Updating the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment for Better Student Learning Outcomes
a learning management system (LMS) is never the solution to every problem in education. Edtech is just one part of the whole learning ecosystem and student experience.
Therefore, the next generation digital learning environment (NGDLE), as envisioned by EDUCAUSE in 2015 … Looking at the NGDLE requirements from an LMS perspective, I view the NGDLE as being about five areas: interoperability; personalization; analytics, advising, and learning assessment; collaboration; accessibility and universal design.
- Content can easily be exchanged between systems.
- Users are able to leverage the tools they love, including discipline-specific apps.
- Learning data is available to trusted systems and people who need it.
- The learning environment is “future proof” so that it can adapt and extend as the ecosystem evolves.
- The learning environment reflects individual preferences.
- Departments, divisions, and institutions can be autonomous.
- Instructors teach the way they want and are not constrained by the software design.
- There are clear, individual learning paths.
- Students have choice in activity, expression, and engagement.
Analytics, Advising, and Learning Assessment
- Learning analytics helps to identify at-risk students, course progress, and adaptive learning pathways.
- The learning environment enables integrated planning and assessment of student performance.
- More data is made available, with greater context around the data.
- The learning environment supports platform and data standards.
- Individual spaces persist after courses and after graduation.
- Learners are encouraged as creators and consumers.
- Courses include public and private spaces.
Accessibility and Universal Design
- Accessibility is part of the design of the learning experience.
- The learning environment enables adaptive learning and supports different types of materials.
- Learning design includes measurement rubrics and quality control.
The core analogy used in the NGDLE paper is that each component of the learning environment is a Lego brick:
- The days of the LMS as a “walled garden” app that does everything is over.
- Today many kinds of amazing learning and collaboration tools (Lego bricks) should be accessible to educators.
- We have standards that let these tools (including an LMS) talk to each other. That is, all bricks share some properties that let them fit together.
- Students and teachers sign in once to this “ecosystem of bricks.”
- The bricks share results and data.
- These bricks fit together; they can be interchanged and swapped at will, with confidence that the learning experience will continue uninterrupted.
Any “next-gen” attempt to completely rework the pedagogical model and introduce a “mash-up of whatever” to fulfil this model would fall victim to the same criticisms levied at the LMS today: there is too little time and training to expect faculty to figure out the nuances of implementation on their own.
The Lego metaphor works only if we’re talking about “old school” Lego design — bricks of two, three, and four-post pieces that neatly fit together. Modern edtech is a lot more like the modern Lego. There are wheels and rocket launchers and belts and all kinds of amazing pieces that work well with each other, but only when they are configured properly. A user cannot simply stick together different pieces and assume they will work harmoniously in creating an environment through which each student can be successful.
As the NGDLE paper states: “Despite the high percentages of LMS adoption, relatively few instructors use its more advanced features — just 41% of faculty surveyed report using the LMS ‘to promote interaction outside the classroom.'”
But this is what the next generation LMS is good at: being a central nervous system — or learning hub — through which a variety of learning activities and tools are used. This is also where the LMS needs to go: bringing together and making sense of all the amazing innovations happening around it. This is much harder to do, perhaps even impossible, if all the pieces involved are just bricks without anything to orchestrate them or to weave them together into a meaningful, personal experience for achieving well-defined learning outcomes.
- Making a commitment to build easy, flexible, and smart technology
- Working with colleges and universities to remove barriers to adopting new tools in the ecosystem
- Standardizing the vetting of accessibility compliance (the Strategic Nonvisual Access Partner Program from the National Federation of the Blind is a great start)
- Advancing standards for data exchange while protecting individual privacy
- Building integrated components that work with the institutions using them — learning quickly about what is and is not working well and applying those lessons to the next generation of interoperability standards
- Letting people use the tools they love [SIC] and providing more ways for nontechnical individuals (including students) to easily integrate new features into learning activities
My note: something just refused to be accepted at SCSU
Technologists are often very focused on the technology, but the reality is that the more deeply and closely we understand the pedagogy and the people in the institutions — students, faculty, instructional support staff, administrators — the better suited we are to actually making the tech work for them.
Under the Hood of a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment in Progress
The challenge is that although 85 percent of faculty use a campus learning management system (LMS),1 a recent Blackboard report found that, out of 70,000 courses across 927 North American institutions, 53 percent of LMS usage was classified as supplemental(content-heavy, low interaction) and 24 percent as complementary (one-way communication via content/announcements/gradebook).2 Only 11 percent were characterized as social, 10 percent as evaluative (heavy use of assessment), and 2 percent as holistic (balanced use of all previous). Our FYE course required innovating beyond the supplemental course-level LMS to create a more holistic cohort-wide NGDLE in order to fully support the teaching, learning, and student success missions of the program.The key design goals for our NGDLE were to:
- Create a common platform that could deliver a standard curriculum and achieve parity in all course sections using existing systems and tools and readily available content
- Capture, store, and analyze any generated learner data to support learning assessment, continuous program improvement, and research
- Develop reports and actionable analytics for administrators, advisors, instructors, and students
more on LMS in this blog
more on learning outcomes in this IMS blog