WARNING – this is a long dump to get ideas that are in my head out and to welcome any feedback that might come by.I’ve been thinking about how LMSs should be support. Rather than looking at the software, staff and systems to add more to fill the holes that are identified by a review. Perhaps it would make more sense to look at the work flow and see how it needs to be modified or supported. I believe that this will identify a number of people who are not directly involved with the LMS as being important to the proper functioning of the system. So rather than trying to catch the raging river at the end of it’s course using brute force methods or adding staff and services, it might make more sense to take a look at the head waters of the work flow and supporting change there to make it more manageable downstream.
The University of Alberta is currently moving through an LMS review, and though I am not on the committee, I’ve attempted to be at every meeting where I could offer my two cents. Seemingly, those two cents are quite a bit compared to some of the others that show at the meetings, but that is all good. Yesterday was another one of those meetings.
At the meeting, the question of support came up, support in general and instructor support. This seems to be a no brainer… until you start to think about what support really means. Is it support for the maintenance of the desktop? The network behind the desktop? The server application? The support to get files in an electronic format for the instructor from the admin staff? Getting the instructor up to speed on just what the LMS can do beyond being a dumping ground for cryptically named files? Helping students get to the content that the instructor has posted? Helping develop and redevelop content to make better use of the LMS once it has started? Or… is it something else?
Outside the instructor, there should also be institutional support. Not just the support that comes from a central unit to run a LMS, but also support from the administrators to make use of the technology and provide a positive impression with regards to the system for new staff. Speaking of staff, should the concentration be on the tenure track faculty who are already at the institution and plan to be there for a long time? Or should support also be extended to sessionals and grad students who likely teach the bulk of the instructional hours within an given department? What about the “non academic” instructors who take care of labs or seminars – those individuals who do academic work, who are long term employees, but are not in a lecturing position.
So support really does seem to be a loaded word, especially if an institution considers the LMS to be an enterprise level system. It often seems that the LMS is “just another app” in the eyes of everyone from the desktop support people to the highest positions in administration. In reality, it should be as much “the” application as the finance/HR system is. Using hits as a metric and making the assumption that students out number staff by 3:1, the number of hits served to the finance/HR system and the LMS might be about the same. So why doesn’t the LMS and the staff tasked to it get more respect?
I think it comes back to the term support. Most “support” staffers on campus are not very likely to interact with the LMS, so they are ignorant to it’s needs and capabilities. For most of them, this makes sense, but they are using work flows that are generating materials that make it harder for those staff who do interact with the LMS. This starts a chain reaction through the system that makes it harder for everyone, right down to the student to good use of the LMS.
I’ve already run through a range of people who might need to be called to support some element of the LMS, but the one thread that runs through them all is the work flow. If we are to look at the support of an LMS, we need to really support the work flow that is involved in delivering any given piece of content from the desktop of an administrator to the eyeball of a student. Office staff who interact only with instructors need to have the support required to be able to produce grades/sylabi and other administrative documents in a format that is LMS friendly. These people need the proper desktop/network support, including being able to potentially upload the files into an LMS. Once these core files are available, it becomes easier for instructors to get going with a system and eventually go on to customize later on. Getting off to a positive start, instructors are going to have a better outlook on the system and that will transfer to the students. But that is in an ideal world.
The real world has instructors who are bound to their old ways and are not willing to move to a new system even if it is completely supported. Why? Because it does not fit into the work flow that they have become comfortable with, regardless of how arcane. The real world also has instructors who are moving into doing new things faster than the LMS will support, being more than comfortable with the work flow required to get a course up and running on the LMS. The trick it seems is to support both work flows to ensure that the end product lands where the end user wants it to. It would make sense if the institution was able to outline a best practice, or minimal standard work flow and then use that to nudge things along into the final location with the understanding that this work flow impacts just about all staff. Those instructors who land close to this work flow will only need minimal support, those who are further afield will need more in terms of interventions (they might need dams to redirect their old work flow). While seemingly obvious, understanding this at an administrative/institutional level seems to be what is needed.
If the LMS is to be an institutional service, then it needs to be supported by the entire institution, from the administrative person entering names and grades to the Office of the Provost who is authorizing funding for capital expenditures. Right now, LMSs, like many other ICT solutions in the classroom feel tacked on. If this is the case, and those involved in support are “only” a subset of the larger university “admin/support machine” rather than a significant proportion of it, no amount of funding or recommendations will help move the use of the LMS forward.
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