The Cultural Impact of Learning Management Systems



The Cultural Impact of Learning Management Systems

(This presentation is available online at georgetown.edu/faculty/everhart/)

Introduction and Contextualization

The Big Picture: How teaching and learning are changing

The original title of my presentation was “Teaching on the Web: From Ad hoc to Enterprise.” I had chosen that title because of the way it captures the enormous transition that we find ourselves navigating, from a context where faculty do their own thing with technology in random and usually unsustainable ways, to the possibilities of new learning management systems that automate and to a certain extent standardize the online learning environment.

Enterprise LMS are important and necessary for many reasons.

Carol Barone, Vice President of EDUCAUSE and leader of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, emphasizes the need for “learning environments that harness the power of information technology to improve the quality of teaching and learning, to contain or reduce rising costs, and to provide greater access to higher education” ().

Enterprise-level LMS provide the benefits of:

• Efficiencies of scale

• Centralized and therefore more effective maintenance and support

• More sophisticated and consistent security than ad hoc methods of delivery

• Integration with other institutional systems

• Common environments for teaching and learning

• Systematic management of intellectual capital

The implementation of LMS bring together faculty and administrative activities in one environment.

They highlight the distinct differences in methodology and attitudes between those who teach and those who administer courses and records. They raise complex legal and policy questions. But perhaps most importantly, they challenge us to implement LMS that foster the art of teaching while streamlining the administration of courses and records.

In this presentation, I will address issues that cut across the many different cultures of educational institutions and have an impact on provosts, deans, CIOs, technology support providers, faculty governing bodies, faculty, and students.

Summary of presentation

Intellectual Property Ownership

Course Materials Management

Records Management

Learning Environment Management

In each area, we will consider the current context, emerging possibilities, issues/concerns/questions raised by these possibilities, and strategies for managing change.

Purpose of this presentation

Raise questions that you can adapt to your context, in order to visualize and frame the issues surrounding LMS.

Raise awareness that technology “solutions” are at best partial, and effective integration of LMS involves changes in business processes as well as adjustments of cultural norms. And remember, business processes and cultural norms are much more complicated and difficult to deal with than technology.

Suggest strategies for managing immediate change while anticipating and creating a framework for future opportunities.

Not attempt to provide all the answers, but hopefully provide a checklist of questions and issues to be addressed so that your institution can successfully implement enterprise LMS and take full advantage of the opportunities in this area of development.

Intellectual Property Ownership

Current Context

Faculty generally assume that they own their course materials.

However, the high cost of information technology is calling attention to the institutional cost of producing course materials and teaching online.

Institutions are starting to consider ways of using online teaching to generate new revenues and/or increase efficiencies to justify expenditures.

These factors highlight the question of who owns course materials.

Institutional policy may treat course materials like scholarly texts, copyrightable by the author, or like “work for hire,” as part of the responsibilities of employment.

“Work for hire” is an alien concept to faculty, and the possibility of classifying their work in this way is generally offensive to them.

• Definition: “Work for hire” is a legal doctrine that an employer owns any work that is directly related to job responsibilities, paid for by the employer, done with the employer’s resources, or otherwise done within the scope of employment. In the case of instructors, at issue is whether or not course materials fall within the definition of “work for hire” or fall within the arena of personally copyrightable works. The legal precedents have treated course materials as personally copyrightable by the instructor, but these cases are dated (1987) and don’t take into account the institutional costs associated with using technology to produce course materials.

And the fact of the matter is that most institutions either lack intellectual property policies or have policies that are too antiquated to address current circumstances.

Scenario

Note: I’ve kept my examples fairly general to make it easier for you to visualize how these scenarios might play out at your institution. You would probably find it useful to write your own scenarios as you consider the possibilities of LMS, and then discuss these scenarios with your colleagues.

Would your institution be prepared for this type of venture?

