To LMS or not to LMS, that is the question!

 The eternal question! To LMS or not to LMS.

A Learning Management System (LMS) is software (or a software package) or Web-based technology used to plan, implement, and assess a specific learning process. Typically, a learning management system provides an instructor with a way to create and deliver content, monitor student participation, and assess student performance.

With me so far? Good chance that if you're  viewing this blog you've had experiences with an LMS of some sorts. Good chance if you have, you've got some mixed feelings about LMSs.

The question of whether to LMS or not has long bugged me. Why? Because when you stack up the reasons for and against there is no clear winner.

Reasons FOR	Reasons AGAINST
It helps manage everything in one place It can often automate workflows (e.g. self-marking quizzes) You can provide a single training and support model You often get vendor support for an LMS You can share objects with others using the LMS You can have connections with other school software (e.g. timetable data) You can have single sign-on options and ease of use opportunities.	You are locked into a single system for managing files and workflows There are often better tools for workflows It makes people reliant on central training and support models You have to pay It stifles people with technical abilities who want to explore beyond the LMS The LMS often drives the pedagogy and not the other way round

So where do I sit? 

Well, let me tell you the story of the last LMS I implemented.

I wanted to do something different with Stage 6 Studies of Religion. I went looking at contemporary models of pedagogy and got stuck on the idea of delivering a blended model that employed flipped learning. So I then sought out an LMS which suited the pedagogical model I was attempting to employ.

That is, my pedagogy drove the LMS decision.

And that is not always the case. Actually, that's almost never the case. 

Very rarely do educators say "That's what I want to do!" and backward map to their reality. The start with "That's what I've got!" (often in exasperation) and move forward to their dreams. 

I am a firm believer that as educators we are, as Ian Jukes and Simon Breakspear were at pains to point out last week at FutureSchools, 'future makers'. We have an eye on a possible future and an eye on the ground in front and we map out the path to the future. 

However, when that eye on the ground in front recognises that not all educators are ready for a post-LMS world, the question of how to get there often brings us back to an LMS reality.

My hunch is that the LMS is the scaffold upon which a digitally rich pedagogy can be built. The question is how comfortable educators are to unlearn an LMS when it is time to leave the nest and fly solo. And of course we could add the further question of how willing systems, like mothers everywhere, are to push them out the nest when the time comes. 

Working with surveys

Surveys. Love 'em or hate 'em, they are everywhere. In way of a disclaimer I previously worked for a very large multinational cooperation that was arguable the largest private industry collector of data in the country.

In schools, surveys seem to pop up frequently. Yet more frequently than not the survey represents a destination rather than a question. And therein lies the problem.

Surveys are a form of quantitative data collection. Even in their simplest form, they are a form of research. And research is be definition a process of three steps

1. Pose a question.
2. Collect data to answer the question
3. Present an answer to the question

Creswell, J. (2012), Plannning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Pearson: Boston

The issue is that so many surveys are about "getting support" or "receiving a mandate". Perhaps we should blame federal politics...

The point is, all research - even the information question to parents, students or staff - should start with a question.

Collecting the data is the easy bit. However, this is also an area where people struggle. For most schools they can use the paper format, but today I'd like to look at SurveyMonkey. Its a fairly simple tool to use, but does cost around $300AUD for its most useful plan.

Alternatively, things like Google Forms are available and offer a simplistic yet effective way of collecting data. And there are several free online survey tools available. You can even create forms in emails (difficult) or use the paper based option (simple!).

Just remember the the following:

• How will your data be collected? If it's only online, will that create a selection bias?
• How will your data be stored? How long for? How will you maintain confidentiality? 
• How will your data be used? Is data aggregated or will individual data be used (E.g. comment data)?
• To whom will the data be send? What is the intended audience?
• Who is responsible for the data?

All of this needs to be clearly communicated to participants before they commence a survey. 

Furthermore, when creating your survey consider:

• The wording of questions and how that impacts an audience's perception (referendums!)
• The pacing and order of questions (consistency and clarity)
• The scales used (consistency and clarity)

There are plenty of online resources to help you out!

How fast is your internet?

In the increasingly 1:1 environments of our schools there has been a whole sale adoption of cloud based storage. While this presents a plethora of opportunities for security, safety and collaboration, it also has a few downsides.

Currently in Australia, if you live in a town like I do, the NBN is a distant dream. While I achieve slight-better-than-the-rest speed of 11Mbps, the national average is 6.9Mbps. What is worse, is that this figure is based on combined metropolitan and rural/regional data. Why is it worse? Is because the NBN (fixed line) and 4G (wireless) density in urban areas is significantly higher. Many students in our diocese are unable to get any kind of service that would qualify as broadband.

