Constrained by CMS
Interesting article in this month’s First Monday by Lisa Lane about the constraints imposed by course management systems such as Blackboard, WebCT, and Desire2Learn. The article is called “Insidious Pedagogy”, and it focuses largely on the defaults on the course dashboards, which Lane says contribute to the faults of novice online instructors, who don’t realize that they can be customized. Well, yes, true, but I think that some deeper issues lie in the fact that the “defaults” are constructed to provide a very linear framework for efficient delivery of course material, that students expect to see a certain structure to all online courses after their first exposure to one, and that many of the customized features available are either not available due to cost or removed at institutional request (I’m thinking particularly of the “pager” on Desire2Learn, which I absolutely loved, but which was removed by the IT administrator at faculty request because students expected the instructor to respond more quickly than usual to these messages, and many faculty didn’t want to be constrained into this kind of “emergency response.”) Some customized features are abhorrent to me: I can’t conceive of using Turnitin, and yet that is being touted as a wonderful new addition to our instructional repertoire, because student papers can be sent directly from the dropbox to the Turnitin servers.
Bottom line is that, although I love the tremendous amount of information that can be conveyed in all directions 24/7 in a good online course, I suspect that I wouldn’t especially enjoy them as a student either, compared to the face-to-face experience, which is becoming increasingly uncommon. I’m fortunate that all my education was face-to-face, though it was not nearly as interesting as it could have been (since it was largely constrained by 3 hour lecture-style evening classes, accompanied by black and white overhead transparencies if the instructor was especially technologically adept!)
And yet I managed to learn quite a bit along the way, I suspect. Hopefully my students will do the same, irregardless of the CMS and instructor constraints.
