Right now we're discussing student and faculy perspectives with a couple of faculty and students. Based on research in teaching and learning, we need to foucs on new ways of teaching. The students are different and need to be taught differently. Today's students want active learning, collaborative learning, civic learning, and use of technology.

Research on learning:

• Active and learner-centered
• Teamwork and collabortive
• metacognition and transfer
• community and engagement

New student and faculty roles

• Student is responsible for uncovering
• Teacher is facilitator

How the LMS fits

• Support for active learning
• Empowerment through communication
• metacognition
• community

Problem-based learning

• muddy problem
• clarify questions
• chart course
• collect data
• evaluate results

Instead of lecturing, he is using these projects. Most of the content gets delivered via this project rather than via lecture. It occurs to me that K-12 has been moving in this direction for years.  Using reading reflections with question prompts to make sure they're doing the reading and coming to class prepared.  Also does knowledge surveys to see where the students are. These are not graded. Captures data about knowledge before and after the class. He can break this down by student or by question. I can think of lots of people who'd like a tool like this. I don't think Blackboard can do this.

LMSs can be used to support active learning if you think about it.

Paul Miller is trying to capture some of the issues that have been raised.  He's mostly talking about writing and peer response. Comments on the paper and the comments. Learned more about the students' assumptions about writing by looking at the comments. I like the idea of grading comments. Faculty change is glacial.

Alex is now talking about his perspective.  He uses Blackboard. He uses IM and email, but doesn't have his own blog or anything. Likes having access to the syllabus. Feels ambivalent about putting powerpoint and notes up. Lots of different ways to disseminate information. Professors use different methods.  Bryan's daughter is right. Blackboard is damn hard to use. A lot of has to do with how the faculty use it. They leave the defaults.

Ryan echoes much of what Alex says. Something that he said really struck me. He said that we spent a lot of money on this software but didn't really think about how to effectively use it. And I thought, wow, he's right, we've never had the discussion about what this powerful tool could and should be used for.

The discussion afterward was interesting as well, with lots of people trying to figure out how best to use LMSs and to get faculty and students to embrace it more wholeheartedly.

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