There’s been some back-and-forth in distance education literature on the issue of “too many tools” in today’s dominant learning management systems (LMSs). These include Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, etc. There are functional equivalents in every LMS. Here, I make the case for standardization using open source equivalents as a move towards simplification. My mantra: “standardize, don’t simplify.”

Examples of tools include YouTube videos, chats, GoogleDocs, Perusal, bookmarks and discussion forums. The advantage of integrating open source tools that do the same thing, is that the content they ensconce is accessible past the end of the course to preserve and extend our community & exchanges. Sort of a lifetime learning warrantee.

The trick is to integrate external tools in a way that is seamless to the student. Canvas has a plug-n-play means of doing that.

As a consequence, the end-user doesn’t even notice that they’re using a plug-in.

And luckily, most of these tools kind of look and feel the same as their functional equivalents when embedded in a course page. They’re not all that different as stand-alone pop-up applications. An LMS screen, after all, is just a webpage. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know whether it’s Canvas or Blackboard. That should be transparent.

There’s an argument made in distance education discourse on reducing the transactional distance between teachers and students. A common response is to use tools that students are already using before they come to campus, and will continue to use on exit. Some schools, like Mary Washington University, only use external tools. Their argument is that ensconcing equivalent functionality in an LMS–is in itself adding an extra layer of complexity.

There’s an excellent account of this in Richard A. DeMillo’s Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities–where I l first heard of it.

In practice, open external tools integration works just fine, and the repertoire of tools, YouTube (integrated), Twitter (chat), GoogleDocs (journaling), Piazza (discussion forums), Diigo (Perusal & bookmarks)–is just that–a menu you can pick and choose from. There was one more–Padlet(?)–that has a functional equivalent in Diigo and overlap functionality in GoogleDocs. Diigo does what Padlet and Perusal did, plus bookmarking. Three for one, and accessible tuition free outside the course.

Also, think of the effort required to extract embedded comments in Perusal. Great tool in principle, but proprietary and stuck in the walled garden of Canvas to boot.

So, in practice–the repertoire I’m suggesting is actually less of an encumbrance–with fewer tools (one of which actually does the work of three). The way it was put it up on slide 10 of the presentation (http://tinyurl.com/AOCD-Cole (Links to an external site.)) makes it look more daunting than it is.

I had a knee-jerk reaction against this approach initially, till I sought to integrate of a standalone chat tool into my institution’s LMS that supported threading several years ago. (Canvas’ integrated chat still doesn’t support threads.)

It turns out Twitter introduced this functionality in 2009, so I switched all chat links in our shells to Twitter backchannels–and–nobody noticed. No complaints. Not a peep. Students just clicked on a link, and up came a familiar friend with all its refinements, independent software support, broad user-base, social reach, and extension beyond the end of the course. An unforeseen benefit–more students “found” our school by means of social media plug-ins than via traditional advertising.

There’s a term for this in software engineering–“componentized design”–where rather than reinventing the wheel, we endeavor to repurpose standard off the shelf tools. “Integrated stand-alones” may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s the best guarantee that your garden variety LMS is capitalizing on best-of-breed tools.

Ironically, Canvas’ greatest strengths–social media plug-ins and standards aligned rubrics–are its least known and utilized features.

But again, seamless integration is the key.

The concern over longevity is valid. I used to measure technology progress in dog years. Now I measure it in flea years. But all software is destined to obsolesce. I’m more concerned about access, and use of proprietary LMSs shuts that off at the end of the semester. Course shells tend to get obliterated after 18 months. Open source tools that sell of their own volition will probably be around for a while longer.

Even Canvas, like Moodle, is open source. You can get it for free on GitHub. Instructure is just making a fee for service business out of hosting it. DeMillo might argue it’s a bait and switch.

If your institution uses proprietary tools (or “widgets”), a gradual tranistioning to open source equivalents can be made incrementally, acclimating faculty and students alike to the new paradigm.

🙂