One aspect of the LMS that I haven’t seen addressed directly is the power of the default to shape course design. Lisa M. Lane has discussed the issue as one that confronts web-novice faculty and suggests ways to ameliorate the default problem.
Although Lane recognizes that the influence of LMS defaults extends beyond web-novice faculty (“Even experienced instructors continue to use Blackboard/WebCT primarily for grade administration, e–mail and presenting static content”), I think the problem is more pervasive than she lets on. The nature of the LMS beast means that even those of us who have been using it for years always remain novices.
Course design should happen before classes start, so any of the work dealing with setting up a course in the LMS happens once a semester, twice or at best three times a year. As a practical matter, someone who teaches a couple of courses online each semester will only set up a course about 4 times in a year. That’s not enough to learn how to work the software, and when you throw in the various updates and new editions of LMS software, even those of us who’ve been teaching online for years never really get to be experts at the software that drives the design of our courses. I re-learn my college’s LMS at the beginning of each semester as I adjust the design of my courses, and even after 6 years, it feels as counter-intuitive as ever. I’ve adopted lots of new technologies over that time, but the LMS is as opaque as it was when I first encountered it.
We faculty have the same problem with the LMS that students do: it’s an unfamiliar technology that we use in limited ways. Outside of class, neither I nor my students ever use it. Once the semester’s over, my students may never use it again.1 We’re forced into using tools that have no value outside the institution, and we never get good at them. I’ve become much more proficient in WordPress over the past 6 months than I have in LMS over the past 6 years because it has some use outside of class, and because I use it more than twice a year.
1 I may not either: memento mori.