSs are built for is managing the administrative tasks of a course--enrollment, grades, sending email--but even there, people have found fault. Grading, especially, has been problematic. I've had several people using tablet PCs to comment on papers. The process falls apart at the CMS level.
Students and faculty both expressed dismay that the systems were so dumb. They wanted to see Amazon-like recommendations, more reminders, etc. Students especially, noted that faculty rarely make use of the customization that's possible within the CMS system, such as enabling discussion boards or peer review.
What do people want in a Course Management System? One huge response: control. Most CMSs are very locked down. If a feature doesn't exist within the system, it's either impossible to add or will cost money to add. For example, one of the features the survey respondants said they wanted was the ability to store content from course to course or to share content between courses more easily. That kind of ability exists for our system if we purchase an add on at a pretty significant cost. It's also difficult to enable students to contribute content to a course that can be shared with other students as well as the teacher. The system is set up primarily for content delivery from the teacher to the student.
Here are some other features students and faculty would like to see:
I'm going to begin the conversation by grounding what I have to say in a recent article ("Managing Courses, Defining Learning") from the Educause Review. The authors conducted a study across several campuses about their feelings about their Course Management Systems. It's a long and thorough article, so I'm only going to cover the first half, which discusses the survey results. Tomorrow I'll cover the second half, the commentary from the authors.
The general consensus of the survey seems to be that Course Management Systems do some things well, but that the systems are generally not able to keep up with current developments in technology, such as blogs, wikis, the use of cellphones and pdas, etc. Students are especially frustrated by this and cited a problem with the inability for CMSs to allow them easy access to other resources (i.e. searching the library databases from within the system). Integration with other campus systems is not as seamless as anyone would like, even with the addition of portal systems.
The systems also fell short in the area of useability. There were, faculty suggested "too many clicks" to accomplish simple tasks. Administrators and students both complained that the features of the system were not being used to their fullest by faculty. Administrators further suggested that faculty could not really integrate the feature functionality with "traditional teaching styles." I'll just note here that if you're trying to replicate "traditional teaching" within a CMS, it'll work, but it won't be very compelling for your students. This is one of my biggest complaints about the (mis)use of CMSs. They should, if they're any good, help a faculty member rethink the structure of their class. Unfortunately, I think they don't do this right now and faculty certainly don't always approach them as ways to motivate learning. At least that's been my personal experience.
One thing that CMSs are built for is managing the administrative tasks of a course--enrollment, grades, sending email--but even there, people have found fault. Grading, especially, has been problematic. I've had several people using tablet PCs to comment on papers. The process falls apart at the CMS level.
Students and faculty both expressed dismay that the systems were so dumb. They wanted to see Amazon-like recommendations, more reminders, etc. Students especially, noted that faculty rarely make use of the customization that's possible within the CMS system, such as enabling discussion boards or peer review.
What do people want in a Course Management System? One huge response: control. Most CMSs are very locked down. If a feature doesn't exist within the system, it's either impossible to add or will cost money to add. For example, one of the features the survey respondants said they wanted was the ability to store content from course to course or to share content between courses more easily. That kind of ability exists for our system if we purchase an add on at a pretty significant cost. It's also difficult to enable students to contribute content to a course that can be shared with other students as well as the teacher. The system is set up primarily for content delivery from the teacher to the student.
Here are some other features students and faculty would like to see:
- Students want to be able to access and store content over the duration of their degree work, to have access to material for all their courses in one location, and to have access to and from systems both within and external to the college or university. Students also want to be able to return to a former course and locate materials and resources that were useful to them.
- Students favor currently free and popular communication technologies such as IM (instant messaging), Skype, and podcasts and spoke of their desire to see these tools integrated in the course experience. When “in the course,” students want to interact with other learners in the same way that they now interact and communicate with their friends and colleagues.
- Faculty said that they would like to be able to easily record their voice as a reply to an e-mail or as comments to an assignment.
- Faculty and students want more technology options built into the course experience: audio, video, easy-to-use IM and SMS (Short Message Service) tools.
- Students spoke of a desire “to move the course to” where they were: on the move and on their mobile devices. To be able to pull up key resources from their smart phones and to be able to receive course e-mail at any desired location were high on the list of students’ requests. Students also talked about a PDA-enabled L/CMS.