Late in 2009, an IT company in South Africa sought to point out the sorry state of affairs, It loaded up a carrier pigeon with 4GB of data and flew it 60 miles to its destination. In the same time that it took the bird to complete the journey, only a quarter of the data had arrived via the internet.

To put this in perspective, At the current 6.9Mbps that Australia 'enjoys', that same carrier pigeon would be neck and neck with the same 4GB at 60 miles.

Yet this isn't 2009.

And SD cards are no longer 4GB or even 128GB. They are 512GB!

What does this mean for the carrier pigeon flying 60 miles? The humble carrier pigeon has a transfer speed of over 800Mbps! That's well over 100 times the speed of our current internet.

Or better still, if you had 512GB of data to transfer, you could either use broadband to transfer it taking 6 ½ days or you could get the card, pop it into the new Australia post two-days-later-40%-more-expensive letter delivery service and still shave days off the trip.

Ok, all of this is just funny analogies. However...

This is the reality - long or short term - in Australia. Our average internet speed is 44th in the world, about where Thailand is. Even our cross-Tasman cousins enjoy better speed. What's worse is its slipping rather than gaining.

If you are expecting your students in your 1:1 device program to be able to be effective learners using digital tools and online storage and workflows, will the internet that they have be able to cope?

Equally, what structures and process will you have in place for students unable to access the internet or unable to access it in a suitable fashion?

And just in case you were wondering, if you were attempting to send that same 512GB data file(s) from Sydney to Melbourne, the carrier pigeon would complete the task in a touch over 10 hours. This is 108MBps, or 8 more than our current fastest NBN broadband.

Side note: The reason for this widening gap isn't bad policy. The bulk of the different is that internet speeds have not increased at the same rate as storage capacity. Storage capacity has been roughly working at Moore's law (doubles every 18 months) while internet speed is far more incremental.

Plagiarism

Image stolen from Mike Reading who borrowed it from Flickr where it was placed by somebody.

Plagiarism. There, I said it.

It’s not a new problem in schools. In fact, in the late 90s I can remember checking work that teachers thought were suspicious. 9/10 of them were. And what I did - simple searches online – must have seemed liked magic in those early days.

Flash forward and we are used to using tools such as TurnItIn in tertiary environments, and we all know about All My Own Work (or should).

Yet what is the system at your school? 

How would your school respond to the following questions?

• How many students plagiarise?
• Why do students plagiarise?
• How many get away with plagiarising?
• What policies and procedures are in place to deal with plagiarising?
• Are they effective and enforced in an even way? 
• When students are caught plagiarising, what are the consequences?
• Are all HSC issues recorded in the BOSTEST malpractice register?

My hunch is that the average high school:

• Has many students who plagiarise
• Who plagiarise because they can without fear of consequences because...
• They almost always get away with it because...
• There are no or minimal policies and procedures to deal with plagiarism or...
• They are ineffective and rarely enforced and...
• When they are caught there are minimal consequences and...
• Little record of these incidents are formally kept

As Mike Reading pointed out in a recent blog post noted that “a[n] ethics survey in 2010 looking at student cheating found the following: 

Rampant cheating in school continues. A majority of students (59 percent) admitted cheating on a test during the last year, with 34 percent doing it more than two times. One in three admitted they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.”

And yet, as Mike points out, teaching students about copyright and ownership in the Australian Curriculum starts in Kindergarten! 

Mike goes on to point out some tools that can assist teachers. I've used a few myself. However I think the best six tools for teachers to combat are:

• Well defined policies and procedures that are evenly enforced
• Education and training (not just All My Own Work) from K-12 which develops an understanding of ownership and copyright
• Good workflows which centre on student learning (the higher up Blooms taxonomy you are, the harder it is to plagiarise)
• Getting to know your students and your student work so that you are familiar enough to spot when plagiarism might occur
• Using tools to assist you e.g. TurnItIn (though when you’ve done the above, generally a quick Google search will suffice)
• Provide a framework of consequences that encourages growth and awareness rather than punitive sanctions

Too much change?

Recently I was talking to a teacher about her new Windows 8 tablet-hybrid. I asked how she was finding it.

"I hate it," she stated bluntly, "all the menus are different and I cannot print."

And therein lies a problem. Our teachers are not technological experts and sometimes we assume too much about their capacity to understand the technology that they are using.

What do I mean?

Well the comment from the teacher seems to be about the device (hardware). But it was in fact about the operating system (software). She was blaming the laptop for what was essentially a Windows 8 learning curve.

So what?

Well change is often about familiarity more than anything else. Regular incremental change in devices and software breeds more comfort with technological change. Meanwhile irregular large-scale change causes stress and creates barriers and blockers.

What then?

