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Don’t let your online strategy become a conversation about which LMS to use
I’m that age where I can say I’ve been working in ed tech for 15 + years. Like many of us, my life in ed tech in higher education began more or less with the LMS. Through the years I’ve witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly with seemingly endless tentacles that the LMS brings to our discussions about teaching and learning and especially online learning in our institutions. Here’s the short of it. LMS’s do some things really well and are not going to go away. We still use an LMS at our institution, and while I would really like the vendor to invest some of our hard…
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Dear LMS companies (and other ed tech sales people),
Thank you for getting in touch with me, and for not bothering our VP and President and CIO after I didn’t initially respond to you voice mail or email request to talk about the latest features that your LMS has to offer. In the six years I’ve been in this job, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many of you, both in person and via other means. I admire the enthusiasm and patience you have in a role where I personally would struggle, especially when trying to get people like me excited about your latest offerings. I suspect it must be very deflating to talk to people like me, and I…
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A Response to D’Arcy Norman on the LMS/Open Binary
D’Arcy Norman has a great post on his blog where he challenges what he feels is a binary between LMS hate and Open love. I was really excited by this post because a) I realized how thirsty I’ve been to read actual blog posts again and b) I found it nailed the state of LMS and Open ed tool thinking. I think where you sit on the continuum of Open to LMS has to do with the kind of institution and institutional resources available to you. I work at a small but highly productive institution that runs on about 40 million (yes, only one 0 there, folks) a year. D’Arcy makes the point that institutions…
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#ETUG and the 1994 flashback
I spent that last couple of days at the ETUG Spring workshop, which was a bit of a special one for the ETUG crowd given that it was the 20th anniversary edition. The Langara location was itself a bit of a flashback for me, given that my first real post secondary job was at Langara only 13 short years ago. For added fun, ETUG invited us to think about the state of educational technology 20 years ago in relation to our lives at that time. The backstory I found myself thinking about that a a fair bit during the 2 days, since there were so many subtle reminders of where…
