Open Source and the NGDLE

A longer-term goal, more in line with the vision of the NGDLE, is to develop a learning experience for students that seamlessly crosses platforms. A student might start by watching lectures on YouTube, then head to a web-based tool for creating a concept map before wrapping up with a shared WordPress site -- all within the confines of one platform.

NGDLE

NGDLE

NGDLE

NGDLE

Lastly, professors need to fight for a post-LMS world that allows all faculty to make a living wage. I can’t help but suspect that at least some of the administrative fondness for learning management systems stems from a desire to systematize teaching and deskill professors as part of that process. When everything about teaching online is systematized and deskilled, it becomes easier to train anyone, anywhere to teach our courses.

The IT and the T&L visions are thus fairly congruent: integrating disparate applications so that they offer our communities a consolidated environment and more customizable functionality. These are invigorating and also daunting challenges.

learning pioneers would be able to experiment and innovate by hooking apps and other functions onto the LMS.

Containing the Future of OER

Do everything possible to minimize reliance on an enterprise LMS. Explore ways to support activity and content development in environments that foster collaboration and also interoperability with a wide range of tools. Before directing activity to a complex, locked-down system, ask: "Do we really need to do it this way? Is there a simpler, cheaper, open alternative that will do the job?"

support alternative systems, such as blogs and wikis

Five Arguments against the Learning Management System

The selection committee declares that whatever LMS the university chooses next must work exactly like Blackboard and exactly like Moodle while having all the features of Canvas. Oh, and it must be "innovative" and "next-generation" too, because we're sick of LMSs that all look and work the same.

(At the time, Stephen Downes mocked me for thinking that this was an important aspect of LMS design to consider.)

Let's imagine a world in which universities, not vendors, designed and built our online learning environments.

In an ideal world, every class would have its own unique mix of these capabilities based on what's appropriate for the students, teacher, and subject.

And that, in fact, is a pretty good description of the IMS standard in development called Caliper, which is why I am so interested in it. In my recent post about walled gardens from the series that Jonathan mentions in his own post, I tried to spell out how Caliper could enable either a better LMS, a better world without an LMS, or both simultaneously.

the backbone of for a distributed network of personal learning environments

the tools shouldn’t dictate the choice

DW: How does H5P allow users to create rich content in content management systems?

xAPI is a json based data structure that's for expressing the actions taken by a user. It's popular for tracking activity across websites because of it having a standard base schema with flexibility for providing contextual information based on use-case.

distributed constructs like Learning Record Stores and xAPI fitting easily within their mental models

ecosystem mindset to delivering course experiences

OLI courses provide an entire experience based on our unique development process.

Next Generation Learning Materials

This site is run by Instructure.

Feldstein's Law: Any educational app that is actively developed for long enough and has a large enough user base will become indistinguishable from a badly designed LMS.

Information from this will be used to develop learning analytics software features, which will have these functions: Description of learning engagement and progress, Diagnosis of learning engagement and progress, Prediction of learning progress, and Prescription (recommendations) for improvement of learning progress.

full Caliper Analytics compliance

the way of MOOCs – a few years of wild hype about revolutionary potential followed by inevitable domestication by the academy.

we need to look beyond the LMS, that place that so many love to hate

This is what a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment is all about.

A commercial/proprietary vendor borrows funding, setting that borrowed funding against potential future revenue; an open-source community pools present capacity to create a sustainable future.

the fact that open-source software is the best guarantor of open standards

Conway's Law

The problem with this variant is that the tendency to aggregate functionality will at some point drive the Pike to eat an LTI-enabled Minnow

Pike and Minnows

Socio-economic factors are therefore potentially of particular significance to the NGDLE conversation, but are all too often not adequately represented or are reduced to a simplistic (and unsustainable, unless an infinitely expandable market is assumed) model of counting new LMS adoptions.

we simply had far less experience in component-based architectures and open application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the interconnection and communication of systems and components

At an institutional level, the lack of a clearly articulated transition path from the LMS to a potentially more flexible, component-based successor was undoubtedly a significant factor.

the Cylons

Open Source and the NGDLE

waiting for Godot

The edtech ecosystem brings forth its own set of privacy, ownership, and security concerns.

Our job is to manage the differences between these two cultures and bring collaborative, not overly competitive, learning solutions to our institutions.

rigorous, peer-reviewed science

In many ways, the health care community is ahead of the education community.

Instructors are learners too.

The word ecosystem, borrowed from its ecological and biological roots, here refers to the educational technology (edtech) market.

Everything must be open.

The overarching theme? Everything must be open.

open standards

Great edtech should fade into the background

The 2 Sigma Problem

What Is the Next Generation?

Shaping the Educational Technology Innovation Ecosystem

The privacy dashboard discloses to students the learning data being captured about them and how it is being used (such as for research and/or early warning tools).

An additional analogy can better describe the NGDLE: the LMS needs to be a central nervous system that connects the components (the bricks) in a unified learning ecosystem.

It's hard to imagine instructors both constructing a new mash-up environment and crafting improved learning activities.

Now is the time to start our journey.

