A few weeks ago, I advised a student who was looking to get some ideas for a project that “if people are willing to put in no effort to get maximal results, the result will not be worth anything”. This is understandable, it’s classic GIGO. But then yesterday when talking with a prof as to how to get more people to adopt WebCT, we started talking about templates and it came to me (as it should have earlier), that it’s not about the effort that the instructor puts into the L/CMS that is important (that should be secondary and transparent), it’s the effort that goes into the content that can be swapped in and out of a L/CMS shell. If we are really serious about preaching that it’s about the content and not the tools, we should really look at what we do to make those tools accessible for the person who is more concerned with the content in addition to those that are willing to put in their time customizing the delivery of that content. WebCT and the other L/CMS that are out there are all still very “techie” and engineer-centric in their terms and logic, something that for the average instructor that may not know anything about pedagogy or have any cares about online learning strategies certainly has a hard time penetrating without help. And if there is a unit or person tasked with this help, it should provide the full range of help from complete production to advice only.
With any luck Vista 4 and beyond will use more human language in how it describes it’s components (the portfolio system certainly does).
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