The Cultural Impact of Learning Management Systems

The Cultural Impact of Learning Management Systems

(This presentation is available online at www.georgetown.edu/faculty/everhart/)

Introduction and Contextualization

The Big Picture: How teaching and learning are changing

· The original title of my presentation was “Teaching on the Web: From Ad hoc to Enterprise.” I had chosen that title because of the way it captures the enormous transition that we find ourselves navigating, from a context where faculty do their own thing with technology in random and usually unsustainable ways, to the possibilities of new learning management systems that automate and to a certain extent standardize the online learning environment.

· Enterprise LMS are important and necessary for many reasons.

· Carol Barone, Vice President of EDUCAUSE and leader of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, emphasizes the need for “learning environments that harness the power of information technology to improve the quality of teaching and learning, to contain or reduce rising costs, and to provide greater access to higher education” (http://www.educause.edu/nlii/meetings/orleans2000/notes.pdf).

· Enterprise-level LMS provide the benefits of:

· Efficiencies of scale

· Centralized and therefore more effective maintenance and support

· More sophisticated and consistent security than ad hoc methods of delivery

· Integration with other institutional systems

· Common environments for teaching and learning

· Systematic management of intellectual capital

· The implementation of LMS bring together faculty and administrative activities in one environment.

· They highlight the distinct differences in methodology and attitudes between those who teach and those who administer courses and records. They raise complex legal and policy questions. But perhaps most importantly, they challenge us to implement LMS that foster the art of teaching while streamlining the administration of courses and records.

· In this presentation, I will address issues that cut across the many different cultures of educational institutions and have an impact on provosts, deans, CIOs, technology support providers, faculty governing bodies, faculty, and students.

Summary of presentation

· Intellectual Property Ownership

· Course Materials Management

· Records Management

· Learning Environment Management

· In each area, we will consider the current context, emerging possibilities, issues/concerns/questions raised by these possibilities, and strategies for managing change.

Purpose of this presentation

· Raise questions that you can adapt to your context, in order to visualize and frame the issues surrounding LMS.

· Raise awareness that technology “solutions” are at best partial, and effective integration of LMS involves changes in business processes as well as adjustments of cultural norms. And remember, business processes and cultural norms are much more complicated and difficult to deal with than technology.

· Suggest strategies for managing immediate change while anticipating and creating a framework for future opportunities.

· Not attempt to provide all the answers, but hopefully provide a checklist of questions and issues to be addressed so that your institution can successfully implement enterprise LMS and take full advantage of the opportunities in this area of development.

Intellectual Property Ownership

Current Context

· Faculty generally assume that they own their course materials.

· However, the high cost of information technology is calling attention to the institutional cost of producing course materials and teaching online.

· Institutions are starting to consider ways of using online teaching to generate new revenues and/or increase efficiencies to justify expenditures.

· These factors highlight the question of who owns course materials.

· Institutional policy may treat course materials like scholarly texts, copyrightable by the author, or like “work for hire,” as part of the responsibilities of employment.

· “Work for hire” is an alien concept to faculty, and the possibility of classifying their work in this way is generally offensive to them.

· Definition: “Work for hire” is a legal doctrine that an employer owns any work that is directly related to job responsibilities, paid for by the employer, done with the employer’s resources, or otherwise done within the scope of employment. In the case of instructors, at issue is whether or not course materials fall within the definition of “work for hire” or fall within the arena of personally copyrightable works. The legal precedents have treated course materials as personally copyrightable by the instructor, but these cases are dated (1987) and don’t take into account the institutional costs associated with using technology to produce course materials.

· And the fact of the matter is that most institutions either lack intellectual property policies or have policies that are too antiquated to address current circumstances.

Scenario

· Note: I’ve kept my examples fairly general to make it easier for you to visualize how these scenarios might play out at your institution. You would probably find it useful to write your own scenarios as you consider the possibilities of LMS, and then discuss these scenarios with your colleagues.

· Would your institution be prepared for this type of venture?