The Provost decides to invest in developing standardized course materials for a lower division course that’s taught in multiple sections each semester. Faculty in the department are expected to contribute materials and expertise to the development process, but Information Services hires an instructional designer and multimedia specialists to shape the materials into a sophisticated course cartridge that plugs into the LMS and gives a core set of standard content to each section of the course. The department uses this cartridge for several semesters and demonstrates its pedagogical soundness. Students benefit from the consistency of the sections and the quality of the carefully developed materials. The Provost negotiates a deal with a publisher who will market and sell the course cartridge for use at other institutions. The revenue from this deal, after the publisher takes its cut, is divided among the institution, the department, and the faculty who contributed to the project.

Possibilities

The ability to share course materials within and across LMS highlights the potential monetary value of course materials.

Institutions could develop creative ways of sharing revenue from course materials with faculty, publishers, multimedia producers, and other parties involved in the creation and distribution of marketable course materials.

And/or faculty could pursue independent, entrepreneurial methods of marketing and profiting from their own course materials.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

Does your institution have an intellectual property policy that clearly covers course materials?

Does your institution consider the production of course materials as part of faculty teaching responsibilities and as work for hire?

What rights does the institution currently have over course materials?

Do faculty understand their rights vis a vis their own use and sale of their course materials?

Is your intellectual property policy up-to-date enough to cover online materials?

Does it cover materials that are produced jointly by faculty working together, by a department, and/or with a significant contribution of resources from the institution?

How is ownership of course materials identified and tracked?

If course materials produce revenues, how are the revenues dispersed?

At issue are not only policy concerns, but also practical business processes. Does your institution have a technology transfer office or some other department that provides guidance and services for licensing, equity agreements, revenue distribution, and other legal and business processes related to shared ownership of materials?

Strategies

Have a strong and up-to-date intellectual property policy.

Make sure faculty and faculty governing bodies understand the intellectual property policy AND its implications.

Have a strong, efficient technology transfer office that provides good services, is faculty-friendly, and is proactive in educating faculty and administrators about revenue opportunities.

Do not attempt to impose centralized management or quality control on course materials in the absence of a well-understand and generally accepted intellectual property policy.

Use the flexibility of your LMS. LMS enable centralized management of course materials, but they do not require it. You may decide to let faculty maintain complete control over their own materials without institutional interference.

If you pursue joint institution/department/faculty/publisher ventures for the production of course materials, achieve consensus among the stake-holders at the beginning of the project and negotiate contracts that clearly define responsibilities and outcomes.

This point is reinforced by a question that came up in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy on intellectual property ownership. The question was:

    “Let's say a university provides Internet access, curriculum software, computers, software support, and training to a faculty member who is hired to teach. Using the tools provided by the university, the faculty member creates a Web site for each class and puts online the course syllabus, lecture notes, chat rooms, and content of e-mail messages from students. If there is no agreement between the university and the faculty member concerning rights of this online material, who owns the rights?”

Ray K. Harris, a copyright and patent lawyer who was the guest respondent for the colloquy, replied:

    “That's a good question. We need to start with any applicable institutional policy. In the absence of a governing policy, content, even if published online, is governed by traditional copyright law. The content is owned by the creator unless it is a work for hire. With regard to online course material, the faculty member may assert that it should be treated like traditional scholarly works. The moral is that it is in the interest of both the faculty and the institution to define in advance (by contract) their mutual rights in the online material to be created” ().

Course Materials Management

Current Context

Faculty teach their courses and use their course materials in extremely diverse and creative ways.

The majority of intellectual property in the form of course materials is still outside LMS.

Most institutions lack the resources and support structure to help faculty convert their course materials to electronic form.

Faculty’s abilities to convert their course materials to electronic form and adapt their pedagogical strategies to teaching online are extremely uneven.

Scenario

The faculty who helped develop the course materials in the previous scenario decide to use those materials not only in the form of a course cartridge, which is used to build an entire course, but also as a library of shared resources that can be used piecemeal. The materials are stored in an institutional library in the LMS so that specific items can be pulled into a variety of courses. The materials are used for review and remediation in the higher level courses that follow from the lower level course that used the course cartridge. They are also used by faculty in other disciplines where there are overlapping skill sets. Each piece of content is tagged with meta data to make it easy to find and identify, and the meta data also identifies the owner of the content and the restrictions on revision and reuse.

Possibilities

LMS allow the institution to collect course materials in a central repository. From this “institutional library,” faculty and departments can share materials.

