New Features for Learning Management Systems
Bruce A. McHenry
The Richard Lounsbery Foundation
New York, NY
I. INTRODUCTION
In the future, learning systems will be omniscient and omnipresent. How do we
begin the journey? This article suggests seven features--annotation, natural
language integration, live multimedia interaction, quality control, spontaneous group
formation, credits-royalties-modularity, and other structured interactions--for learning
network users, researchers and developers to consider.
There is a now a choice of first generation approaches to developing courses.
Major universities tend to have education services groups that develop in-house
learning systems. They integrate component software such as Microsoft
Netmeeting with course administration systems. An easier approach is to
license complete Learning Management Systems (LMS) from companies like IBM,
Asymetrix, Blackboard
and WBT Systems. Meanwhile,
smaller schools tend to contract with turnkey providers like Convene,
Eduprise and eCollege
that specialize in assisting faculty with the conversion of their course content.
Future generations of LMS will be able to leverage the unique attributes of computing and
the Internet much more effectively. While it may be surprising that the outstanding
benefits have yet to come, what we are seeing is entirely consistent with the typical
adoption process of new technologies. For example, after indoor plumbing was
invented, people said, "Aha, I no longer have to heat a kettle and bring the water
over to the sink in order to wash my hands. I'll just pipe the hot water straight to
a faucet." Just as owners of old homes replaced old faucets when they tired of
alternately scalding and freezing their hands, the design of LMS will be reconsidered
during the coming renovations.
The fundamental misconception of today's LMS is that core content can be developed
without intimately integrating learners into the creative process. The
coming advancements have many precedents. Marketers use focus groups while
manufacturers intensively interview consumers to better hear what Total Quality
Management (TQM) circles call "the voice of the customer." Also, doctors
treat illnesses but patients have to say where it hurts. Ph.D.s, a.k.a.
faculty, and students need to have much more continuous and fine grain transactions.
For most teachers, mentoring and research will indeed displace "standing
and delivering." As depicted in the movie,
the teaching role is especially valued when teachers imbue students with a belief
in themselves.
Back to the faucet metaphor, the core learning materials produced by today's course
authoring tools is something like freezing water that users have to combine with hot, live
components in order to create a learning community. Obviously, plumbers first had to bring
the hot and cold outlets together in order to get warm water. That quickly begged the need
for a new kind of mixing valve just as LMS now need "mixing" devices. The hot
side will be derived from Internet legacies such as e-mail, threaded discussions and chat
rooms but the new mixing devices will be markedly more effective for students and much
more efficient for teachers.
Let us start with one simple assumption: students want to do all of their studying with a
really sharp tutor always at their beck and call. They want to be able to ask any
question, at any time It is no wonder that they may not even know that they want to do
this. Few but royalty have been able to afford personal tutors. For the rest of us, large
classes have stifled our voices. But history is full of examples of privileges of the
wealthy that have become commonplace. We will soon enough be wirelessly connected with
affordable sages at any time we wish.
We will not be able to leap into the omniscient and omnipresent network all at once but
it will come very fast. The PCs and communications needed to support rapid responses from
teachers and their assistants, at least during e-office hours, already exist. Those
interactions should be recorded since students often repeat the same questions, mistakes
and diversions. Instructors do not want to have to repeatedly hear exactly the same
chatter and students want to get the best possible return on their tuition. We need
software that helps people to build robust yet economical knowledge resources out of many
thousands of pieces that are custom fitted, one at a time.
Future functionality will deliver value unimaginable in traditional classroom
teaching and will be critical to the future success of the LMS's vendors and
outsourcers mentioned above. There will also be continuing leadership from existing
degree granting schools with strong online components such as UCLA
and Stanford, as well as
new comers like University of Phoenix, Cardean and Jones
International University. There will be many more online universities
and purveyors of technical
and soft training skills.
Textbook publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton
Mifflin have already developed e-learning programs; the new platforms will
really drive the cannibalization of the textbook business. Meanwhile,
open source software is emerging as a viable alternative to proprietary solutions
and closed-end experiments. Foundations might be well advised to seed
this kind of R&D.
