Serendipity35

Earlier, I wrote about Google Classroom developing as a nontraditional learning management system (LMS). Now, I want to consider what the next-gen LMS might include.

One thing I have read is that rather than being just an eLearning portal, this next-gen LMS must be an "engagement engine." That is a buzzworthy term because not only in education but in the social media marketing world "engagement" is considered to be very importent. 

In the U.S., we don't hear much about LMS products from other part of the world. Growth Engineering is a UK  Learning Technologies company, and they see their mission as making learning fun with gamification and engaging content. Their LMS (Academy) and their authoring tool (Genie) are both new to me. They appear to me to be intended for corporate training rather than school use, but I suspect the next-gen LMS will be able to operate in both domains.

Juliette Denny, of Growth Engineering when writing on elearningindustry.com, notes 9 Characteristics Of The NextGen LMS. I could come up with other characteristics and I'm sure a group of faculty or instructional designers could come up with others. With a focus on corporate training, her list probably won't agree with one from academia but, again, I think that next-gen LMS will work in both places.

I agree with her that the earlier Learning Management Systems were very much portals and content depositories for learning units. In the late 1990s, we sometimes called them a CMS which could mean course management system or content management system and institutions used them both ways.

I worked for a few years designing corporate training and clients definitely want a way to manage content - documentation, help files etc. - as well as a way to track employee uses of that content. The ability to monitor employee progress and mastery of training was the next thing that was a concern. This is not unlike academic use of an LMS.

The LMS of 2017 is much more sophisticated than the ones I used at the end of the 20th century. They are easier to do authoring. They are not beautiful, but they are less ugly. They take into account user experience much more and their use is much more intuitive.

In corporate use (and perhaps in some free and non-credit use) "informal learning" is a definite consideration. One key element of that is a system's ability to track and predict in order to direct the learner toward the next piece of content. This individualized learning path is something being developed more recently but will certainly be built into the next-gen LMS.

Connected to this informal learning is social learning. The current LMS you use probably has ways to interact with social networks. It might even have its own social tools. Most of these do not have the appeal of the most popular networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al). The next-gen LMS will include the qualities of a social network and will "help organizations capture and retain intellectual capital."

Some social features appear in LMS, but many companies use separate application (such as Sharepoint) for social collaboration, and in schools outside social network still rule. Combining the two successfully means learners have a reason to return to the LMS and complete more training or coursework. We are not there yet.

The next-gen LMS will be mobile. I still have not seen a really well done mobile version of an enterprise LMS, though vendors will tout that their LMS is "optimized for mobile use."

What about this engagement engine concept? As the aforementioned article points out for the corporate world, "It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that employee engagement is a big problem. Training aside, poor engagement is responsible for low productivity, high employee turnover and lifeless company cultures. The sad thing is that these consequences exacerbate the issue of engagement, locking organizations in a downward spiral." In education, these translate to poor grades, dropped courses and lower enrollments.

Things you will see being developed more now are improved vectors for feedback and communication from facilitator to learner and from learner to learner. Learners want to know how they are progressing and want to be "rewarded" for progress. Whether those rewards will be most engaging as grades/salary, status/advancement, badges, rankings or some other system is yet to be decided. 

Gamification is currently one of the ways to let learners see progress and become engaged. But "gamification" still carries with it the incorrectly applied impression (especially in higher education) of playing games and "making learning fun." Learning, at its best, is fun, but don't tell professors that is the goal for them to strive for.

I realized early on in doing corporate training design work that tracking employees’ "key performance indicators" was surprisingly much more important to companies than it was to educators. Our corporate courses were actually more concerned with formative assessments (frequent checks for learning), than our academic courses that more commonly used summative assessments (quizzes and tests).

That future ideal LMS will include "performance management suites that tie together objectives, competencies, reviews and training in one streamlined process."

Are these unrealistic goals for a future LMS. No. In fact, I know that all of these items are being studied and tested by developers. It is just a question of how long it will take for them to be ready in one LMS.

Does a degree ever expire? That is not a question I had ever asked myself, but an article by Kristi Depaul on nextgenlearning.org/blog/ did ask that question and got me thinking about it.

There is probably strong agreement with students and employers that you can't summarize a learning experience very well with a list of courses and grades. What would anyone know about my undergraduate degree from many years ago from a transcript? Not much. My work experiences since then have certainly made some of those academic experiences much stronger. But some of those courses are pretty much gone from my memory at this point.

Depaul is mostly concerned with the evolution of the transcript (which is also a recent ELI 7 Things You Should Know About brief). Part of that evolution might mean including activities, accomplishments and experiences beyond those that occur within the traditional academic environment. 

Have my degrees expired in the way that licenses and certifications expire? Should there be a way to update the degree to show professional development and other work done since it was awarded? 

The article notes that four institutions are looking at a new kind of "learner record" and thinking about questions such as: Who should be able to control the information displayed within it? What are the implications for teaching and learning? These records might contain a learner’s entire academic history from multiple institutions. A new kind of transcript could include "information from credentialing organizations, research, service learning, internships, study abroad, badges, co-curricular achievements, and other evidence of knowledge."

Would a reimagined student record make a degree less likely to "expire?"

An article this week in The Chronicle by Goldie Blumenstyk asks "Is a Degree Just the Beginning?" It is one of a number of articles they have grouped around the theme of "The Credentials Craze" which is introduced with: "A college degree isn't the only credential that matters anymore. As part of a growing movement to document students' knowledge and skills, an array of companies, industry groups, and colleges themselves are offering new types of credentials. "

I don't believe that most people in higher education have signed on to badges, certificates, and microdegrees whether they are earned in a course or via some other non-profit (most MOOCs, for example) or a for-profit company (a Coursera MOOC that is not free but carries credentials or a site like like Lynda.com).

There are still many issues surrounding credentials' validity and measurement, and I think the jury is still out on whether they help graduates seeking jobs.

Here is how Blumenstyk opens her article:

The idea of students graduating from college with just a diploma — a single academic credential — could soon seem downright quaint.

At some institutions, it already is. Community colleges in North Carolina encourage students to complete coursework while earning certifications from industry groups like the National Institute for Metalworking Skills and the National Aviation Consortium. At Lipscomb University, students can qualify for badges, endorsed by outside experts, to prove they have mastered skills such as "Active Listening" and "Drive and Energy." Students at Elon University get an "extended transcript" describing their nonacademic accomplishments.

Higher education is entering a new era, one in which some industry and nonacademic certifications are more valuable than degrees, transcripts are becoming credentials in their own right, and colleges are using badges to offer assurances to employers about students’ abilities in ways that a degree no longer seems to do. On top of the traditional academic and corporate players, a whole bunch of nonprofits and businesses are also jumping on — if not leading — the movement, including MOOC providers like Coursera and Udacity and so-called coding academies like General Assembly, Galvanize, and the Flatiron School.

 

The Lumina Foundation is worried about credentialing. They feel that with a widening range of certificates, badges, experiential transcripts, industry certifications and licenses, in addition to those traditional college degrees, we are left with a fragmented system for job seekers and employers.

What do those credentials represent? What rigor is behind them? Whose standards do they meet?

Lumina already sponsors a Degree Qualification Profile, which attempts to define what a degree should mean. Now, they are suggesting a "Lingua Franca for Credentials" that would create a common language across systems. They released a beta version of the framework, which experts from the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce and the Center for Law and Social Policy developed. Dozens of contributors from other groups also helped create the template.

More at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/12/lumina-led-group-seeks-develop-common-framework-credentials