Shared repositories of course materials can facilitate institutional, departmental, and/or peer review of materials for quality, consistency, timeliness, and other characteristics.

Using common materials can make students’ learning experiences more consistent, esp. in different sections of the same course.

Common materials and even standard course structures or templates that have been reviewed for quality can enhance the pedagogical soundness of online teaching, esp. in cases where faculty are having difficulty adapting their materials and/or their pedagogical practices.

The common context of the LMS produces a predictable, common environment for teaching and learning, making these activities more efficient and allowing faculty and students to focus on content rather than spending time navigating the differences among random online materials developed and delivered in a variety of ad hoc ways.

Sharing materials can save faculty time.

Effective reuse of materials can leverage the institutional investment in production of those materials, esp. in cases where expensive multimedia development is involved.

Effective reuse can reduce redundancies and make online storage of materials more efficient.

Centralized control of course materials can empower the institution to market those materials outside the institution, for example to other institutions. This could be done through publishers, consortia, organizations, and even through direct connections among different institutions’ LMS. These arrangements could lead to income for the institution, to be shared with faculty (depending on intellectual property ownership agreements), and perhaps producing funding for production of more high-quality, marketable online course materials.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

Conversion

• How can course materials that are still outside the LMS be effectively incorporated?

• Is this content still in hardcopy?

• Does it need to be converted from another electronic format?

• What is the cost of getting content into the LMS?

• Who will do the labor and who will absorb the costs?

Version control

• If there are multiple parties using course materials, what constitutes the “master copy” of the materials?

• Who has rights to alter the master copy?

• Who has rights to make derivative copies?

• Are derivative copies ever reconciled with the master copy, and if so, how?

• If the materials are shared or sold outside the institution, does the outside party have the right to alter the materials and/or make derivative copies?

Meta data

• What meta data standards will be used to ensure that the materials can be sorted and tracked effectively?

• How will the producers of course materials, esp. faculty, be educated as to the importance of meta data and how to use it?

• Will the institution develop its own meta data to supplement standards? If so, how will it be formulated and managed?

Migration and Interoperability

• If the institution already has a significant amount of content in one LMS and decides to change to another LMS, how easily can the content be migrated?

• If content is available in different online contexts, are there mechanisms for creating links from one context to another?

• Do these links among contexts require passing authorization from one context to another? Do users have separate logins for different contexts?

Portability

• When faculty leave the institution, can they take their course materials with them?

• Can the materials be used in contexts outside the institutional LMS (for example, if the institution sells another institution rights to use the materials)?

Quality

• Who determines the quality of course materials?

• Will only high-quality materials be centrally stored and shared?

• Who decides the level of “quality control”?

• Can internal, departmental review provide effective quality control, or is external peer review and outside authority required?

Faculty Autonomy

• Does centralized management of course materials limit faculty autonomy, academic freedom, innovation, and inspiration?

• How can the opportunities of LMS be used to inspire and motivate faculty?

• How will collaborative opportunities be fostered?

• Will faculty trade a certain amount of autonomy for the benefits, perhaps even financial benefits, of centralized management?

Strategies

Standards are extremely important for interoperability of content among contexts. Educate yourself and your faculty in the Instructional Management System (IMS) standards and promote correct, consistent use of meta data ().

Migration strategies should always be taken into account, and in many cases will depend on effective standards.

Use the tools in your LMS for version control. Make sure those who create and use the materials understand the difference between master copies and derivative copies.

Take a project management approach to converting course materials to electronic form. Standardize processes as much as possible, educate faculty on efficient strategies for conversion, and provide easy-to-use tools. Discourage “lone ranger” approaches, where individual faculty do their own thing in ways that are inefficient, costly, and typically not interoperable with the work of others (A. W. Bates, Managing Technological Change, p. 60).

Encourage departments and institutional leaders to undertake “visioning” exercises to develop “concrete, innovative, future-oriented plans” for making best use of LMS (Bates, 2). This process is described in detail by Tony Bates in his book Managing Technological Change:

”Visioning is a technique that allows those working in an organization to understand the full range of possibilities for teaching and learning that technology can facilitate and the possible outcomes, acceptable or otherwise, that might result from its implementation. It helps people working in an organization to identify and share certain goals. Even more important, a shared vision provides a benchmark against which to assess different strategies and actions regarding the development of … technology-based teaching” (45).

