This NITLE sponsored event was one of the best conferences I've been to.  It was small and everyone came from similar envrironments to mine, so I found myself saying, "me too" a lot or asking people who seemed to have overcome certain obstacles how they went about it.  My overall impression of the conference was that a lot of people were somewhat dissatisfied with the way most course management systems worked. Someone in the audience mentioned that they hated the fact that this word "management" was tied to learning. Can we or should we be managing learning? And yet, there's a real need to manage our workloads and learning management systems tend to be good at that. At most of the schools, there was only one person dedicated to working with faculty on technology in their teaching. If a CMS that's easy to use is okay, then we often shuffle them off to that with help documents in hand rather than spend lots of time developing a web site or something else.

Another issue that came up related to "managing learning" was the way that the layout and functionality of most course management systems might force faculty to teach in a certain way. Many in the room, I think, wanted to allow great latitude in letting faculty teach the way they felt was best. Some of these systems seemed to restrict what one can and can't do. And this is probably the main reason many have considered or are using open source alternatives such as Sakai or Moodle which allow you to customize the layout and add on your own modules to suit your needs.  The proprietary systems like Blackboard and WebCT allow little customization and assume a kind of "one-size-fits-all" mode of operation.

I think many people were also focused on helping people use their existing systems. There was a lot of discussion about running workshops and generally helping faculty use the system to its greatest potential. Adoption seemed to be hovering, as it does for us, around 25-30%.  There was a general desire to increase adoption, but most people didn't have a lot of ideas for how to do more outreach and training. Some people seemed to be good at this, especially when they had large staffs. One group, who implemented Sakai, had a faculty advisory committee who helped them determine how to develop the system and also how to approach training.

Another issue that arose was how to connect course management to Web 2.0 technologies. For those who don't know about Web 2.0, here's a good explanation.  Web 2.0 basically is all those tools you hear about that are generally "social," like Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Many faculty had abandoned course management systems because they weren't allowing them to leverage these tools for teaching. There was also a bit of discussion about the desire for CMSs to become more like the web 2.0 tools, in look and feel as well as functionality. Most of us were pretty hard on the look of most course management systems. They're clunky and compared to most other web sites look pretty out of date. 5 or 6 years ago, this was acceptable. Now, our students expect much slicker design and functionality.

One of the more interesting panels was the faculty and student panel. The students were pretty hard on the LMSs and especially the faculty who didn't use them or didn't use them well.  One of them suggested that we'd spent a lot of money on this software but hadn't really discussed effective use of them.

For more thoughts and notes about the conference from myself and others, see the technorati tag lmslac2006.

technorati tags:lmslac2006, coursemanagement, learningmanagement