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On this episode Laura is joined by Brenna, Caroline, & Laura to unpack the learning management system (LMS). We've got a few thoughts, metaphors, and words for you, dear LMS. Listen up!
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 years of edtech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura pasquini.
0:18
Great, Welcome to Chapter nine, in the between the chapters 2000 to the learning management system, I'm joined with a great panel of colleagues talk, I have Caroline cumin, Laura Gibbs, and Brenda Clark gray. Welcome. Thank you for joining me and to talk about the infamous LMS.
0:36
Thanks for having us.
0:37
Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having us. I think this is a great chapter to start. Because our ideas and what do we think about it?
0:46
Absolutely. So I was always curious of why people want to talk about the LMS. Cuz my personal heartache, I have always struggled with learning management systems as an instructor, as a student, as a faculty as a now instructional designer. So there's a lot that we need to unpack in this chapter. And I don't know if anyone wants to share their perspective, because this positions, the LMS coming out in 2002, I don't believe in my undergrad, I was in Canada at university gwelf we had a learning management system, then we had like a portal, but there was no LMS formally, so who wants to share their thoughts on that? LMS.
1:27
So I just wanted to say you started with a really phrase or word that just triggered something in me that it's I think it's worth sharing. I think the LMS feels has always felt for me, like a straight jacket. And I you know, I'm, I'm a rebel, I always have been, I can't help but is just, it's too late also to help it. So I feel always when I was a student, I felt again, that was someone was imposing this thing to me. And being a teacher, I feel that even worse. And I think I have to do it because I at the moment, at the moment, I can't, I don't think I have things that I would need in order to do it differently. So it's, it's still a straitjacket, and it feels very uncomfortable to me. So that that is how I relate to this. And I guess that's why I wanted to be here to just kind of, you know, see, kind of the strike jacket, a bit of my body.
2:31
Here, it can be a tension. And I think a few of us have talked in a pre chat a little bit about what it means to be confined or constricted, because a number of you have been involved in the open educational resource movement, openness, and being an open educator yourself. So what do you think about it?
2:50
Well, for me, my career is along the same timeline as Martin's that I started publishing webpages in 1998. When I was in graduate school, that was the very end of graduate school for me. And it was a life changing moment. You know, so Caroline was talking about a straight jacket, another straight jacket, I felt was just the classroom. You know, I wanted to reach out and connect with people. The work I do is kind of weird. You know, there's, there's a limited number of people who are interested in the weird work that I do so so I need a big audience so I can find the people who might enjoy my work. And when I realized I could just put my stuff online, my dissertation online, all the notes that didn't go into my dissertation online, the the lists and lists of animals and anecdotes and stuff that I've been working on, all I had to do was hit publish, and there it was online. So that was in 1998. And I got my teaching job at the University of Oklahoma in 1999. And I had my students publishing web pages, then, even when I was still teaching in the classroom. And then I started teaching fully online in 2002, which was what I wanted to do, you know, to do the things I thought were most important as a teacher of writing, the teacher folklore, as a teacher of world folklore, getting online was really important to me, and then was about the same time that the LMS came along. And I was just struck by the horror of it from the start, because we could all be creating websites, the University even gave us web space to do it. And then we would have links we could share with people and the LMS is not linky. It's not part of the real internet. And the price that we paid for investing in a closed system like this now for almost 20 years is a very high price. And I know it's justified by all kinds of institutional needs and purposes that the LMS serves. But I would love to see as pared down the LMS. So it only serves those institutional purposes without being the kind of straight jacket that Caroline was talking about that, that that constrains students and constrains teachers from using the internet to its full advantage.
4:58
It's funny in the chapter Martin actually use the word folstein Pact is what I'm reading in his book. And I was laughing because we're all like, there's this regime that's come in. And the LMS is the boundaries of where we have to sit in this like little courtyard. Brenda, what do you think about this as we talk? Kind of hyperbolically?
