With the growing popularity of our Practice Plan, we have been looking at adding additional management tools to help support its three primary functions: needs analysis, course design and on-going speaking practice. This research has brought us in direct contact with more traditional, ‘Learning 1.0′ if you will, course management systems, such as Blackboard, Angel Learning and eCollege.

What is most striking about most of these systems is just how clumsy they all appear when viewed side-by-side with more modern web 2.0 tools. Take Blackboard for example. Originally designed in the late ’90’s, Blackboard sells to institutions and its primary purpose is student and course management designed for use by teachers and institutions. While Blackboard does have tools to enable inter-student interaction and aggregation of information sources for students, these features are very much a secondary focus and look extremely primitive when you look at the platforms students actually use, such as Facebook, MySpace and Google.

To further illustrate this institutional bias, Educause Review released their top 10 IT issues for higher education in 2007 (via the NOSE):

1. Funding IT
2. Security
3. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems
4. Identity/Access Management
5. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
6. Faculty Development, Support, and Training
7. Infrastructure
8. Strategic Planning
9. Course/Learning Management Systems
10. Governance, Organization, and Leadership for IT

See anything focused around solving student problems or improving the learning experience?

Bill Ives in his FASTforward blog made a point discussing the enterprise environment that I believe is just as applicable to the learning industry (source):

I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today’s wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?

It seems to me course/learning management systems are much more likely going to have to adapt to student-centered platforms (e.g. adding course management widgets to Facebook), rather than forcing students to using clunky, out-of-date tools. Companies that provide these course management systems give lip service to a future of student-centered learning, but since they sell to institutions, the user experience for students becomes of secondary importance. Where are the course management systems that put the needs of students first and then layers in tools for teachers and administrators afterward? In essence, this is what we are trying to do right now with ChinesePod.

If you have experience using any of these traditional course management systems, please let us know what you liked and didn’t like, as well as any other features that you think could make ChinesePod even better.

Hank Horkoff