Posted by Richard at September 12th, 2007

About a year ago, I was pulling my hair out with my job at a large, nameless proprietary university. I was an instructional designer and was getting increasingly frustrated by the inflexibility (not to mention the inanity) of most LCMS (learning course management systems) I’d worked with.

The chief culprit was one of the usual suspects in higher education: eCollege, but it was aided and abetted by a number of experiences with other systems. I’d used WebTycho when taking some online courses at UMUC. I’d experienced Sakai while doing some courses at Indiana. I’d even briefly played around with Moodle. What struck me was that most of these systems spent a lot of energy trying to complicate a system that was essentially quite simple: higher education is, fundamentally, about relationships.

This came back to me pretty strongly while I’ve been getting acquainted with Facebook and Ning, which are social networking sites with multiple tiers of user-user and user-group relationships.

Borrowing from a model that seems to work alright for corporate training, most LCMSs for the higher education market focus on the management of courses, which they treat like meta-objects – containers of content and other types of small objects.

At the end of the day, though, my experience in higher education indicates that the focus of the “college experience” isn’t access to a meta-object, but participation in a meta-relationship. Courses aren’t containers for content to which users are granted access. They are a complex set of one-to-one and one-to-many relationships that entail access to objects that are given over to the group’s access. These are power-laden relationships, of course: all users are not created equal, but they are primarily relationships.

I’ll admit my biases: as a former e-learning student at two large public univerisities and a former administrator at a large, proprietary e-learning university, I think e-learning is a wonderful opportunity that is being slowly crushed beneath soulless, needlessly bloated communication systems that downplay collegial and mentoring relationships and emphasize courses as commodities. If the social media/Web 2.0 idea might revolutionize education in any way, it could be to replace object/container-focused LCMSs with relationship-centered learning management systems.

Now if I could just figure out what this might look like…

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