5:19
Yeah, no, I'm thinking about how I'm a massive hypocrite, which is why I volunteered myself for this discussion. So I started my undergraduate career in 2001. And my experience of the learning management system as an undergraduate was that only the nerdiest and most tech for professors were playing with it. So whereas now, it's often the place where folks who don't really like technology, but need to serve things to students online hang out, then it was like, oh, there's this new cool tool, and only four of my instructors are playing with it, but I'm gonna learn it because I have to, and I don't think I minded it as a student, I wasn't a particularly I don't know, it's an undergrad, I,
6:01
okay,
6:03
I'll do what you told me like I was fine. Um, and I say moved into my career, both in terms of wanting to be a public scholar, I'm wanting to share my work publicly. And also, just as a particular, as an early instructor,
6:21
I really chafed against
6:23
the learning management system. As a concept information is meant to be free, I wanted to put everything on the open web. And for the nine years that I was a full time, community college instructor, I only use a learning management system when I absolutely had to when I was teaching fully online courses, the institution for the old, what if you got hit by a bus reason I wanted my materials for the fully online course in the LMS. But even when I taught hybrid I taught through WordPress. So that's a long way of saying I fully embrace all of the arguments against it, I found it chafing as an instructor, and I wanted to play in a more open space. And I wanted my students to engage in authentic assessments in the real world where they could meet other minds and disagree. And that was always really important to me. And then about seven months before the pandemic, I changed careers, and I became a faculty educational technologist. And then I had to move 500 faculty members, two thirds of whom had never used any kind of electronic tool in their teaching onto the internet, because of this plague that we're living through right now. And suddenly, my, the value of learning management system really changed for me, because we had an incredibly small team who had to move a very large number of faculty, many of whom were extremely resistant, and all of whom were panicked, because we had a week to deal with this change. And suddenly, the value of the LMS for all the reasons Martin talks about in the book as being good enough, that that good enough concept that became all I needed, right, I needed something good enough. And so I became like a little bit evangelical, which feels very uncomfortable as a place to be. But also, I don't know what other option I had, right. And I still have a few faculty members who are doing their cool open web projects, and I'm supporting them, but they're getting a lot less support than they used to, because I have so many more faculty to support. And, yeah, I really needed a set of like, every tool is identical. And all the support materials look the same. And like that has a real institutional purpose that I simultaneously hate and wouldn't have survived the last nine months without.
8:39
Yeah, we are recording this at the end of November 2020. And it is a call out that we've all stated our biases on the table. I I'm with Laura, I agree, not linky, not linkys. A great term, by the way, and have you closed systems was I brushed against but I think the LMS. And something that we forget is this is the first time institutions had consistency, because the previous chapters leading up in the conversations I've had with folks is they were hodgepodge Gee, we're putting things together haphazardly, and for our learners. And even faculty that are working in instructors that are there to design. It was very confusing. It was a wild west of things that didn't make sense. There was no consistency. In the last chapter I talked with Lorna and Phil about elearning standards, there was no standardization on things. So it was kind of a I guess this is the solution we're going to put forward because we want to support online learning digital learning in a cohesive campus way. And it makes sense. So someone could pop into a course and see that as I guess I started looking at the LMS as the hub. That is where everyone could find the things and they could go to it.
9:52
I'll chime in though with a complicating factor, right. That's how I've used the LMS is I know my students go there first. And so I embed A blog in there in the homepage, which is the announcements, and it's fine. I mean, the LMS serves that basic purpose for me. But I don't want this whole podcast to to vanish without us talking about a really big dangerous fear savage elephant in the room, which is the new role that the LMS has started to play just over the past couple of years, right? Because, you know, are complaints? Is it clunky? Is it good enough, you know, we can go on and on about that the LMS is also now serving a new data collection purpose that it did not originally serve, right, so that all this data is being accumulated. companies want to figure out what they can do with that data to make money because that is the goal of these companies, right is to make money and this is a new product that they have. And so at the same time that we can go on at great length and even spend most of the podcast talking about, you know, is the clunky trade off. Good enough? How do we sort of not stifle innovation, even while we're trying to promote consistency, we've also got to talk about institutional responsibilities regarding the data being collected by LMS is because institutions have failed abysmally, to be proactive about that data. And we, we can't let them off the hook, because the conversation is just starting. I know no one really wants to talk about it during the pandemic. But Brenda knows how important this is in Linkletter. her colleague was one of my collaborators and trying to bring in structure to the table to talk about data issues. And it's it's big and important. So I'm throwing it out there. We can talk about it later, or now, but it's a really important LMS issue.
