Hooray for Brian blogging again! :-)
I didn’t really (fully) articulate my position(s) on in my recent LMS post, either. I kind of ran out of steam at 1600 words. Maybe for the better. (I’m still not fully articulating things yet - more to come later, if I can come up with the energy - but I wanted to respond quickly to Brian)
I am really not a fan of the LMS as an end-state, but it’s a symptom of institutional models, not the illness itself. Unless/until the nature of post-secondary institutions changes pretty radically, the LMS (or something like it) is here to stay. Yeah. I feel it too.
Which leaves me thinking about how to proceed. I’m powerless to change the nature of The Institution™, so I have 2 choices - either give up entirely and write off online learning for anything larger than incubator/startup/pilot scale, or embrace the fact that the LMS (or something smelling awfully similar) will be around for awhile. How to turn that around so that we can still do interesting things?
If the LMS is set up to be the institutional plumbing - access control, grades, basic functionality for most users - what if we let it do that, so that the pressure of “scale” is taken off the innovators at the edges? Let the majority of people do their thing in the LMS, and slowly change as that beast evolves, while we work on the awesomeness in the fringes. Or something.