Well, I'm starting to think that most LMSs are simply not very good social learning environments. They're not even middling. They're great at administrative tasks. Most are ok to good on content management. But despite course pages, discussion forums,Jowikis and glossaries, they are just not great social environments, requiring too many hoops to jump through to create a convenient, natural, social learning experience that fits in with our information consuming, active, diverse and increasingly mobile lives.Joyce suggests that LMSs are great for administrative tasks, and, to a certain extent, management of content. However, "LMSs should not try to emulate all of those social media, but instead become better at integrating with them" - and this requires educators to be aware of the importance of design, as well as up to speed with the many options that will make it simple for learners to collaborate and communicate.
Returning to Tom's post, he indicates that learning platforms of the future will include 6 core elements, underpinned by 4 central services (student services, teacher services, back-office services, and school services):
- Standards-aligned libraries of open and proprietary content with search and content management tools
- Social, collaborative, and productivity tools
- Assessment tools and achievement analytics
- Learner profiles and portfolios
- Recommendation engines smart enough to build custom playlists
- Assignment, matriculation, management, and motivational tools (e.g. achievement recognition systems, badges or other data visualization strategies) (source)
So - do we really need a learning platform that has all the elements that Tom identifies, and, if developed, whose needs will it really be serving the best?
Image
Elements for constructing social learning environments by jrhode
No comments:
Post a Comment