11:38
No, it really is important. And I'm I feel often very insulated by the fact that the institution I am at takes a strong stand on issues of data privacy, and we're an open access institution, which changes our relationship to to vendors, for example, not that they aren't making incursions, because they always are. And that's a conversation we have to have all the time we do use Moodle, and talking to individual instructors all the time, who would like a deeper integration between, say the homework package that they've decided to have students purchase or the eText. Like they really want to give Pearson access to our Moodle, for example. And that's a line that we've said like, absolutely not. So I feel lucky that I'm working within a larger system that respects those ideas, because I know that if I was at a more vendor forward institution, capitulating to the LMS, in the way that I have, would be a much more fraught concept. So I'm really glad you bring that up, Laura, because it's incredibly important that we don't lose sight of who's making money, right? Who's making money? How are they making it? What do they plan to do with that data in the future? That's all critical. And I feel like it's a conversation that doesn't get had high up enough in our institutions.
12:49
And, you know, if I might jump in, in relation with the data, the surveillance, you know, all what that what's going on there? I think so I'm, at the moment, we're working on a project that is about critical data. literacies. And, you know, how do you how do you foster that, and we're creating an open educational resource. And the, you know, the, the basic thing is, you do not let, or you're not a passive, how can I say that patient from whom the data is extracted, but also from them which they profit, and here we are, like the victims of that system? And I think that that one of the things and and it's a practical activity that we do, where are you being traced? So what are your what are the Sorry? What are the traces that you leave, who gets them who is after them like breadcrumbs? And I think that that the, the, these open and loose or interoperable tools, however, we want to call I call them open and participatory tools, they do allow us to, at least, and what are on on a minimal extent to say, I don't want these cookies or I don't want to, you know, I want to opt out to this, or you have some kind of you know, I think, yeah, some kind of agency. And here is where I don't remember if Laura or Brenda said, I feel hypocritical. He said, That's me. And, you know, I think we need to be if we have to, if we have to bear with the LMS. Because the different I mean, not only the crisis, but because I think this is you know, education is a massive business and Martin was saying here 200,000 students is that what they serve with the LMS Of course, you can do this on on an individual basis lets you listen, and she does, but I think that we as teachers, And I work in a in a particularly teacher oriented University, we have a really strong PGC, which is the postgraduate certificate in education. And I think it is my responsibility to, to say to my students, you know, this is the LMS. But this is what it does. And how can we resist, and there is a magnificence movement, which is designed for resistance. And I think if we, you know, if we don't want to be so hyper critical or hypocritical, we, at least in our small spaces, we need to create the space of risk for resistance. And that's, you know, in a way, I really advocate for opening the eyes of students, and this is what's happening, this is what people are getting out of you, do you want to you don't want to well, then you have to do something about it. And and I think this is something we cannot lose sight of, I think, no, I
15:57
think we have an ethical responsibility to do it. Because in so many ways, the learning management system, especially for students who have encountered a similar technology from the beginning of their educations, it trains them to think a certain way, it trains them to behave in a certain way. And it trains them to have a particular set of expectations around their data and their data privacy and whether or not they are sort of active agents in their education. And unfortunately, we all work in institutions where we all have colleagues in some capacity or another who are very happy to let that train keep rolling, right? for lots of reasons, for reasons of expediency for reasons of efficiency, all those kinds of terms that, that I hate, and also recognize are not empty arguments.
16:42
But I think,
16:44
you know, we like to talk a big game about how post secondary education is an opportunity to teach people how to think and to create good citizens and all this kind of stuff. But if you're not actually doing the hard work of having those conversations, and challenging those tools, you're not getting very far right. And I think it's really hard for students who so rarely encounter those conversations all the way through their education to understand the value until sometimes it's far too late in in the process.
