People and e-learning – limitations and an alternative

So the last of three sections examining the limitations of industrial e-learning and suggesting an alternative. Time to write the conclusion, read the paper over again and cut it down to size.

People

The characteristics of the product and process of industrial e-learning (e.g. focus on long periods of stable use and the importance of efficient use of the chosen LMS) directly reinforced by and directly impact the people and roles involved with tertiary e-learning. This section briefly examines just four examples of this impact, including:

1. The negative impact of organizational hierarchies on communication and knowledge sharing.
   The logical decomposition inherent in teleological design creates numerous, often significant, organizational boundaries between the people involved with e-learning. Such boundaries are seen as inhibiting the ability to integrate knowledge across the organization. The following comments from Rossi and Luck (2011, p. 68) partially illustrate this problem:

   During training sessions … several people made suggestions and raised issues with the structure and use of Moodle. As these suggestions and issues were not recorded and the trainers did not feed them back to the programmers … This resulted in frustration for academic staff when teaching with Moodle for the first time as the problems were not fixed before teaching started.

2. Chinese whispers.
   Within an appropriate governance structure the need for changes to an LMS would typically need to flow up from the users to a central committee typically made up of senior leaders from the faculties, Information Technology and central learning and teaching. There would normally be some representation from teaching staff and students. The length of the communication chain for the original need becomes like a game of Chinese Whispers as it is interpreted through the experiences and biases of those involved. Leading to this impression reported by Rossi and Luck (2011, p. 69)

   The longer the communication chain, the less likely it was that academic users’ concerns would be communicated correctly to the people who could fix the problems.

   The cost of traversing this chain of communication means it is typically not worth the effort of raising small-scale changes.

   Not to mention killing creativity which just came through my Twitter feed thanks to @kyliebudge.

3. Mixed purposes.
   Logical decomposition also encourages different organizational units to focus on their part of the problem and lose sight of the whole picture. An IT division evaluated on its ability to minimize cost and maximize availability is not likely to want to support technologies in which it has limited expertise. This is one explanation for why the leader of an IT division would direct the IT division’s representatives on an LMS selection panel to ensure that the panel selected the LMS implemented in Java. Or a decision to use the latest version of the Oracle DBMS – the DBMS supported by the IT division – to support the new Moodle installation even though it hasn’t been tested with Moodle and best practice advice is to avoid Oracle. A decision that leads to weeks at the start of the “go live” term where Moodle is largely unavailable.
4. The perils of senior leadership.
   Having the support and engagement of a senior leader at an institution is often seen as a critical success factor for an LMS implementation. But when the successful completion of the project is tied to the leader’s progression within the leadership hierarchy it can create the situation where the project will be deemed a success, regardless of the outcome.

As an alternative, the Webfuse system relied on a multi-skilled, integrated development and support team. This meant that the small team was responsible for training, helpdesk support, and systems development. The helpdesk person handling the user’s problem was typically also a Webfuse developer who was empowered to make small changes without formal governance approval. Behrens (2009, p. 127) quotes a manager in CQU’s IT division describing the types of changes made to Webfuse as “not even on the priority radar” due to traditional IT management techniques. The developers were also located within the faculty, so they also interacted with academic staff in the corridors and the staff room. This context created an approach to the support of an e-learning system with all the hallmarks of a social constructivist, situated cognition, or community of practice. The type of collaborative and supportive environment identified by Tickle et al (2009) in which academics learn through attempts to solve genuine educational problems, rather than being shown how to adapt their needs to the constraints of the LMS.

References

Behrens, S. (2009). Shadow systems: the good, the bad and the ugly. Communications of the ACM, 52(2), 124-129.

Rossi, D., & Luck, J. (2011). Wrestling, wrangling and reaping: An exploration of educational practice and the transference of academic knowledge and skill in online learning contexts. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 8(1), 60-75. Retrieved from http://www.sleid.cqu.edu.au/include/getdoc.php?id=1122&article=391&mode=pdf

Tickle, K., Muldoon, N., & Tennent, B. (2009). Moodle and the institutional repositioning of learning and teaching at CQUniversity. Auckland, NZ. Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/tickle.pdf