LMS Reminiscing: The Teacher Perspective
The Disclaimer:
When I start to talk about learning management systems, I get a little passionate. I talk about names, prices, and some things that may make some people uncomfortable. Obviously, my comments come from being an end user, not the owner, CFO or CTO of a massive software company. They have their own things to worry about, and I have mine. I understand there are *thousands* of happy users of many of these software systems, but in case there are users who share my concerns, I’m putting this out there.
The History:
My experience with educational technology began quite by chance, when I started teaching high school German in the Denver Public Schools, and, like every other teacher in the district, was given a Mac Classic to use with my class and/or take home. This was the early 1990’s, and DPS was pretty advanced, in that it had passed a bond and put the infrastructure for voice, video, and data (as well as the portable Mac Classic) into every classroom. The following year I applied and was hired to create a cable television and telephone-based (one-way video, two-way audio) distance learning pilot program to teach several high schools German. This then grew into an entire distance learning network focused on elementary programs in art, science, geography, Spanish and French. Ok, right, this has nothing to do with an LMS. Flash forward.
Enter the LMS:
In 1999, I began teaching online, adapting the materials and techniques I had developed in distance learning via TV for distance learning via the web. At the time, the consortium I worked for (now Colorado Online Learning), used Jones e-Education Software Standard (JESS) for course management. It did the job, mostly. A couple years later, we moved to eCollege. It did the job better. I used it for several years, but I started to feel limited by the software, and started sending wish lists to tech support fairly early on. As a teacher, I had little control over many variables and features I wanted, and even my tech support person had little ability to do much more than create new course shells for me and move content from term to term. I found there were some very repetitive tasks and setups that took the majority of my time and repeatedly asked for changes. I kept thinking, ‘can’t someone just go in and change the code a little bit to do this…” Nothing. I went to a user conference and sat in a room with some 30 other users and came up with a list of desired changes and new features. Still Nothing….
To be continued…
In the next episode: The Tech Support Specialist Perspective.
Posted by Clark Shah-Nelson