17:14
And that's what critical pedagogy is really about Paolo, frankly, in the 70s. When he set up all his movement, one of the things he really insisted is that the material that starts the conversation of my teaching session or experience is the reality of my students, what they are experiencing, and trying to see which of these invisible, oppressive structures are occasioning in it was different in Brazil, absolutely, completely different in the 70s. Even more different. But I don't think that the the core idea that he was addressing with starting with the reality of your students, is very far away from what we now should be doing. And if we are teaching in an environment where the LMS is taking the data, then that needs to, we need to find a place where that is the starting point of the conversation. And from there, we see what we are teaching, and then you see how you know how you can then you know, I don't know go right or left, it depends on what you do. But I think if critical pedagogy is a thing that we are in, I am very interested on coming from Venezuela, this is where I lived for years, even more so because I am very aware of social injustice and you know, social inequality, which is massive in Latin America. So I do believe in critical theory and in critical pedagogy, and I think that we need to have the uncomfortable conversation of this is happening, what are we gonna do? Well, and
18:53
that idea of agency is what ties the data question back to the larger question of the LMS. Right, because something feels like a straight jacket, that's probably an indication that you don't have a lot of agency in there. And I think that's what disappoints me the most about the LMS is that, you know, in the early chapters of the book, Martin talks about, say constructivism, and I remember having just knockdown drag out arguments with people about constructivism back around 2005. You know, it's the kind of thing that you would talk about in and I was at Google Plus but you know, when Nene wherever it was, educators were hanging out, and we'll talk about that. I get the feeling we don't talk about that very much anymore. Not like we used to we've kind of given over to this idea of the LMS being a best practice, right and an LMS is just default to this kind of top down teacher led lack of student agency and that's that's why I don't use it. And it really concerns me that if we're going to be preparing students for a world Political complexity and employment complexity and just personal identity complexity, simplifying, and making sure that everything feels the same is it? That's not what we should be doing? In my opinion?
20:15
It's funny that what you said there, Laurie said about looking to the LMS is best practice. And I think the tragedy is that I don't know anybody who thinks the lls is best practice, right? Even even the folks who have who administer it, the folks who select between LMS is for an institution, I've never met anybody who suggests that the LMS is the best practice. So if that's the case, like if, if there's nobody who's really like, this is the best possible way to educate our students, then what's the alternative? Right. And in many ways, the alternative is something that our institutions have have decided against, which is staffing and supporting faculty development, and educational technology and giving people the support they need to explore a different way. But we've decided that that like, we'd rather stick with a system that we pretty much all agree is not the best way to teach, then do that. Oh, great.
21:14
Yeah, it's investment in our our industry. And like, I think I'd like to get that they are an industry, but they are. And in the process. I think some it's been interesting because this chapter could be the pivot point for the future ones when we talk about learning analytics to AI to surveillance. I think Shoshana Zubov says surveillance capitalism, like we've let these tools and platforms and and so I know that Martin talks about Jason Lenny's software sedimentation, set the protocols, set the practice and make the decisions. And we've just kind of coasted along. And we've never been, I'd like I'd love to see as we train other faculty developers Institute, instructional designers, instructors and faculty to teach in digital spaces, the ethics of some of these considerations, because I don't see those woven into any kind of curriculum or training certificate or anything like that, where they say, should I be using this? And what permissions and data Do I really need for my learner's or myself? So Laura gets I think you've done well to like, say, this is an important starting point of the first kind of sedimentation into these enterprise campus wide. And even across countries, because we're in four different countries, that we started doing these different things. And we accepted it and Canada in the UK, they accepted it in the US. And then our friends that are in Australia, where Moodle comes from, I think we've all said, I guess this is the road, we're going to start trucking without stop and ask some critical questions on what information are we taking from this? And how do we get out of the sedimentation process?
22:54
I want to add something here, which might sound extreme, but I think extremes are always good examples to put things into into, you know, into the view of the our audience, Hannah aren't, she is a German philosopher who was very interested in what's happened with the Nazis in the Second World War and the case of the whole our suites and the whole technology that was created in order to be more efficient to kill more Jews. And people sat in a table. And you know, they were deliberating Well, you know, we should do this. And then maybe, you know, if we have more things, and then the angle of the thing, and in the trial of this guy who I at the moment don't remember the name. And he was saying his answer to this horrendous you know, genocide was Oh, but I was following instructions. You know, I was I wasn't doing really nothing, nothing out of what I was doing the instructions, I got an an ad and said, evil lives in Banner people. And evil is not a thing. So you won't find an evil person in a really particular place. And no, no, no, that is in our every day life and it looks like completely normal people. So what I want to say here, it's extreme because of course, it's not the same. But I think that this really blindly following instructions is very, very dangerous. And but there is also one thing that I would like to put also, you know, as we are humans and we need the job, we need our work we are caught into a capitalist system where we can't really bear without the money we just can't and that has us in a way. Caught in particularly people it you know, if you're not maybe in a space where this is, this is where you feel like fishing. watering, you can have maybe another job and but if you are in a more precarious situation and you have maybe three children and you have three jobs and you're not in your country, and you're, you know, you have left a war zone, you won't put that on risk. And you just go with what the system, you know, tells you to do, because you are it. And I think that the problem really is that Sylvia Federici, who is she's a feminist, and she's a Marxist. And she says something lovely, they have taken away the commons from us. And we have not been able to say no, because the way in which that has been engineered, has been brilliant. And I think she is right. And you know, I always wonder what is the option? What can we do when I think we can? I don't have the answer. But I think there is something that we and I don't think the LMS needs to disappear. I think we need to we need to tame, no way that bees need to find uses. Maybe our administrative or the Greg, you know, I don't know, the massive work so that all the things that need. But I think in the teaching, we do need support for something different. And there needs a hybrid. I don't know combination where we can use both things. And we don't need to, you know, yeah, to comply with with because we have to. And I think that's very dangerous. And it oppresses us and it disempower us. And we're always less and less against that system and against also, you know, that the institution as it stands at the moment.