All change needs to be managed. Change management is not a new part of business theory and discourse, but change theory in education is an area where academic discourse and research hasn't filtered down as effectively to middle management. Technology leaders in schools could do themselves a great service in understanding what changes means for an organisation, how they can plan change and how they can effectively sustain change. This is, perhaps, the leadership issue in contemporary education.

From my perspective, the best type of the change is that regular incremental change.

Change the device first. Then change the hardware. Then keep changing in little steps until change is the norm for schools.

The reality is, that is arguably what schools are all about.

Postscript: I will attempt to add some work on change management in Learning Technology when I am not otherwise occu

SAMR

SAMR is a model designed to help educators integrate technology into teaching and learning. Developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, the  model guides educators in how to best integrate technology into their learning.

The model has close alignments with Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (and that makes sense). Kathy Schrock (a US educator) adjusted the map above to reflect this alignment. 

SAMR provides a solid framework for assessing the level of integration of technology.  If you want to know more, a quick Google search will show you plenty of information or go to Kathy's website. 

Who drives the agenda?

One of the more interesting questions is who drives the technology agenda in our schools? When asked, and I am not certain it is asked often, the question is often quite challenging.

1) Is it driven by technology?

Technology itself is not the solution. It is a part of the tool-kit. If there is one takeaway from the DER, it is that hardware and software are not sufficient to drive change.

2) Is it driven by individuals?

We need technology leaders in our schools, of that there is no doubt. But they are no sufficient in and of themselves. I once heard a technology leader being described as a lighthouse. Though an apt description, it highlights why a lighthouse is not enough - a lighthouse shines the way, but does not move the boat. That requires a ship, an engine, captain and crew.
The real danger here is that individuals who are technology leaders can get burnt out, ostracised or disillusioned if left to lead alone. More importantly, what happens when they leave?

3) Is it driven by principals? 

Principals are the true everypersons of schools. They swap from WHS leader to curriculum leadership to human resources to any number of other roles... all in the space of a single staff meeting. To assume that they technical knowledge and time is sufficient to implement change is impractical, and as above, to leave it up to a single individual is fraught with danger.

4) Is it driven by systems?

A running joke in IT is the programmer who is asked how long a project will take. He thinks three hours, says three days and by the time it is on the strategic plan it's three months. Systems, due to their nature, are slower and more difficult to respond to change. More importantly, should systems drive agendas for change in school? This is the tension of good governenace that plays itself out in all organisations with a governing body. Particularly, in our Catholic schools, the concept of subsidiarity plays a central role.

5) Is it driven by research? 

Researchers research. However, educational research... well... as the saying goes: "Everything works somewhere, and nothing works everywhere". Therefore, as Dylan William rightly points out the right question is, “Under what conditions does this work?”. Assuming that all research is easily generalisable is a poor application of the research. #Mr_Cornwall if you want to fight me on this one.

6) Is it driven by what others are doing?

My wife tells a humorous anecdote. When we first were dating she made me roast lamb dinner. As part of the preparation she cut about 1cm off each end of the roast. I was curious as to why. She said it was what her step-mother did. Later we asked her step-mother why she did that and she replied that she had done it because her mother always had. When we asked nanna, the response was as hilarious as it was illuminating: her butcher's rolled shoulders were always a little bit too long for her little oven at the family home, so she had to shave the ends off which she cooked separately as sandwhich meat.

The often quoted line "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is 'we've always done it this way'" should have a companion line that says "The second most dangerous phrase is 'Well it worked for them'".

As the comments for educational research indicate, generalising research is fraught with danger and equally generalising experiences has the same issues.

7) Is it driven by other considerations?

Do parents drive the agenda? How much is the cost to parents involved in the decision making of BYOD? Do students drive the agenda? How much do we consider their needs? Does funding drive the agenda? How many technological purchases were made by the need to utilise available funding?


So what then?

I would propose that there is a model that is both aware and agile. I would nominate context as the crucial issue for any school. Schools that say "my school couldn't" are working from a context-aware framework. The challenge is knowing what is real and what is not.

Some important question for context are:
* How do our current learners learn?
* How do our current teachers teach?
* What is the TPACK of our teachers?
* How supportive is our community to change?

From here important questions become:
* How do we want learners to learn?
* How do we want our teachers to teach?
* How do we increase the TPACK of our teachers?
* How to we build a more agile community?

There is no part of this process that is about a principal, a technological leader, an agenda, a system, a research report, a parent, a student, or a different context. Simply put - it's about all these things.

Furthermore, inquiry needs to be disciplined. This isn't singularly the field of educational research. Every teacher is a leaner and a researcher-in-action. Everyone needs to be disciplined in their inquiry as to what works best in their context, be it the context of their school or even as narrow as the context of their classroom. This may mean breaking down the questions above until they are specific to the classroom and the individual student.

We know that technology should be integrated into learning. Any discussion regarding technology in schools should equally be integrated with the context of the school.