The LMS is dead. Long live the LMS. (Part 1 of 5)


Over this series of articles, I’ll examine the flaws in the learning management system and explore the ideas and technologies pointing the way to a superior approach. Then, in my final article, I’ll meld these ideas into a model and re-examine the LMS in light of these ideas to see if it can be reborn, or if it really is time to kill the LMS.

I believe that LMSs are a high friction, business centric experience, founded on a top down, server side, reductionist worldview that assumes humans are primarily rational beings needing to comply, follow procedures and achieve competencies. As such they fail to nurture higher order thinking skills and create prisons for content, experiences and learners, taking the immense complexity of a learning human and reducing it to the status of a competency achieved, a quiz passed, an activity ticked or a class attended.

Sure your LMS might be designed responsively, hosted in the cloud, generate insightful analytics, be gamified and embed social features. But it’s still a gilded cage.

So the question is how do you break out of that cage? Before I answer that, I want to talk about my children. Sam is seven, he has learning difficulties and loves to test boundaries – by arguing, by seeking exceptions, by manipulating concepts and rules to fit his momentary desires. His flow is chaotic, emotive and self-involved. Riley on the other hand is five and he is unquenchably curious, he takes new information, creates connections, builds mental models and tests his ideas. His flow is sequential, analytical and reflective. Our youngest Sally is three. She loves to play and laugh, learning organically through experience and from what pleases her. Her flow is very experiential and joyful.

Sam, Riley and Sally all learn through the unique and natural lense of their personalities, using a vast grab bag of cognitive tools within the stream of their daily activity. They are not receivers of information, but agents of their own transformation. Most importantly, they are intrinsically motivated to learn - for argument, from curiosity or through pleasure.

The development of the LMS and an organisation’s decision to buy one, springs from constrained thinking about how we are supposed to learn, acquired from a school system developed to feed the industrial revolution. This worldview positions us as receivers of information and so it narrows our personal lense to a rational approach, supports only a small set of thinking tools and ignores most of the naturally occurring and richest learning opportunities we experience in our daily lives.

This generates unnecessary friction between the motivations and desires of the individual and the needs of the business. So people end up learning despite and outside the LMS, viewing it as a chore to be tolerated.

So what can you do right now to start the break out? Well our first step has been to establish an architecture founded on xAPI, a learning record store (LRS) and a repository. This has allowed us to eliminate our dependence on an LMS and use our clients existing ecosystems to deliver/capture content and activity wherever the learner is and whatever they are doing - reading a book, consulting with a client, arguing with a peer, updating their records system, so their learning is doing.

But to more deeply break out of the cage we need to ask some deeper questions. How do you support learning of a higher order, through nurturing the emotional, egoic, cognitive, complex state that is human consciousness? How do you enable this, not as a thing to do, but as a state of being, a frictionless part of our flow? Most importantly, how do you make it a deeply meaningful, intrinsically motivated experience?

In my next article, l discuss the potential for the LMS as a coach, not a manager and explore advances in adaptive learning, affective systems and psychometric analytics.

David is an Edtech Innovator, with over 20 years experience in the digital and adult learning spaces. Based in Melbourne Australia he runs the “Kill the LMS” workshop, designed to disrupt your thinking about how humans learn, reflect on the limitations your LMS imposes upon the performance of your people and look at ideas and architectures to remove those limits.

Click here to view the original article on our blog. Click here to learn more about the Kill the LMS workshop, or to book a free one hour phone conversation with David.

You might also like to join David’s Linkedin group, exploring these issues in greater depth or follow our company page on linkedin for more great posts.

Jan Radcliff

Quality Administrator

9y

Hi David, Like Andrew suggests we don't want our designs to look like "course vending machines". It is very important that we first develop a deeper understanding of how people learn across multi settings as well as understanding the technological gap between the traditional learners versus the non-traditional learner. Active learning labs, virtual technology and learning, LMS, etc., it appears to be evolving potentially into another branch of instructional technology and learning science. I view instructional technology - not so much about how we design the platforms of the future -but rather now we design the learning environment in which any given platform can be sustained. It’s the environment we stick that platform in that matters. I like the LMS concept where you only purchase what you need, and add to it as your organizational needs change. You don’t have to buy the whole system. Just pick and choose what you need, and when you are done with certain segments you discontinue them. You don’t have to buy the whole grocery cart, just the staples to get you through. You also tell the vendor what you like and don't like. It's a movable platform to fit individual needs within a given environment. Student centered learning is life time learning. I like the idea of the job environment. I wish you luck on your research. Very interesting topic.

Andrew Gerkens

Cultural Evolution │ Capacity Building │ Organisational Development

9y

I think it was Jay Cross who described LMSs as 'Course Vending Machines'. As we move away from 'learning events' towards a culture of 'continuous learning' and drive the shift from 'courses to resources', it becomes very obvious that the traditional LMS does not fit. The philosophy behind technology platforms should be 'where I go to learn is where I go to work', but this is easier said than done. I think many of us struggle to know where to start in selecting flexible, scalable platforms amongst a market flooded with options that all profess to being the best. I'm looking forward to the series and your ideas on how to approach this significant challenge (and investment).

Colleen Hodgins

Learning Technology Advisor James Cook University - Academy

9y

Love "horses for courses" aka LMS but passionate about challenging, reflecting and visioning the possible and the practical in relation to good learning experiences :)

Trent McNair

Founder, Capture My Space

9y

I'll bite! I look forward to more as you roll this out. I have been feeling for years that learning needs to change (actually, it has, we just keep desperately holding on to a dated paradigm).

Karl-Henri Loiseau

Mgr Talent Systems | Learning, Design and Talent Technology, UX and Governance

9y

Hi David, I approached this series with interest and cannot wait for the other parts of the series. I am certainly one who appreciates a good discussion about these topics and would like to hear where you are going. I begin with general some agreement with you that LMSes could be more, but I don't know if you have given me too much else to agree with you yet. You start with a general outline (in bold) that gets me excited, but then, you make some an assertion that you have not yet elaborated on (1st paragraph) and then discuss a learning experience (albeit one for children) and then jump to a software architecture before finishing with a vision of sorts. I would agree that there is a certain dissatisfaction out there with the whole experience of learning in a contemporary corporate environment, especially when it comes to electronically delivered learning. Naturally, LMSes receive the brunt of that blame as it is the most visible component of the continuum. But could we design better learning with existing tools? Yes, we would like learning to be more engaging, allowing for more freedom, less formalized, lot more a lot of things. But is your LMS the sole culprit or is this a larger debate? Sometimes, part of the discussion out there sounds like having had a bad date and deciding to blame the car because at a critical moment we wished our car would turn into a sailboat and it didn't. Going back to your introductory paragraph, there are two aspects to the discussion I am looking forward to hear. 1- In which ways are LMSes overall not meeting the requirements we set out for them? Because otherwise, we are blaming them for not fulfilling needs we never had or knew we had at RFP time. 2- Breaking out of the box and thinking more broadly, if we could design a superior learning experience in the workplace, what would it look like, what would each party (yes, the learner but also the manager, HR and senior management) want out of it and what sort of LMS or other system would be needed to support all the needs. After all, it can be great that Sally is motivated and likes to learn experientially and her own way, but how do we reconcile that with, say, Sr. Management's desire for everyone to be better at document management?

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