26:35
And one of the ways we get disempowered is that we're so busy all the time, right? And no one has time. So it's like what Brenda was talking about in terms of just the massive amount of work you have to do to support all those faculty. And I think that's the same for so many instructors, you know, you might be an adjunct instructor who's cobbling together jobs at different schools and teaching, you know, five preparations, you might be at a school like mine, a research school where most people are under enormous pressure to produce tons of research, and they have very little time for their teaching. And I think that's where we need to look for solutions, right, we're not going to find a technological solution to the problem of the LMS. It's not going to be a better LMS. The technology will not save us from a system that takes away our time, and does so I think sometimes for very sinister motives, like what Caroline was saying, you know, the best way to disempower students and faculty and everybody else is is is to not give us time to reflect on what we're doing to organize to try to do things differently. And just honestly, talking about time is important, and also about the way that Ed Tech has promised us time saving over and over again, every time I see a piece of technology that says this is going to save you time so that you have more time to spend with your students. I don't know about you all that just burns me up every time I see that line, but it never stopped to see that line over and over again, in the selling of that tech. And we have to push back against it. I think
28:08
so it sounds like we're gonna lead to resistance. No, I think something that I've learned in some of these conversations that you all are talking about is I don't think we should take away the education piece at all, we say a tech but education needs to be a bigger piece of it and infusing some of those methodologies and practices before the tech is really important in any of these spaces. And I think it is a system of you can make a to do list and organize your life and do this. But unless Yeah, unless you have the resources, which is time, people, other things that are supporting you and scaffolding you, you're never going to catch up, it's going to be like trying to keep your head above water. And I wonder, thinking about this chapter. I think that Martin did well to kind of introduce what it meant to different people. But I don't know if we really, really touched upon that piece. So I think my one call would be is where do we put the resources needed to actually use the LMS? So that's my question to Martin. Are there things that you're thinking about asking either Martin or the community about what they're not thinking about the learning management system in how we use it, or how we could use it now that we're past 2002,
29:22
there is a line that he rides that I highlighted and it says this is to be expected as we search for new metaphors to understand the ways in which new technologies can be used. And ruka Benjamin says something beautiful that is imagining something different is a journey of struggle, and there is no way that you can change things if without a struggle because imagination and utopia is exactly that is how to, you know is that journey of struggling for something that is not yet to there. And I think the search of that metaphor, I find that really wonderful and one could ride across out, how do you say crowdsource chapter? With metaphors? What do you think is a metaphor that we can really turn this thing upside down and find the right use for it, which is an administrative use, you do what you want in your admin stuff, but leave us the teachers, the freedom. And so the, what are these metaphors? And I think it would be lovely to create an appendix with one of these, you know, what are these possible metaphors? And can we ask our community of people, you know, open education or whatever, you know, it doesn't matter. But I come out I think our community, which I really find it really strong the community that we're a part of, can we start to think about metaphors? And can we can we Yeah, it would be lovely to have a chapter collecting these metaphors. And I open, I am sorry, I have to say, I offer myself to do that. Because I think that can be highly powerful.