II. SEVEN FEATURES
A. Annotation
Microsoft Word supports annotation and so does Third
Voice on the WWW, but the capacity for fine grain retroactive linking has
not yet been integrated into any LMS. For example, a Java applet could allow
a student to highlight text, or a location on an image, that would become the
anchor for the question. The student would then type the text of a question
that would be queued for online staff, or even other students. The system
should present the respondent with the question in context and, if lacking facilities
for real-time communication, should automatically notify the questioner of the
response.
This is similar to the e-mail interactions that some LMS already support, where the URL of
the originating web page is automatically included in a student's e-mail. There are two
differences here: 1) The interactions would be used to augment the original content so
subsequent students could then mouse over an appropriate icon to reveal the text of a
question and click to view answers. 2) The links would be anchored to specific locations
in the content. This is not just a threaded discussion tacked on at the end of a learning
module. Students are constantly looking for specific answers and they waste a lot of time
trying to find them. Since there may be many questions associated with a web page, there
is no more reason to make a student read through a lengthy threaded discussion than to
wait for a recitation the next day or next week.
B. Natural Language Integration
There are several reasons why semantic interpretation will be necessary:
- The same question may arise in multiple contexts.
- Different questions may arise in the same context.
- Some questions won't have any specific attachment points at all.
- A dense thicket of links could arise in some areas of content.
- The learner should be able to stop and enter a reflective mode that is distinct from
mere surfing, to point at something on the screen or stop the soundtrack to ask questions
like, "Did she just say ____?" or "How did she deduce this?" or
"Does this also mean ____?"
- We still want to give students the illusion that a personal tutor is always hovering
nearby.
The semantic degree of fit of typed or even spoken questions would then become inputs,
in addition to context, for a matching algorithm. Closely matching questions could be
displayed so that the student, in selecting the most similar question, provides feedback
about the matching algorithm itself. Then learning algorithms could be used to
optimize the relative weighting of the proximity and the linguistic components.
C. Live Multimedia Interaction
The demand for synchronous distance classes is evidenced by the success of virtual
classroom providers like Centra
and LearnLinc that feature a
workspace that can show slides, be pointed at, and drawn upon by all parties,
even at modem speeds.
LMS need to integrate these capabilities so that students can get attention as quickly as
possible for questions that have not already been answered satisfactorily. While a
few typed words will be sufficient for many responses, a graphics tablet and/or camera
will be needed to enable free form diagramming. It should also be possible to easily
edit the time-based recordings for re-use. If a segment turns out to be popular,
production values can be improved later.
D. Quality Control
The recordings will be of highly variable quality so control will be paramount.
Let's consider two apparently divergent approaches. One is to give professors
control over everything. But it probably won't be possible for busy faculty members
to review everything generated with a system designed to simulate tutors by capturing very
large numbers of interactions. In fact, it would not be necessary for them to do
so. Many of the live interactions will never be accessed again so it will be highly
desirable to limit reviews to those answers that are being heavily used.
The second approach is to have students provide feedback about the usefulness of every
interaction. In the short term at least, it will suffice to ask students to provide
feedback about whether the interaction was "useful." This information
should be captured in conjunction with navigation. A good rating would signal that the
answer was satisfactory and return the user to the place where the question arose. A
poor rating would take the user to the next most highly ranked answer or else queue the
question for a person to answer. In the long run, this feedback will come from
computer recognition of gesture, facial expression, and physiologic parameters.
Both of these quality control approaches have limitations. Professor Marvin Minsky
tells a story about a young professor who has just given his first lecture.
When a colleague asks him how it went, he replies that it went terribly.
The colleague asks why and the young professor says, "I've forgotten what's
hard." Students, on the other hand, know what's hard for them but
can be easily mislead. This suggests the need for both forms of review.
Students should identify content that they find to be useful and the faculty
can then verify the quality of the content and provide, in effect, a stamp of
approval.
This leaves open the possibility that students will identify content that is useful to
them but that the professor does not find relevant! Long standing questions about
the mission of academe to stimulate intellectual inquiry vs. providing vocational training
will continue, and courses will continue to link to chatty interactions.
