Some of what I said is based on recent focus groups and surveys with students. Last semester was our first try at moving the introductory Finance course here to a blended format. There were several ways in which the implementation was clunky, so that we got some push back from the students was anticipated, but I was surprised to hear that many said they liked regular lecture and wanted us to bring it back in its entirety.

More generally, I believe that many students are simply looking to get through college and much less interested in asking what they get out of the experience. I think this is unhealthy so in that sense I agree with you, but I believe it describes the reality for many students. I’ve got a long essay on the issue here http://ggames-larvan.blogspot.com/2008/12/chapter-1.html. It goes back to high school, or even earlier. Not many high achievers have taken your approach, I believe.

Getting back to your original point, it may be that LMS software, especially after it scales up beyond the initial developer, ends up having no vision behind it whatsoever. It represents the aggregation of users (instructors and administrators much more than students) expressed need or the developer interpretations of that expression. The critical point here is that those needs are invariably functional, not visionary, and they represent incremental improvement of where the software currently is, not a radical new direction. Further, product development cycles are slow, which encourages lock in to the old way of doing things.

So perhaps you might opine on how such software is developed and whether that inevitable if the application is designed primarily for Higher Ed.

I’m not oblivious that LMS will be here for a long time; that’s why I posted this post – the caveat at the start was a message to compadres who otherwise would ignore this simply because it had something to do with LMS. I disagree with you on both points about faculty and students not wanting it as much – if we are more vocal, it’s because we KNOW there is something different.

Bolt down seating – we used to walk out and do classes in the halls or in the field when we encountered stuff like that. There’s no excuse for settling, especially if you are not literally forced to. Sure, pick your battles, and for me, as an educational technologist, developing and promoting alternatives to the LMS-based vision of educational technology is one of them. A lonely one, maybe, a pointless one, perhaps. Won’t be the first windmill I tilted at. But as the good Reverend always reminds me, you can’t live wrong rightly.

My experience at Illinois is that while there are a few others who feel likewise, Learning Technologists as a group want to change teaching and learning more than faculty or students want to see it change.

Then I’d add on top of that consider the segmentation in Higher Ed. My campus has reasonably high student performance as measured by the most common statistic, graduation rates. Here the correlation between LMS use and course grades are interesting for certain niches in the student population who typically under perform relative to the average, but it is less interesting overall. At other campuses with substantially lower graduation rates, the correlation is likely more interesting across the board, as it is a proxy for that old variable – class participation.

One more thought. We have a lot of classrooms with bolt down seating where a student can’t turn in the chair to face his neighbor. Most of that is in very large auditoriums, but we have some in smaller classrooms. That design matched someone’s conception of how instruction should happen and it has persisted. Bolt down seating isn’t going away any time soon. I’d venture the same is true of the LMS.