30:59
What that's making me think of there's a piece that Jacob go well put up of metaphors for the syllabus, you know, because the quest for metaphors, it's not just about technology, right? We should be challenging ourselves about the most basic things we do in school, the things we take most for granted are the things we most need metaphors for. And so like, you do the syllabus, you make the syllabus, and I'll see if I can pick it up and send a link to Laura, it's, um, it must be like 100 different metaphors for what a syllabus could be, you know what a travel brochure was one of my favorites, but he just runs through all these different ways you could sort of free yourself to think of the the old once again, straight, jacket like syllabus as something new and wonderful. I think it would be kind of painful to think about all those, you know, metaphors for the LMS knowing that I will not see them come to pass in my lifetime. But let's drag out the old one. I don't think people talk about this anymore. But it was it was in existence, surely for a solid decade, the walled garden. Remember, when everybody thought that was a good idea, though, walled garden, so we should do a google Ngram to see if people still even use that, but they used it for a darn long time. And I didn't like it the whole time. So there's a bad metaphor
32:14
up in my mouth a little bit thinking about that one, Laura, thank you for bringing that up. Are there things then maybe it's not about the LMS? We have questions with but maybe it's just as we just focus on this one thing we really are starting to realize, why do we have to put this on a pedestal I think that's what I'm considering and our institutions still do. And it's because it makes it easier or uniform. And I don't know teaching isn't like that anymore. Learning isn't like this anymore. It's not as compartmentalised. And maybe that's why I push back on it. Whether it's the walled garden, which I think of an immediate go into a walled maze, where you get lost in it. I think we've just made it very complicated. And and we've taken away some agency that some of our own instructors could have and their own creative ways, like how would they want to teach? Or what ways would they want their learners to learn instead of the, the where, I guess?
33:17
The biggest problem I see with investing in the LMS is just doesn't go anywhere, right? If you look at how its evolved, or rather, how its failed to evolve over these past 20 years, it's pretty clear that it's stuck for all kinds of reasons. And part of its ethos is stuckness, right? That you don't want things to change, you want everything to be the same. But if you look at something like oh, we are, if you look at in Martin's book, he traces that great evolution of how we had these ideas, like learning objects, well, that all kind of failed and standards, metadata kind of kind of scaled out. But what evolved from those failures is this great new OCR world that is pretty exciting. Even on my campus we are is exciting. I mean, there's exciting Oh, we are stuff happening all over. And those grew out of things that we admitted were kind of failures, we can't afford to admit that anything about the LMS is a failure, right? Partly because vendors cannot admit that their product is not the best, most innovative, most revolutionary, whatever. And also, because institutionally, we just can't admit that kind of instability around this thing that we're promoting, really, as a best practice. Yeah, it's it's interesting to hear what you said, Brian, because at my school, there are plenty of people who will stand up and say the LMS is a best practice and they send out emails every week to remind us that it's the best practice and using the
34:34
last literally never heard that in my life. Oh.
34:38
And I think it's because we face even bigger pressures that a research institution you know, where faculty just aren't about innovating, they're teaching they need to be told to just do this, use the LMS and, and that's that that will be teaching excellence, right? Because we want to have Teaching Excellence.
34:55
So anywhere else Teaching Excellence with no investment or support
35:00
Right, there you go.
35:02
Yeah. So the
35:04
LMS worries me because, you know, what do we get for all that we pour into it? I don't see that we get as much as we get in other kinds of investments. No, I
35:14
mean, I, I have office hours every week where folks can drop in and get support for their, particularly since we started doing the, what do we call emergency remote teaching? And I, it's the most depressing question in the world that
35:29
I get asked, which
35:29
is, I used to do X Y Zed face to face How do I do that in Moodle? Like, well, you kind of can, but here's, you know, a 900 step path where we sort of subvert the purposes of each of these individual tools, and we kind of get something at the end. Or I have this other tool that might better facilitate the kind of conversation you want to use, whether it's WordPress, or mattermost, or whatever. But then, for really good reasons, instructors are like, I don't want the students have to log into two places, right? I don't want them to have to manage multiple tools. I don't want them to have to. And I have to say like we do student surveys I hear from students all the time. Why do I have to log into six different places to take my four classes at this institution? I hate it. Why do I have to learn multiple video platforms to make it through this semester? I like it to
36:16
survive in the work world
36:17
while a versity true
36:19
Yeah, but they're also you know, we are none of us our best selves right now. And I'm we're all cognitively overtaxed and even something as simple as you know, Blackboard rolled out that fairly minor update, I believe, a month or so ago, and Twitter was like,
36:35
What have you done?