As Herbert Simon observed: "Improvement in post-secondary education will require converting teaching from a 'solo sport' to a community-based research activity."

Understand that as difficult as the technology might be to envision, articulate, and implement, the culture changes required between where you are now and where you need to be to implement it will be much, much harder.

nontraditional platform partners, particularly those who have a learner- and learning-centric approach and architecture

Representation of Learner Identity

our systems need to be smart enough to direct learners back to review and relearning activities when the learners are struggling to remember or effectively apply previously demonstrated competencies at later stages in a program

More advanced versions of CMA functionality would allow learners to specify their own learning goals, map them to learning activities and experiences, and discover ways to self-validate achievement of those goals.

stored in the LRS

the repository of all learner goals, achievements, activities, and interactions

it is built from the ground up around individual learners

two major categories of required components: software architecture and learning architecture

A modern DLE of any generation is virtually unthinkable without standards support built in, readily available to connect and share data with a myriad of other tools and services.

By adaptively and dynamically updating learners' paths across programs, the N2GDLE increases the probability that students will achieve completion and earn credentials.

a slow, natural-selection process that brings us to the possibility of the N2GDLE vision

the once universally rejected ITS model

a willingness to work through or ignore the fundamental challenge to traditional instructor and student roles

no significant change

Unsurprisingly, neither of these domains has led to significant change to the traditional roles of or relationships between teachers and learners.

The unstoppable democratization of the web

backward design

exoskeleton for the mind

We must utilize the tools we have at our disposal to finally close Benjamin Bloom's 2-sigma gap in achievement between personally tutored students and students in a traditional classroom.

we face an urgent societal need to fully, efficiently, and effectively help all individuals realize their potential as learners and practitioners across an expected lifetime of learning

the NGDLE offers a way for institutions to more easily extract and share their learning community’s personal data with a wide range of sources, something that should deeply disturb us in the post-Snowden era. But the real kicker is, how do we get anyone to not only acknowledge this process of extraction and monetization (because I think folks have), but to actually feel empowered enough to even care.

NEO Learning Management System: The World’s First Comprehensive LMS

PowerSchool Unveils New Innovations in its Unified Classroom Designed to Transform K-12 Education

Feldstein’s Law: Any educational app that is actively developed for long enough and has a large enough user base will become indistinguishable from a badly designed LMS.

provide a set of discussion APIs

no responsible human being should ever willingly inflict yet another electronic grade book on the world

make the web the learning platform

Consultations with more than 70 community thought leaders brought into relief the contours of a next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE).

educators have a desire to unbundle all of the components of a learning experience

Rather than existing as single applications, they are a “confederation of IT systems and application components that adhere to common standards ...that would enable diversity while fostering coherence.”

Domain of One’s Own

are limited in capacity, too narrowly focused on the administration of learning rather than the learning itself.278

dynamic social exchanges

That entanglement makes it harder to provide tools that support the tasks individually. If you can annotate segments of interest, though, you can disentangle the tasks, tool them separately, build the book more efficiently, and ensure others can more cleanly repurpose your work.

There is an increasingly diverse student population in today's colleges and universities, and a wide variety of modalities and course models. "Try to imagine a single application like an LMS that could possibly do justice to the wide range of needs," Brown said,

That this can be another chance for us to direct more of the conversations around teaching and learning and scholarship, rather than simply react to these persistent outside forces

we must be in control of our own destiny, not swept along by the “solutions” being handed to us

State of learning management systems ‘verging on embarrassing’

The idea is to separate the course administrative tools & functions (like classlists and gradebooks) from the teaching and learning tools, and allow faculty to mix and match tools to fit their pedagogical needs.

Instructional processes must begin and end with students ― with “learners and what they learn.” This idea—of shifting the focus away from an institution-centric construct and toward understanding and meeting the needs of students—is absolutely central.

The infrastructure

Today, the  path to regaining control lies less in writing super-large chunks of code and more in forming consortia that serve a variety of purposes.

Tomorrow’s system environments will better integrate collaboration and engagement features into the user experience, allowing faculty to easily make these features an integral part of their courses and providing students with flexible, varied, and ongoing means of engagement.

A mash-up is a web page or application that “uses content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface.”8Hence it uses a heterogeneity of components to produce a homogeneity of function.

Clusters of institutions could form consortia (such as Unizin or C-BEN)10to set up co-ops to provide a buffet of apps and other tools, either purchased or donated. In this case, each institution’s learning environment would be a unique blend of these components

The Experience API is an example of an API that “makes itpossible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline).”

Define potential investments to accelerate the development of the next generation digital learning environment.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

creating the NGDLE will require co-ordinated efforts among vendors, colleges and universities, and standards bodies,

mind-set

and Instructure

the LMS is valuable for handling the administrative duties of a course, it is less successful in effectively facilitating learning, especially as higher education actively develops new course models and pedagogical approaches.

a useful label for strategic thinking about the future of learning environments in higher education.

NGDLE "sightings "—nascent initiatives and developments that are moving in the direction of the NGDLE

the growing appreciation of and support for openness based on interoperability standards;