Learning Management Systems are the talk of higher-ed technology

At the 2011 Campus Technology Conference this July in Boston, Mass., Gary Brown and his colleagues discussed the future of the Learning Management Systems (LMS), exemplified by Blackboard and Desire To Learn (D2L).

According to Brown, the new director of Portland State’s Center for Online Learning, the LMS “is a transposition technology that makes is possible to create a course in virtual space, rendering it asynchronous and accessible from distributed sites. In short, a class can be conducted anytime and anywhere.”

Most classes at PSU now include some kind of online component. If a class doesn’t operate online, students feel like something is missing, Brown said.

Brown sees the integration of the classroom and modern technology as inevitable.

He cited one scenario at San Francisco State University that particularly impressed him.

“Students were actually doing team projects online in collaboration with local community member partners,” he said.

Brown hopes that online learning will continue to move more and more in the direction of connecting students with the “real world” instead of just providing a place for the circulation of grades and assignments.

One new technology is called an ePortfolio, a continuous “life-long learning tool” that follows students throughout their educational careers and beyond.

Instead of creating just a connection between university classes, an ePortfolio is a tool that connects your classroom experience with that of other students and people around the world, Brown explained.

“A Learning Management System is a really good application for a model that is course-centric, but as we evolve our understanding of university students swirling from university to university, the ePortfolio will be a more viable tool,” Brown said. “The ePortfolio has a more durable future.”

“I don’t want to be misunderstood. I think the LMS is very viable right now,” Brown continued. “The ePortfolio makes more sense in
the future.”

Brown said that he hopes to see the first implementation of ePortfolios at PSU this spring.

Because PSU exhibits such a strong commitment to civic and international engagement, Brown believes the ePortfolio will eventually be a great fit.

However, until ePortfolios become the standard for online and integrated learning, students have PSU’s new LMS: the D2L system.
According to Anne McClanan, a professor in the department of Fine and Performing Arts, the LMS “allows a wide range of instructors to use web-enhanced features in their classes. Without Blackboard, D2L and other systems, it would be up to each instructor to learn web design and create their own web pages, which would have much more limited functionality.”

While there’s no doubt that systems like D2L and Blackboard have allowed for traditional classes to be enhanced and integrated with web-based applications and projects, these existing systems also bring an entire
host of problems.

“In the big picture, they’ve been really effective at giving more students access to online learning options,” McClanan said. “I think everyone who has used them has experienced some frustrations. For example, in the final months of using Blackboard it
got very overloaded.”

Brown believes the aim of integrated online learning should be to make the classroom part of the real world.

“Learning absolutely is the real world,” Brown said.