What is an LMS, Really?

Background
The notion of a "Learning Management System" or LMS has long dominated the discussion and practice of E-learning. This was understandable at first; an LMS is essentially a large content tracking and delivery mechanism (built atop some database engine). It addressed immediate considerations for automation of learning delivery both for online and classroom education; those considerations included:

• The ability to disseminate CBT and other electronic content over the web.
• The ability to support online course registration / subscription.
• The ability to support learner progress tracking.
• The ability to support some form of online assessment.
  

At the heart of this issue was the desire to provide some type of virtual metaphor for the classroom and the desire to automate a number of traditional, existing processes while simultaneously opening up new channels for education delivery. The LMS helped accomplish some of this, but also acted as a barrier for further innovation by entrenching much of the status quo approach to Learning Management as a process and a philosophy. This has led to a number of resulting issues.

Core Definition
A Learning Management System provides web-based access to Learning Content and various Learning administration capabilities. The exact nature of the content available and the administration features provided varies based upon product vendor. Multiple content standards are utilized, most notably SCORM and AICC. The majority of LMS products have tended to couple content delivery with content / learning assessment and this is also reflected in the standards mentioned.

Variations
The one question that has been continually posed to vendors LMS and e-learning practitioners who view the LMS as the engine that drives a typical enterprise learning solution is this: can or should the LMS adopt a more open content model. This is not a new question, since 2000 many have looked at creating flexible "Learning Object" standards and many vendors have produced solutions that represent hybrid compositions of LMS and Content Management System (CMS) - otherwise known as a "LCMS." Others have extend the LMS in the direction of Performance Management (previously often referred to as competency management). This is a variant that is very focused on assessment.

However, at the same time another crop of solutions - originally referred to as Learning portals started attacking the virtual classroom metaphor more directly. These solutions tend to have some LMS (usually lite) capabilities built-in and are used to deliver learning at universities and other institutions. There a quite a number of ways to refer to them; Virtual Learning Environments, Collaborative Learning Environments, Personal and so forth.

Impact of the LMS
The true impact of the LMS seems to have been an arbitrary imposition of pedagogy on E-learning before such a consolidation of approach was warranted. This means simply that many assumed that there was a right way to provide E-learning before really understanding what their true options were and how those new options might impact the way that learning is managed as a process and an IT solution. Many if not most of us have found web-based technologies to be fairly liberating - we have come to expect that this will always be the case in most instances where traditional activities are made "virtual." This didn't happen in E-learning - with a world of content available to us we restricted ourselves to a very narrow interpretation of what was "appropriate." The content standards and pedagogy imposed by early E-learning solutions prevented them from achieving widespread adoption - this in fact explains why nearly all of the major universities and other educational institutions are now using the Learning Environment paradigm to deliver their offerings instead of the early LMS-driven solutions.

As noted in other posts, E-learning as a practice is and should always have been technology agnostic. In other words, the approach taken to what solution mix to use, what process mix to use what approach to content to use - should be flexible and not bound to any particular technology, product or pedagogy. The E-learning practice is about solving problems, not posturing to determine who is right or what is 'better.'


Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Learning Leaders Blogcast 1 - "Orchestration"

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The "Q" Word

The Q word, "quality" has presented problems for E-learning ever since its inception.

We live in world of endless possibilities; the restrictions that do exist tend to be self-imposed. Recent discussions in the e-learning community continue to focus on what is ‘Good’ learning content or not. That is the wrong question to be asking at this point. Right now we should be looking at new forms of content and development techniques that can be added to our repertoire. Our focus on perceived quality has limited our possibilities, reduced content production and increased its production cost.

It is also important for us to consider how our content design and development fits into a larger world of dynamically accessible content. Assessment based learning content still has a role within this spectrum of possibilities, but that role must be matched to the appropriate scenarios for the content to be utilized properly. The design spectrum implies a variety of methodologies and approaches as well; each suited towards producing different types of content with varying levels of structure. Most of the current opportunities revolve around "lite," or flexible content - content that was traditionally deemed unsuitable based upon various assessment or pedagogical expectations.



Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

Knowledge, Information & Content are Learning

There is an odd process of specialization at play in most enterprises that takes what essentially is the same set of resources and divides them across separate delivery and storage mechanisms and then associates them with different workflow processes. The simplicity of our alternative is staggering in its implication – ALL of the systems now referred to as: knowledge management, collaboration, content management, document management, knowledge bases, help systems, learning systems and courses, discovery portals are all essentially extensions to one core process – enterprise knowledge assimilation, i.e. Learning. Knowledge without the ability to assimilate it is like pouring water into a desert.

The purpose for all of the information is clear yet usually ignored – it must be accessible and integrated into the living fabric of the organization through the only mechanism that can accomplish such a feat, learning. Once the premise is accepted at the conceptual level, a number of obvious possibilities begin to emerge:

• Redundant systems can be eliminated

• Nearly a dozen or enterprise processes can be merged, greatly simplifying both the day to day operations of most organizations and their information infrastructures as well.

• Discovery of information becomes greatly simplified as the unnecessary tangle of conflicting workflows, methodologies and philosophies are replaced by a single Learning-based paradigm.

• Learning and information management becomes interactive; the enterprise is no longer the elephant graveyard for long-lost bytes never utilized or assimilated. A living culture emerges where learning content is created as regularly as it is consumed – the organization finally discovers its collective memory and builds a collective consciousness.
  

• A sense of context is imbued to both the learning content and the process that finally grounds education in everyday reality, rather than perceived reality. Learning becomes a routine aspect of everyone’s job in the organization; allowing for more agile organizational evolution while reducing risk and backlash against new technologies and techniques.

Knowledge is captured in content—content can be complex or simple, the level of complexity determines the unit production cost...

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.

The Learning 2.0 Glossary Blog

Semantech is pleased to announce that we are deploying a supplement to our Learning Leaders Blog. The Learning 2.0 Glossary project is now officially underway and the results of that effort will appear in our Learning 2.0 Glossary Blog. We anticipate that it will be completed sometime by the end of this Summer, but in the meantime, feel free to drop by and check on new additions as they arrive.

Our goal with the Glossary is to provide an updated set of terminology to help better understand what is already available and to help prepare for the Learning solutions of tomorrow. Any suggestions will of course be appreciated - we hope you get a chance to check it out from time to time. Eventually, when completed, the Glossary will become part of our online magazine.

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.