When will the Next-Gen CMS arrive?
I have been re-reading the Educause Quarterly article,
“Next-Generation Course Management Systems” by Colleen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner.
Since I am also testing Blackboard plug-ins here at the University, and preparing to present with Dr. Patricia McGee at the Syllabus 2005 conference, I thought I’d capture a few ideas that might prove helpful.
The first capability of a next-gen CMS mentioned by the two authors is “the ability to share materials and modules across course containers.” I have recently begun working with a faculty member who wants to introduce blogging into freshmen composition courses. So I offered a trial glimpse of a new plug-in called Journal LX from Learning Objects, Inc., a start-up company out of Washington, DC.
I like the tool and think that it offers a straightforward and controlled way to add the best features of blogging to a “course site,” which is, of necessity, private and an isolated “course container.” We began to discuss the plug-in and her first request was that students across four to seven sections be able to dive into each other’s blogs so they could learn from each other and create a discipline-based writing community within the pedagogical landscape of these courses.
I haven’t dug into the product for the answer yet, but my guess is that such sharing will not be possible. Not because the plug-in isn’t capable of that degree of collaboration but because plug-in authors must work within the technical and architectural constraints of a CMS which is, by definition, course-centric.
Another capability, “the need for WebDAV-driven upload and download.” Well, that’s rather technical in its phrasing, but what it really means is the ability to batch dowload anything. Then, deep in that explanatory paragraph, the authors hit upon another key feature that would be a rich component: “we note that students would benefit if theycould access a collective drop box for all their materials, in all their classes…”
Student storage space within the overall system, so the data is protected, but not linked to any single course ID. That sense of cyber-storage-space that is owned by a student is wonderful. Right now, we are still incredibly fragments in our information management. Proprietary containers remain that way as long as the vendors believe that the proprietary element will feed their revenue stream. What might motivate them to program in cross-container linkage that would empower both faculty and students in a new way?
So simple, yet so hard to achieve: much greater speed. The size of a system at a major research university works against speed unless the code powering the system has been elegantly and efficiently written. From my research in learning objects and the business process of rapid development, it would appear that we are still a long distance away from elegant, blindingly fast processing. But then you have to wonder how Google does it??
A more elusive capability is including instructional design support for content and assessment development. A recent IT Forum discussion revealed the dynamic tensions behind the term “instructional design,” a debate which hits job descriptions, salary levels, policy making, and the university-focused distinction between “the professor” and the “support staff.”
How could any CMS create instructional design support that would identify where the particular instructor lived pedagogically as well as in terms of technical skills, and then nudge the instructor toward the appropriate use of available tools? The debate over learning objects taught be that the very concept of chunking a dynamic course into tiny digital assets was fraught with moral and pedagogical consequences. Implied pedagogical neutrality does not exist, as several critics have pointed out.
One of my favorites, “expedited collaborative teaching” reaches to the heart of a new pedagogy which challenges the traditional model: “sage on the stage” and all its inherent assumptions about the passivity of students.