Records Management

Current Context

Faculty in general are not known for organized or reliable record-keeping.

Faculty are forced to standardize their grading only at the point where they enter grades in the registrar’s grade sheet. They rarely consider the fact that the registrar reviews those grades, occasionally changes or corrects them, and keeps the repository of official grades.

Having a grade book in a LMS makes the grades in that grade book appear to be official from the students’ perspective. Especially if the grade book persists online after the course is complete, the student will return to that familiar context to review grades for that course, not necessarily understanding that once the faculty have submitted grades, those grades become part of an official records management system that may or may not have any connection to the online learning environment.

Other than grades, information associated with students’ participation in courses has typically not been managed in any official way, and yet these records are protected by law, specifically FERPA.

FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, has not been a hot topic in the past (except among registrars), but it’s getting more attention now as online privacy concerns heat up.

Definition: FERPA is a federal law which states that higher education institutions must have written institutional policies governing student records and that a statement of adopted procedures covering the privacy rights of students must be made available to the students annually. The law provides that the institution will maintain the confidentiality of student education records, subject to exceptions that are thoroughly documented in the institutional policy.

Scenario

The President decides to use the LMS to help fulfill a mandate that the institution increase its retention and graduation rate. Student activities are monitored in the LMS and notifications of inactivity, excessive absences, and/or failing grades are reported to faculty advisors at midterm each semester. Faculty advisors are asked to confer with the students’ instructors about classes in which the students appear to be having difficulties. Advisors then confer with the students and help them find additional help to get through the semester with passing grades.

Possibilities

LMS offer the opportunity to track student progress over time, enabling the student and advisors to see more clearly how the student’s work is progressing and where he or she might need help.

This tracking can be done in great detail, such as how much time a student spends taking an online assessment or how often a student contributes to class discussions. These details could be used for extensive data-mining yielding reports on individual students, categories of students, or the entire student body. Such reports could be used to identify and remediate problems such as low retention rates among certain groups of students or high failure rates associated with particular pedagogical strategies.

Long-term tracking mechanisms could help institutions evaluate students’ learning processes and assess the strengths and weaknesses of certain courses, pedagogical practices, course materials, etc.

Tracking could help institutions make technology investments in a more informed manner.

LMS offer the opportunity to integrate online learning environments with official student record repositories.

For example, submission of final grades from the LMS directly to the registrar’s system can be much faster, more convenient, and more accurate than current methods.

Since students are likely to return to the online course after it is complete, the grade book in the online course could include the final official grade as well as the grades for individual assignments.

The data exchange between the LMS and the registrar’s system should be dynamic, so that as official grades change (for example, an incomplete is changed to a letter grade), the change is reflected in the grade book for the course.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

Privacy

• How are student records defined? What types of course activities are covered by student record policies?

• Who has the rights to do what with student records?

• If the LMS is used for tracking, are the results handled in a way that includes the identity of individuals, or only as aggregate (anonymous) data?

• Are students aware of their privacy rights? Are clear and well-communicated procedures available to them if they wish to opt-out of tracking mechanisms?

Handling and storage of student records

• Handling of different types of student records has historically been very inconsistent, such as the difference between a stack of graded essays in a faculty office and an official grade in the registrar’s system. What new control and management issues are raised by the opportunity to keep more records in a LMS?

• How long are courses and students’ contributions to courses stored in the LMS?

Security

• What security mechanisms are necessary to protect student records from tampering and unauthorized viewing?

• What methods does the LMS provide for tracking who has accessed and changed records?

• What are the potential failure points and security concerns in the integration of a LMS with a registrar’s system?

Strategies

Review current practices and policies for handling student records. Make sure policies are adequate to address new possibilities.

Review legal obligations such as FERPA and make sure they are addressed in any new technological implementation.

Review institutional privacy policies, or develop one if you do not currently have one.

Make sure there are not conflicts between legal obligations, privacy rights, technological implementations, and institutional practices.

