Why LMS should have an Apple App Store

I should put in a disclaimer at the beginning of this blog. This is not about the new Apple ipad or supporting some Apple product. I could just have easily have said Why LMS (that is, learning management systems such as Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) should have a Windows Marketplace, though I suspect not many people are familiar with Windows Marketplace.  It much more of the concept of having 3rd party clients develop apps that users find useful.

It was just about a year ago I was really submersed into the wonderful world of Web 2.0 technologies. Well, Web 2.0 technologies along with the breath of edtech tools that are available to teachers. I don’t think there are that many faculty that are aware just how many different types of technologies exist that can do a variety of different things. Indeed it is an exciting new world, with lots and lots of possibilities. My Delicious feed that attached to this blog can attest to the different technologies I come across on a regular basis that can be invaluable to teaching.

All this wonderful technology though does have a bad side. I was reading a blog post http://bit.ly/bhqNNJ which was talking about Poll Everywhere’s difficulty in dealing with the free educator plans that they currently have available. The blog starts off: “Web services are not free to provide. Someone pays.”  Currently they still have a free plan but who knows for how long.  I, myself, have gotten burned from coming to rely on such free educator plans that eventually go away. My particularly distressing experience involved the very cool survey tool called QuestionPro (http://www.questionpro.com). They had, for a number of years, offered a free educator plan (with some restrictions of course). It was great to be able to use a very powerful survey tool for free and as one can imagine I used it for just about everything – from informal feedback from students to small, unfunded student research projects. And then, without warning, it was gone, my free license will no longer be renewed. To get the same level of service as in the past, I’d have to pay $99/month. Not within my budget range.

What is worrisome is that there are these wonderful technologies that are available today, but who knows if they will be tomorrow. It’s not just simply a matter of paying for a service, it’s a matter of whether that service will be around a year or two from now. It’s quite conceivable that a particular web tool that I am fond of using today may just disappear because the company went bankrupt or decided to move in a different direction. Then all my hard work setting things up and integrating it into my pedagogy would be lost and I would have little say in it. That thought worries me and I often wonder if it makes sense adopting some of these wonderful technologies I run across because they might be gone tomorrow.

My other big gripe is with the LMS that are currently available. My campus is cursed (yes, I’m using the word “cursed”) with Blackboard. We have the latest and greatest version, Blackboard 9. I’ve also had a chance to use their sister LMS, WebCT and in addition had an excellent comparison by being able to use Moodle. I’ll admit I’m no expert in LMS but from what I know, the currently Learning Management Systems are inadequate. These technologies were developed before the dawn of the popularity of Facebook and MySpace. And they do offer some good tools: discussion boards, blogs, wikis (for Moodle), etc. Still though, in the world of web technologies, their offerings tend to be very sparse and very simplistic.  Inevitably, if you are an active edtech user interested in bring more technology into your courses, you are forced to rely on these 3rd party sites to get more dynamic features. And there are a whole host of problems associated with using these 3rd party sites. Just a couple off the top of my head include: having to take the time to have students set up accounts with each 3rd party site, the cost of using these sites, the uncertainly of whether it will be available over time, accessibility issues, and lack of gradebook integration (and people wonder why I have two screens in my office!).

This is where my Apple App Store idea comes in. Why not have these 3rd party clients develop apps that instructors can purchase and download for their use in their LMS. Say you like the way that 3rd party app creates wikis, they go ahead and purchase it to use in your courses. Want to use a mindmap assignment? Then purchase that app to use in your course.  I know that there is some of this currently available in open-source LMS like Moodle. But I don’t think it’s quite at the level that I’m thinking about as in an app store. And just to be clear, I did say “purchase and download.” I acknowledge that “Web services are not free to provide.” Certainly if I develop a cool piece of technology and you want to use it, you should pay for it. But, in an app store type format, the thought is that it would be more affordably priced for instructors. There might even be an institutional price and therefore make it available across the entire campus. And I’m not knocking free stuff, but in my general experience, if there’s a price tag attached to something, even if minimal, it tends to be better than the free stuff.

