This is a continuation of a discussion from Part 4
“The conversation needs to be larger, the sense of urgency needs to be greater, and the vision and imagination of what’s possible needs to be far, far broader. PDFs aren’t going to get us there. We need more efforts to provide the benefits of publishers’ “adaptive” systems while honoring and enabling the values of the OER community (e.g., the 5Rs and open pedagogy) and more support of these efforts. The tl;dr (sic) is this: faculty (who make the decision about what resources will be used by students) love these systems, and with good reason – they can make things better for students and faculty alike. If the OER community doesn’t recognize that and start providing and promoting viable alternatives to publishers’ platforms, the best possible future for OER is being locked down inside a Pearson MyLab playing second fiddle to proprietary content. No 5Rs and no open pedagogy.”
Earlier in the post he said: “And don’t even start trying to explain how the LMS is the answer. Just don’t.”
I responded, ignoring his exhortation: “LMSs properly supported, are very good 'platforms' for all kinds of assessment and analytics. And, more importantly, control of the LMSs can remain in the hands of the faculty where it should be, if they choose to exercise that authority. Of course, if faculty are only interested in the easiest way to do things, well, then, they can always pay someone or have someone else pay for the difficult parts of teaching and learning.”
David responded to that by saying- “This is demonstrably false. Just taking the first example that comes to mind, LMSs cannot do Computerized Adaptive Testing no matter how they're supported.”
I’m not sure where to start. Arguing that we shouldn’t consider LMSs for OER because LMSs can’t do CAT is a problem for at least two reasons: First, CAT is usually not OER in practice, today. But, secondly, LMSs can indeed to CAT if you want to use them for that.
David then went on to propose that I read what he’d written about LMSs and CMSs and OLNs back in 2009. I generally agree with what he wrote in 2009. Faculty adoption of all of the interactive, collaborative, student centered features of an LMS is a slow and extremely tedious process. We wrote about that in our book chapter and 2014 HLC Conference Best Paper describing such an initiative. David would do well, I think, to consider the work of one of his colleagues at BYU, Charles Graham, who we reference in our work. Graham, et al. point out that implementing a hybrid or blended system in an institution requires a whole lot more than was considered by David and Mott in their 2009 paper.
David clearly understood that there are a whole host of issues to consider as faculty change the very nature of how they do what they do. David’s approach regarding the task of transforming the way faculty approach how they interact with students in the teaching and learning process was not to show faculty how to do it. Instead, he created a for-profit company where OER is housed in an LMS that is connected to the institution’s LMS via LTI. The advantage to faculty is that they don’t need to learn how to install OER in their LMS courses and learn how to use the new, interactive, collaborative, student centered, wider community connected features of their LMS, or learn how to manage the analytics that are available with all current generation LMSs. The advantage to David is he gets to have a for-profit company that charges the students of those faculty who don’t want to learn how to do all of that difficult ‘platform stuff.’ Sure the students save money compared to what they would pay if they bought the books from proprietary publishers, but the faculty stay ignorant about how to really manage learning using a learning management system. Ignorant faculty are good for profit making.