Educate faculty and students on the definition of “official” records. Inform them of how these records are managed and how they can review their own records.

Learning Environment Management

Current Context

Faculty assume that they control the physical classroom environment and no one enters without their permission.

Therefore faculty often allow “outsiders” to come and go without conferring with anyone else. These outsiders may be students visiting or auditing the course, guest lecturers, colleagues, etc.

Online course materials typically serve a variety of purposes, making it harder to define who should have access to them.

Scenario

The LMS provides security and authentication so that faculty can manage their courses, including grades, and students can use online course materials, including quizzes, with the confidence that each user has appropriate rights in the system through a uniform login. This means that anyone who has anything other than “guest” access to a particular course must have a login and be identified as a user with a role in the course. After conferring with faculty and the Provost, Information Services defines five different types of users who can have access to a course: instructor, TA, grader, student, and observer. If an instructor wants anyone to have access to the course who is not officially listed by the Registrar as an instructor, TA, or student in the course, the instructor submits a request to the Registrar through a secure online form. By these methods, everyone who has access to the course materials and activities is properly identified and authorized.

Possibilities

LMS provide flexible definition of rights and roles, allowing the institution, the department, or the individual faculty person to determine who can do what in the learning environment.

LMS can be integrated with institutional authentication and authorization systems, such that rights and roles can be defined in a consistent, well-managed system where userIDs are standardized.

Authentication and authorization systems can be built on standards that allow sharing of information between institutions, providing the opportunity for teachers and learners to move among different LMS with a standardized userID.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

Purposes

• What is the online learning environment? It has different and potentially conflicting purposes.

• A private teaching and learning environment closed to everyone except the instructor and the students currently enrolled in the course?

• A means of publicizing course materials for the faculty person who wants to show them off?

• A means of publicizing the course to students who might want to take it?

• An arena for collaboration among colleagues?

Complexity of rights and roles management

• A typical userID at an institution could have many different sets of rights. For example, a graduate student might be a student in some courses, an instructor in others, a grader in others, and an auditor in others. This type of overlap, as well as the movement of an individual from one primary role to another, makes the management of roles very complicated, particularly the standardization of assigned rights for primary roles.

• Rights and roles management in many cases is made even more complex by the tiered authority structure of institutions. Are rights and roles determined and managed by the department, the school, the IT organization, the registrar, the provost, and/or other institutional authorities?

Security

• How are rights and roles managed?

• How are key sets of rights, such as the ability to change grades, protected from tampering and misallocation?

Strategies

Define the purpose of the online learning environment. If necessary, develop different methods for meeting different purposes, such as a course preview mode for students who might be interested in taking the course but who do not need full rights in the course.

Develop strong, proactive security structures and hire experts who constantly analyze your systems for security weaknesses and compromises.

Analyze your need to accommodate various roles in learning environments. What are the rights associated with those roles—for example, guest lecturers, outside experts, students taking the same course at another institution, student auditors, prospective students, TAs, graders, colleagues sharing methods and course content, colleagues evaluating courses? Configure rights and roles in your LMS to meet these needs.

Review your institutional structures for managing userIDs and the rights and roles associated with those userIDs. Are they adequate? Make sure your support structures efficient, so that userIDs can be created and rights and roles altered in a timely fashion, esp. at the beginnings of semesters.

Conclusions

LMS challenge traditional educational structures and practices, and their implementation is part of a much larger pattern of change that we need to address with appropriate thought and leadership.

The long term benefits of LMS are enormous.

Vijay Kumar sums up many of these issues in his article “Choosing the Right Track for IT’s Transformation of Teaching and Learning” (EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2000, pp. 62-3):

”A critical aspect of enterprise orientation is building an infrastructure that is sustainable in all senses of the term. Such an infrastructure must include leadership by key faculty members, appropriate underlying technology at every level…, an adequate funding model, realistic cross-platform standards, viable policies (ones that enable information access, privacy, and intellectual property rights), and an organizational structure that promotes (rather than hinders) innovation.”

It is my hope that the materials in this presentation will help you achieve these outstanding goals at your institution.

Thank you.

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