Imagine the flexibility that would be available if you can take your favorite web tech tools and have then right in your LMS. No extra signing up for students, reduced accessibility issues, and you know it’s going to be there because it’s an app in the LMS. Even if the company goes away, you still have the app (though admittedly with a lot less support).

My biggest problem with Learning Management Systems right now is the lack of flexibility. I say that acknowledging my bias of being forced to use Blackboard 9, which is probably with worse of the lot in terms of flexibility. I am certainly in favor of LMS having a few basic services like they have now. However, what the Apple App Store teaches us is that one company can’t create it all and a single tool (such as the iphone) can become really useful when it becomes highly flexible with diverse, numerous options.  Sure, we don’t need 15,000 apps but among that 15,000 there’s sure to be that one app that you’re looking for that will do exactly what you needed it to go. Why can’t our LMS do the same thing?

Time to move away from clickers

Sometimes clickers don’t always work

I am currently part of a special project this semester called a faculty learning community. Basically we are a group of faculty that have gotten together to talk about how to use group activities to enhance student learning. One of the faculty in the community has decided to adopt a team-based learning approach based on the book by Larry Michaelsen, Arletta Knight, and L. Dee Fink (you can check it out here on Amazon: http://bit.ly/9oyD1R). The interesting thing about this team-based learning approach (TBL) is that there is a definite shift from the traditional “sage on the stage” to a “guide on the side.” Students are organized in teams and they work together to learn. Some of the TBL activities though can become tedious. One such activity requires students to work in their teams to answer a quiz. In order for the activity to work, each team needs to be given relatively simultaneous feedback about whether the team choice for each quiz item was correct or incorrect. Needless to say with the traditional pen and paper approach it can be a bit of a daunting task. How can you get concurrent groups doing the same activity the ability to check their answers? Their approach to the matter is to have special scratch cards, so students scratch off what they think the correct answer is. Once they scratch off their choice, underneath the scratch card would reveal if the choice is correct or not. Here is a short video on TBL:

My initial thought was, how tedious! You have to do that for every class and every semester you are using this technique. Surely technology can make this process a lot easier. Immediately I thought about how clickers might be able to accomplish the same function. However, it doesn’t seem like clickers could perfectly fit this situation either. For clickers to work, there would need to be a group clicker and all groups would have to work on the same question at the same time. That seems like a less organic process than having each group work as a team through the quiz at their own pace.

My experience with clickers

I was one of the early adopters of clickers. I started using clickers when other professors looked at it and thought it was just some fad that those “techie professors” were doing. In fact, I served on the selection committee for our university to decide which clicker system to adopt. At that time clickers were slowly beginning to be adopted by instructors on campus and it was the right juncture to decide on one system to be used. Using one system would allow for easier support from the IT department and also save students money who only had to buy one clicker instead of several different ones.  All in all, I have to say I enjoyed the use of clickers in my teaching.

I began to get annoyed with clickers because it always required students having this extra piece of hardware. The feedback was also limited to multiple choice. Sure we could make students buy the more expensive alphanumeric clicker, but the extra cost didn’t seem justified. And, in any case, the clicker the university decided to adopt (iClicker) didn’t have a alphanumeric version. Later came alternative versions of clickers that used students’ cellphones instead of a special piece of hardware. These included the popular Poll Everywhere (http://www.polleverywhere.com) and more recently, Text the Mob (http://www.textthemob.com). These alternative versions allowed for voting by SMS and also for alphanumeric responses. It now became possible to have opened ended questions in a clicker type format. The biggest down side was that they are expensive to adopt.