36:37
I have to put the text in a different spot and Iraj right, it's like we are all so full, and my biggest fear. Now my biggest fear, it's a pandemic. But a major fear that I have is that we are so overwhelmed and overtaxed right now that it's a perfect moment for like, old school disaster capitalism to come in, and promise us a way through. And I don't know about you guys, but like, I'm super tired. And, you know, going to committees, I mean, I do it. But my heart's not in it in the way that it typically was. I'm not as invested in governance as I was when I was not exhausted. And that's my concern. I mean, I know we don't want to be exclusively pandemic focused, the book is so much more expansive than this last nine months. But I think in many ways, this crisis is like, the last 25 years of edtech. in, in, in a condensed space, as we sort of look for the next solution. As we we do things like throw our support behind, ie proctoring tools, and all kinds of surveillance tech
37:51
are our
37:52
colleagues and outside of this, this industry, there spy tech in our homes, because of our workplace computers. And this is all happening so quickly. And when we don't have the bandwidth to challenge and resist. And that's, I think that's what I think the legacy of this period is going to be. And it scares me to see what we're going to come out with the other side. So I'm glad we're having a conversation about resistance. And and what could we have done then? Or where should we have invested? And how can we change course, because I think there's an awful lot of pressures that will push us towards some pretty terrible decisions.
38:31
But you know, I think we, we should not lose sight that this is an emergency, we need to be really careful to whenever this end, it's going to be over, it's going to be over because it's got it got a task passed in all the times where we have pandemics or epidemics. And I think what we need to be, you know, stewards of, we don't we're not in COVID. Now, so let's change course, later, right? We have to do that. And and I think, you know, change doesn't come from outside, you are the change, it's you doing it, and you're doing it. One and the other one and the other one and then you know it, the energy attracts and then there is this, you know, that Yeah,
39:16
but what Brent has said about disaster capitalism, which love me some Naomi Klein and the Shock Doctrine, I do think there's is a cause for awareness that we don't let these certain tools, vendors practices creep into our return to whatever is gonna return to it's not normalcy, because nothing was normal. But the future of Ed Tech will make some decisions now that could have ripple effects in the future. And so the idea of Shock Doctrine, as you may all know, but just our listeners is there's a crisis and people swooped in to do X. They talked about economic changes, well, tech is part of the economy and part of the economy of scale in higher ed. So if we don't push back on some of these things, the Watch us that track us debt collector data bits, then this will be continued practice because that segmentation idea that was brought in this chapter is still relevant. So, I know this was written a couple years ago, Martin ended this. He said it's not fashionable, but maybe we should probably give the MLS a little respect and a little love. I don't think those are the words I would use. What are the words, if we went across the panel to say, respect and love? What are the words that you all are thinking of?
40:31
Well, I have to chime in here because I'm going to actually say something good about the LMS. Okay, I guess it'd be the pandemic. And what caught me by surprise, because I'm just so naive, right, I get caught by surprise again, and again, what happened at my school was not that everybody started using the LMS, everybody started using zoom. It's been Islamification, right, as if we didn't even have the LMS because everybody wants synchronous face to face. And so I'm having a great time talking with you all, because we're for people, right. But we have these big classes that people trying to do in zoom. And they're not using the lns, LMS. Because they haven't really even thought about what asynchronous education is, right? So for us emergency remote teaching that emergency remote synchronous teaching, and you have to be there, not at the place, but at the time, because it's going to be in zoom. And that really surprised me because I thought, well, here's a time where the LMS can prove that it actually is useful. We actually need it now. And we weren't really even promoting it, it was just because the easiest thing to do is to try to reproduce your classroom online, you can do that with so when I started designing my online courses back in 2002, people said things like, don't just try to reproduce your on your classroom class was like, how would I reproduce my classroom class in 2002, there were no audio, there was no video, there was no zoom. So the temptation wasn't even there. So they're saying, Don't try to do that. It's like, yeah, whatever, you can't do that. Well, now the temptation is real, to just reproduce the classroom badly online with zoom. And the LMS is a better alternative than that, right? I mean, at least the LMS is more accommodating of students in all kinds of ways in terms of access and differentiation. And you can do, you know, some some student agency things in there if you kind of go in and trick things around. So the LMS would get more love for me than then zoom does, even though I'm saying that on zoom right now. So
42:34
one of the words I saw I don't know if I'm gonna give it respect, or love, but I'm going to give it cautious care. That's gonna what I'm going to give the LMS because I think there's some things that are forming. Yeah, asynchronous learning is where it's at, for me and I, I'm with you, Laura, is I don't see it being as accessible. I don't see synchronicity that people jumped into right away as great for what Brenda talked about cognitive bandwidth, like who has always time to show up to another meeting, thank you for joining me in in my meeting and this podcast, but I want it to be portable, I want it to be accessible. And I want people to get it at their own time in multiple ways. And zoom is not going to do it. And the LMS has some components that you can create those spaces for learners to pop in on their just in time learning or training or whatever they're doing, and come back to it later.
