Over breakfast this weekend at a popular farmhouse two high school teachers sat next to me to discuss how their respective LMS solutions made teaching difficult. Both were from wealthy suburbs outside Milwaukee. What really peaked my interest was hearing how one spent over 45 minutes trying to add polling for in-class feedback.
I helped lead the adoption of a Moodle LMS at a private Wisconsin college in 2007 that is still in use today and also had the pleasure of attending a conference at UW-Madison with Martin Dougiamas the founder of Moodle.
Yet over that breakfast I was intrigued by their difficulty with all things LMS for the upcoming school year. Frustration ranged from how one teacher received no LMS training (poll example above) while the second teacher spoke about her district migrating to a new LMS vendor over the summer.
Of course no technology discussion can avoid a teacher mentioning K12 servers going offline for hours during the school day making their teaching even more difficult. Seems like teachers have a lot to confront on a daily basis in delivering education to a classroom of twenty plus students. A local LMS run from an empty closet is no longer acceptable.
Maybe we have reached a tipping point where any state’s K12 agency should roll out a licensed solid, reliable LMSaaS. Remember the LMS marketplace is an $8 Billion market. Blackboard Learn, Pearson Realize, D2L (rebranded as Brightspace) and Moodle are very well established while Amazon, Google and to a lesser (extent but on the horizon) Salesforce all bring a lot more industrial punch to LMSaaS.
While Moodle really jumpstarted LMSaaS years ago Google propelled their Classroom LMSaaS….because its from Google of course. Yet Classroom is also Google’s platform for Chromebooks not so softly aiming to replace OS X and Windows with their OS by integrating Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Amazon’s LMSaaS certainly has made an corporate effort recently but continue to have existing Moodle LMSaaS options in their marketplace. Seems like LMS is indeed having an identity crisis.
Bottom line: K12 Districts must implement a solution built upon their established curriculum but hosted a solid, reputable cloud infrastructure that supports mobile devices. Districts must conduct LMSaaS training and provide dashboard metrics.
But buyer beware: The best platform will suffer if just one IT professional is responsible for administering the LMS along with every other enterprise service while putting out fires across any medium to large district. That includes travel in may cases. Today there are so many IT services expected at every District. Teachers have fully embraced the laptop, tablet and smartphone solution and even the cloud but the school enterprise has to step up as teaching professionals are still hampered by local technology implementations.