Hi Ken,
Many thanks for these thoughts. I think the issues of adoption of Learning Design (your last point) and licensing for open content are mostly separate at the moment, so I'll take each in turn in separate posts. Listed below are some reflections on the reasons for the slow adoption of Learning Design to date:
(1) A typical Course Management System (CMS) is mostly used to support existing practice, rather than transform the pedagogy of a course. Typical real world CMS use (ie, announcements, email, calendar, course documents and slides) seems to me to be “e-admin” for learning, rather than actual “e-learning”. These “e-admin” components are helpful contributions towards an efficient course, but they are quite different to the introduction of online scenarios for problem-based learning or role plays (as examples of more transformational pedagogical approaches). So while Learning Design systems may be strong in their support for transformational pedagogies, the reality is that current CMS use is mostly not in this direction to date. When innovative work is done in a CMS, it is mostly “single-learner” content (eg, rich multimedia courseware), rather than collaborative sequences of activities.
(2) Following on from (1), a problem that I now see regularly is that instructors who have used a current CMS have narrowed their view of what might be possible for online learning to just the feature set of their current CMS. This is pragmatic and understandable, but I've noticed that some of the people I would most expect to grasp the benefits of Learning Design are actually most resistant, either because they now think of e-learning only through the lens of their current CMS, or they don't want to consider a different approach. What's interesting about this problem is that I find it more prevalent in universities (where CMS use is widespread) than in K-12 (where CMSs are now being adopted more, but not as widely or as quickly as in universities). I've seen a number of cases where K-12 teachers have used LAMS, and then later been introduced to a typical CMS for the first time, and been dumbfounded at the “lack of features” in the CMS to support sequences of collaborative learning. I don't see the problem as one of a natural evolution from “basic” use of a CMS to “advanced” use of a Learning Design approach; rather, it seems that the initial tools you use for e-learning affect the way you perceive future tools with different assumptions.
(3) Following from (2), Learning Design systems (such as LAMS) have not tried to add all the traditional CMS features to their core “workflow” features, and so if an instructor wants all the helpful “e-admin” features (and this includes me when I teach!), they aren't available in a Learning Design system. This means that two systems will be needed (CMS + Learning Design) and in many cases, technical restrictions make this difficult or impossible. (As an aside, it is amazing to me how many of the real decisions about e-learning technology use in educational organisations are made by technical staff, rather than instructors; and when there is a disagreement between these groups, the instructors rarely get what they want). However I should note that since we released integrations of LAMS with Moodle, Sakai, .LRN, Blackboard and WebCT, we have seen increased interest in using LAMS within these CMSs.
(4) From a different perspective, I think early Learning Design systems have had some important limitations that made them seem too rigid for some instructors. For example, ever since we started building LAMS, colleagues have been asking for a feature that would allow them to change a “running” sequence “mid-stream”. The idea is that as an instructor, even when you plan a set of activities ahead of time, you often find yourself changing these halfway through due to new realisations you've had along the way (“oh - that next activity is not going to work, I should do something different”) or simply that the discussion among students within the sequence has taken a different direction to what you expected, and so you want to change the later activities to better reflect the unexpected direction of the discussion. As a teacher myself, I've always wanted this feature too, as it is pretty fundamental to the way education works in practice.
Unfortunately, Learning Design systems turn out to be very complex software applications (they are basically concurrent multi-actor workflow systems, which is bleeding-edge technology even for the most advanced workflow systems), and so the software requirements for editing a running sequence “on the fly” proved to be really hard. However, I'm pleased to say that after rebuilding LAMS from the ground up for the V2 release in December 2006, we were able to put a new architecture in place that would support “Live Edit” (as it is now called). This feature comes out in the LAMS 2.0.3 release due in the next few weeks, and if you want to see it in action now, it is available in the new “RAMS” beta release (RAMS is the eResearch workflow version of LAMS - see http://demo.ramscommunity.org ). For an animated walkthrough of this new feature, see http://saturn.melcoe.mq.edu.au/lams2/docs/winks/live-edit.html.
Two other technically difficult but pedagogically important features to come soon in LAMS are “branching“ and floating activities”. Branching allows an instructor to have multiple pathways for different groups of students (and these pathways can be based on instructor or student choice, or automated - such as using a quiz score to determine which path a student follows). Floating activities are activities that are not “inside” the flow of the sequence - they're individual activities that sit “along side” the main flow of tasks, and can be accessed by students at any time while in the sequence (this is useful for support information/tasks which not all student may need to do as part of the main flow, but are there as a backup for this who need them). Both of these features are due for release in LAMS V2.1 in July. My point here is that until very recently, some important pedagogical features were missing from a Learning Design system like LAMS, so for some instructors, these missing features may have had a big impact on their readiness to consider a Learning Design approach.
(5) One of the core theoretical concepts of Learning Design is that systems should attempt to be “pedagogically neutral” - that is, they should not support just one pedagogical approach (eg, problem based learning), but rather support a wide range of pedagogies depending on how an instructor designs their activities (NB: my own view on this is that it is impossible to be completely pedagogically neutral, as any system will have hidden commitments of one kind or another - rather, I see this as a crucial goal to aspire towards - the wider the range of possible approaches that are supported equally, the closer we are to achieving this goal).
I think this is an important principle, but in practice, I think most instructors want more than this – they want a flexible system together with advice and templates on “good practice” Learning Designs. So if I want to run a problem-based learning scenario with my class, I'd like a number of pre-built activity templates for problem based learning, and some advice on which one to choose, and how to edit the content to suit my discipline area. To me, this would be a very useful overlay to a Learning Design system, but it is worth noting that it goes beyond the concept of pedagogically neutrality. I think the field of Learning Design is now ready to take this step of having two layers - a generic design layer, and on top of this, a set of templates and advice for particular uses - but not all would share my views on this. In our own work on LAMS, we are working towards a first example of this kind of system (sometimes called a “pedagogic planner”) in the coming months, and there are two projects in the UK working on related concepts in this area. For an early mock-up of how this could look, see slides 18-22 at http://www.lamsfoundation.org/CD/html/resources/presentations/LAMS.JISCeval.AstonUniConference.Jan05.ppt.
The above is by no means an exhaustive list of barriers to the adoption of Learning Design, and they may not even be the most important. In particular, the slowest adoption of Learning Design, relative to general market size and innovation, is in the US, and this remains a mystery to me. I'd welcome comments on these or other suggested barriers from readers of these posts.
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