43:24
I'm going to give it some strategic use and a lot of resistance. Oh,
43:31
you guys all use such good words. I'm just gonna say care. And I was gonna say resistance. I'm still gonna say both those things. I think that if we can be frank and honest about the learning management systems, drawbacks and failures, we are in a better position to help faculty to use it well. And you know, back in June, Brian lamb and I did a session for campus called so you hate Moodle. It was all about like how we were two people who had like, sort of staked our public identities on a distrust and dislike at the learning management system who are now hurting 500 people into the learning management system. And we want it to be really honest with the community about what a fraught choice that was and where it came from, and what we hoped they would do differently than the default in their adoption of it. I think we often aren't given the space to have that kind of a conversation. And, you know, we had 100 faculty turnout to that chat. And, and it was great. It was sort of all about here are some alternatives. But here are the problems that we see. And here's why we did it this way. And here's why we don't think we could have done it a different way, even if we wished we had the resources to and and i think folks were really responsive to that. So I'm embracing resistance, and also care and suggesting that we can approach the LMS with an awareness of those issues and make it something that we can live with what We must. But I still ultimately would like to advocate for everything else first.
45:06
Except to I hate to more also, flora,
45:09
I also eat some more.
45:10
You know what, there is no zoom chapter. That's great.
45:12
Um, so
45:14
I think I also heard two things from you, Brenda, that I want to call out is transparency, and awareness. And I think those two things are sharing with our community and people listening that maybe aren't even in tech at all, or like thinking, Oh, why aren't I being more aware and transparent about what's happening? And I think, honestly, our candid honesty is going to be great. So these candid conversations I am grateful for for all of you. Before we wrap up, are there any final thoughts questions? call outs?
45:45
Yeah, I just want to say that awareness and transparency is part of resistance up it's been living my whole
45:51
life Caroline, you know, me.
45:55
Know, I just want to thank you, it has been lovely to be here. Lovely to you know, the chat the experience of the book and between the chapters. It's part of this, what I think really the community of people that it is so yeah, particular you know, I left my country and this is my family, the family of the open educational practices that go gn the and, and it is so beautiful, really to see how we care for Martinsburg. And how we have come to this idea and how we are here and our all exhausted. And here we are, you know, caring for the LMS caring for Martin for the book for the community. And this, for me is a thing that has no price. And I'm grateful really to be part of this. And so I wanted to thank you. Yeah, I'm very grateful.
46:42
And, and a shout out to Martin too. I mean, because I've never met him in person. I've never been in a classroom with him. I've never taken a class from him. But I've learned so much from him over the years that his blog, and he's at Twitter and this book, and to me, you know, if we can all make contributions like that I'm this kind of Pollyanna utopian person, I really believe in that. So you know, be like, Martin, that's great. You know, I'm
47:08
still so I still feel so very new to the discipline. I've only been in this role for a little over a year. And just being invited into this conversation and getting to be part of this whole project has been a real gift. And I I echo Carolyn's comments about the power of this community, I think it's really quite remarkable. And in all the different ways I've seen the community come together to support individuals or to help to challenge systems or to work towards a kind of productive resistance. I'm inspired every day. So getting to do this. It's a real joy. Thank you.
47:47
I'm honored for all of your time and even coming into a Zoom Room. Thank you very much. And so let's resistance. Till next time. It's been a pleasure.
47:57
Thank you, Laura. Thank you for Thank you.
48:02
You've been listening to between the chapters with your host Laura pasquini. For more information for to subscribe to between the chapters and 25 years of edtech visit 25 years dot open ed.ca