If you build it...

A famous movie line goes as follows "if you build it they will come." My experience has taught me, as far as educational technology goes anyway, that if you build it they might or might not come. It just depends on their needs. Sometimes the problem is that students, and the faculty that teach them, don't know their needs and quite a lot of times he tools used transform their practices so much that they wouldn't have even known that they needed a tool when in fact they did!

This transformational capability of technology is something that business operations of educational institutions seem to not consider and it came to light in a recent set of emails at work. We just had our Blackboard Vista LMS upgraded to SP5 which enables blackboard mobile. Of course in order use Bb mobile on your device it has to be enabled on the server side and this wasn't done by our provider. The rationale was that there hadn't been a need expresses for mLearming; even though a lot of instructional designers asked bout the mobile capabilities of the LMSs we tested a few months back when we were doing an RFP for our Next LMS.

In subsequent emails it was revealed, or so goes my understanding of these emails, that it was the faculty that teach that hadn't expressed a need, and I'd we were to turn on Bb mobile capabilities it might not need the demands of our users.

This logic is flawed in two ways:
(1) we can't wait for faculty to express the need for a certain technology. Learning is a two wu street and we need to give our students the tools to learn on their own way and time. It's not a top down learning environment Any more. Also, the supply chain isn't a pull-chain as much as it is a "make it available" chain. This is the amazon model of making EdTech available - just put out your wares and let the faculty decide how to use it.


(2) by waiting for someone (or a group of people) to request a tool you are negating the transformational aspect of technology. By operating on the amazon model you are allowing students and teachers to redefine pedagogy in unforeseen and exciting ways. Sure some times things go awry, but happy accidents sure to happen and they benefit all. We need to be less concerned with service level agreements and we need to be concerned with innovation. If you don't have the amount of human resources you need to provide top notch service, just slap on a "beta" label and your users will understand - but for heaven's sake make the tech available.

As a side note, Bb mobile sucks when compared to instructure Canvas' and Desire2Learn's mobile offerings, but it's better than nothing! Besides, if our users think Bb mobile sucks, maybe next time we can go with a better LMS ;-) LOL


-- Post From My iPhone

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more