The idea of clickers got me thinking, if we can use clickers within the classroom experience to enhance the learning experience, what other types of technology can we use in the classroom to enhance the learning experience? This question was coupled with another dilemma I was having in my classes, a dilemma I’m sure a lot of faculty face today.  This dilemma is students texting and doing “other” things on their computer besides taking notes (such as checking their Facebook profiles). I’ve heard of the hardcore approach: just ban the whole thing and demand obedience, no texting or Facebook checking, etc! The idea is that is just rude on the part of the student and will not be tolerated in class. But I’m not so sure the heavy hand is the way to go in dealing with this issue. Surely all of us have gone to an extremely boring talk and decided that was a good time to multitask. Clearly, if I don’t have your full attention, if I’m not fully engaging you, I leave open the possibility of you being able to do something else in the process. Ideally for me, the classroom experience should be so engaging that you don’t have time to do anything else but pay attention – it becomes the idea that either you are fully present and participating or you’ll be completely lost. There is no time to text or check your Facebook profile. Can technology create such an environment in the classroom?

Simutasking

My mind began to race with possibilities. They all revolved around an idea I have labeled simutasking. This generation of students grew up in an environment where they are used to doing several things at once, especially when they are on the computer. Computers are specifically designed to multitask – for example, the whole “windows” idea, you have your email application open, your IM program open, a couple web browser windows open, etc. Larry Rosen in his book, Me, MySpace, and I for example mentioned that it is not uncommon for teenagers to be having several IM conversations at once on the computer. Potentially, listening to one person lecture on a topic could be extremely boring to the new generation of students. So, why not create a learning environment in the classroom where students can be bombarded with several different activities at once? In other words, have students simutask. Imagine a classroom and every student has a laptop. You have a PowerPoint presentation showing. The presentation shows not only on the main projector screen, but also on the screen of every student’s laptop. In addition to the presentation screen on the student’s laptop, there are a bunch of other screens available. In one screen, there is a copy of the textbook page which is related the current slide. In another screen a short quiz question related to the slide. In yet another screen, there is a space for students to take notes, or if a student wishes, they can take notes right on the presentation slide screen. And in another screen, the ability to backchannel and ask questions. Screens are optional, so if a student wishes they can focus just on the presentation screen, or if they need more stimulation, they can do more simutasking by opening up more windows. And the instructor’s screen? A master control screen with the ability to monitor each and every student.  Have a large classroom of 200 students and want to do group work? No problem, with a simple click the instructor can create virtual groups where students can interact with each other without ever having to leave their seats. TBL problem with the ability of groups to check answers independently of other groups (mentioned at the beginning of this blog) – solved!

The closest thing I’ve seen to this (that is even mildly affordable to me) is something called Lecture Tools (http://www.lecturetools.com).  But from what I’ve seen of it, it’s still a little clunky and doesn’t have nearly all the features that this type of system needs to have. If such a system could be created and implemented, imagine how passe clickers would be! The ability to give and get feedback from the class moves to an entirely different level. Indeed Lecture Tools gives some demonstration of this. One of their interesting feedback tools is image-based, where students can select where on the image their answer is and then the instructor can show the proportion of students that selected different parts of the image.

Perhaps the greatest critique of such a system is the fact that it requires every student to have access to a device that can browse the internet. I don’t see this as a big problem though. Even on my campus (with a lot of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds), at least 80% of students have a laptop (or some kind of netbook I’m guessing). And with the growing interest in tablets (Apple’s ipad and Microsoft’s Courier) it’s not unreasonable to envision that sometime in the near future students can have access to some kind of internet browsing device for classes.

Let’s get this off the ground!

I spoke with one of the sales rep for one of the big clicker companies about my ideas. I told the rep, “you know in a couple years clickers are going to be obsolete. What’s your next big thing?” And sadly, they were stuck in the same place they were in 2 years ago and seemingly unwilling to change.  If anyone can design this vision of a simutasking system that is versatile and easy to use, they will definitely redefine the classroom experience. I want to be a part of that movement, who will join me?