How will the content of the future be delivered, will it be tracked, if so how?

I've been thinking alot about this question because recently I've become increasingly (and unintentionally) involved in the dark, confusing world of learning management systems (LMS). We've had Moodle for a couple of years for testing content on. I think it's OK but not terribly user friendly. We've also built content for many other (allegedly) SCORM compliant LMSs. Almost without exception my clients view their LMS as a problem they have to work around; the have a hideous time getting content to run and track on it, and whether it tracks user data at all is by-the-by as they can't get the thing to generate any useful reports. Pretty shoddy when large corporates can spend tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds on them. Then there is the question - ah but is it an LMS or a LCMS, VLE, CMS. Who can tell?

My main problem with LMSs (or VLEs or whatever you want to call them) is that they are for the benefit of the organisation, not the learner. They are there to tell the organisation who has done what, when, and what they scored. THe user experience is a low priority when compared to the requirements to hook up to HR systems, track data, run reports, administer thousands of users and so on. Subsequently the user interface is unfriendly and unintuitive. The LMS becomes a barrier to learning, rather than an enabler.

I think things may be starting to change (at last!) with the rise of Web 2.0 and particularly social networking. I recently attended the launch of e2train's new Kallidus 8 LMS and they've added a user homepage to it that works like iGoogle. The administrator can configure it to show whatever they want including web content (e.g. YouTube, news, rss, twitter feeds, facebook feeds). This is a big step in the right direction.

I've also been spending some time in Sakai. I'd only ever heard of it in the context of '...not as good as Moodle.' so like many had not investigated it. This was a mistake. Sakai is far more user friendly than Moodle, far more intuitive. OK it's not SCORM compliant but you can make it so. You can embed web content in it seamlessly and it will soon include Google Wave. They are also looking into visual, non-linear navigation.

It really got me thinking about how we become blinkered by the big market leaders (i.e. Moodle) and don't consider some of the other options which may be just as good, if not better. I think my ultimate LMS would be one that is a social network, accessible from any web-enabled device, that allows learners to collaborate, contribute content, easily find content, design their own learning paths, and track it all seamlessly.

What do you think the LMSs (VLEs etc etc) of the future will look like?

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Permalink Reply by Bob Harrison on June 30, 2009 at 10:02am: Hi Ron and thanks for this....just on my way the C4 event on digital technologies and agree with the points you make. If you look at the top 20 learning tools used by learners today powerpoint and word are very low on their lists but if you were to analyse what is stored on VLE's in most colleges I suggest it will be dominated by this type of resource.

My view is we need to move from a "download" perspective to an "upload and communication" perspective; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Rob Hubbard on June 30, 2009 at 10:21am: Sounds glamorous!

Pretty soon everyone will be shooting and editing video on their phones so definitely need to be able to upload content easily. Some kind of intelligent automatic meta-tagging would be good too.

Very good point about docs. I'm doing some work with the University of Cambridge at the moment and most people's conception of 'elearning' is that of documents and a multiple-choice assessment delivered by an LMS. PowerPoint and Word docs do have their place though. It's people, not technology, that make awful learning resources; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bob Harrison on June 30, 2009 at 12:19pm: Not that glamorous Ron but Professor Rose Luckin talking a lot of sense about the need to get rid of the "illusions" around the technology,institutions and knowledge which really summarise a lot of the challenges...you can follow the discussions on twitter?
www.twitter.com/bobharrison; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Eta on September 15, 2009 at 5:16pm: I'd very much like to know what those top 20 learning tools used by learners consist of, Bob. If, as I suspect, it's a combination of Web2 type technologies, this may well excite the learner - but if we're to use it to deliver learning, and we need to somehow track what individuals are learning, any ideas how we go about this if a variety of different tools are being used?; ▶ Reply to This