E. Spontaneous Group Formation
The ratings, as well as the kinds of questions asked, will serve to identify teachers and
peers that a student likes. These will also become inputs to the evaluation function
previously based on distance and semantics. Perhaps more importantly this
"association" data will help to identify groups of individuals who can move
through the material in largely self-supporting cohorts. Online classes could then
be scheduled in order to foster live group discussion and private conversations among
these individuals.
The individual profile data needed to support these agent functions should be
kept private but in an interchangeable format and at a place on the network
where several levels of keys can provide access at the individual owner's discretion.
Standards organizations could help to reduce balkanization among many teaching
systems while independent authorities could provide the lockable databases.
This might be a natural role for education
portals.
F. Credits, Royalties and Modularity
Interactivity is the key difference that gives online learning an edge over
textbooks. Yet publishers still have a major advantage. They identify
star talent and provide advances to help write books for wide distribution.
The same economies of scale will eventually dominate e-learning. Publishers
will attempt to take the lead by giving star talent the opportunity to develop
content using next generation LMS. Local professors would then be able
to assign modules, just as they now assign chapters from textbooks. The
rich content will reduce the reliance on routine lectures that students usually
dread anyway and shift the emphasis to special events, as Philip
Morrison anticipated. In order to allow local faculty to continue
to add value in a unique way, schools could license the core content and, using
the same platform, augment it through e-office hours and regular classes.
Of course, online interactions do not have to be limited to any particular campus or
school. While there will continue to be a need for accredited schools to offer
degrees, and a need for campuses where young people can congregate, high quality content
will attract students enrolled in many institutions. Is it better to limit the
requests for help to a campus where face-to-face classroom interactions create a cohesive
group of cohorts, or to distribute requests for help more globally?
In the latter case, students, and even faculty, might well ask questions of leading
experts at other institutions. This will beg the need for payment arrangements such
as royalty streams based on use. Naturally, there would then be competition to
create the best interactive components. Ownership would become distributed among
many connected modules.
While some professors may object that they want sole discretion to modify the
source materials and control the content, this desire conflicts with the needs
of "Communities for Learning" (C4L), an objective voiced by Andy diPaolo.
In C4L, students will often prove themselves to be the best instructors and
faculty will often find themselves learning from the students. This need
for integrated systems of credits will be most acute for rapidly evolving subjects.
G. Other Structured Interactions
LMS's researchers, developers and marketers can expect to be faced with competition from
more general tools for cooperative work when those corporate tools trickle down for
educational use. LMS will need a competitive strategy. Academic societies constitute
markets where LMS could counter the impending attack by upgrading from teaching systems to
the discussion and consensus systems that are the natural evolution of research journals.
There is already an established trend towards publishing academic papers on line so
articles can be quickly located. The inclusion of retroactive links will better refer
readers not only to supporting work and explanation of underlying concepts that the
original author could not anticipate, but also directly to areas of developing controversy
and further work. These latter types of structured annotations, different from questions
and answers, will require their own protocols and inevitably involve not only payments but
also security.
III. CONCLUSION
The next generations of Leaning Management Systems will take advantage of the unique
ability of the Internet to bridge space and time in ways classroom-based instruction
cannot. The new attributes of these systems will have applications beyond education so LMS
vendors should prepare to compete in a much larger marketplace where competition will come
from unexpected quarters. The copycat functionality now seen from many providers will be
upgraded to support Communities for Learning at about the same time as the users embrace
changes in their own methodologies. Ultimately, the network will serve, oracle-like, with
much greater knowledge that any of us could ever possess as individuals. Accepting the
challenge of building such systems will be no less difficult than accepting the changes
that we will need to make in our assumptions about teaching and, finally, our selves.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Feelie
Lee for providing an intelligent layperson's comments and Nishikant Sonwalkar
for providing a faculty member's viewpoint about student ratings. Howard
Block and Brandon Dobell, Banc of America Equity Research, provided an education
industry overview dated September, 1999, that provided references to many of
the links herein. Thanks to Denis Newman for telling me
about the term, "Learning Management System" and Dr. Frederick
Seitz for supporting my attendance at the Fifth
International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks, On-line Learning '99,
Eduprise '99 and the iCS conference.
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