· The Provost decides to invest in developing standardized course materials for a lower division course that’s taught in multiple sections each semester. Faculty in the department are expected to contribute materials and expertise to the development process, but Information Services hires an instructional designer and multimedia specialists to shape the materials into a sophisticated course cartridge that plugs into the LMS and gives a core set of standard content to each section of the course. The department uses this cartridge for several semesters and demonstrates its pedagogical soundness. Students benefit from the consistency of the sections and the quality of the carefully developed materials. The Provost negotiates a deal with a publisher who will market and sell the course cartridge for use at other institutions. The revenue from this deal, after the publisher takes its cut, is divided among the institution, the department, and the faculty who contributed to the project.

Possibilities

· The ability to share course materials within and across LMS highlights the potential monetary value of course materials.

· Institutions could develop creative ways of sharing revenue from course materials with faculty, publishers, multimedia producers, and other parties involved in the creation and distribution of marketable course materials.

· And/or faculty could pursue independent, entrepreneurial methods of marketing and profiting from their own course materials.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

· Does your institution have an intellectual property policy that clearly covers course materials?

· Does your institution consider the production of course materials as part of faculty teaching responsibilities and as work for hire?

· What rights does the institution currently have over course materials?

· Do faculty understand their rights vis a vis their own use and sale of their course materials?

· Is your intellectual property policy up-to-date enough to cover online materials?

· Does it cover materials that are produced jointly by faculty working together, by a department, and/or with a significant contribution of resources from the institution?

· How is ownership of course materials identified and tracked?

· If course materials produce revenues, how are the revenues dispersed?

· At issue are not only policy concerns, but also practical business processes. Does your institution have a technology transfer office or some other department that provides guidance and services for licensing, equity agreements, revenue distribution, and other legal and business processes related to shared ownership of materials?

Strategies

· Have a strong and up-to-date intellectual property policy.

· Make sure faculty and faculty governing bodies understand the intellectual property policy AND its implications.

· Have a strong, efficient technology transfer office that provides good services, is faculty-friendly, and is proactive in educating faculty and administrators about revenue opportunities.

· Do not attempt to impose centralized management or quality control on course materials in the absence of a well-understand and generally accepted intellectual property policy.

· Use the flexibility of your LMS. LMS enable centralized management of course materials, but they do not require it. You may decide to let faculty maintain complete control over their own materials without institutional interference.

· If you pursue joint institution/department/faculty/publisher ventures for the production of course materials, achieve consensus among the stake-holders at the beginning of the project and negotiate contracts that clearly define responsibilities and outcomes.

· This point is reinforced by a question that came up in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy on intellectual property ownership. The question was: “Let's say a university provides Internet access, curriculum software, computers, software support, and training to a faculty member who is hired to teach. Using the tools provided by the university, the faculty member creates a Web site for each class and puts online the course syllabus, lecture notes, chat rooms, and content of e-mail messages from students. If there is no agreement between the university and the faculty member concerning rights of this online material, who owns the rights?”Ray K. Harris, a copyright and patent lawyer who was the guest respondent for the colloquy, replied: “That's a good question. We need to start with any applicable institutional policy. In the absence of a governing policy, content, even if published online, is governed by traditional copyright law. The content is owned by the creator unless it is a work for hire. With regard to online course material, the faculty member may assert that it should be treated like traditional scholarly works. The moral is that it is in the interest of both the faculty and the institution to define in advance (by contract) their mutual rights in the online material to be created” (http://www.chronicle.com/colloquylive/transcripts/2000/07/20000720harris.htm).

Course Materials Management

Current Context

· Faculty teach their courses and use their course materials in extremely diverse and creative ways.

· The majority of intellectual property in the form of course materials is still outside LMS.

· Most institutions lack the resources and support structure to help faculty convert their course materials to electronic form.

· Faculty’s abilities to convert their course materials to electronic form and adapt their pedagogical strategies to teaching online are extremely uneven.

Scenario

· The faculty who helped develop the course materials in the previous scenario decide to use those materials not only in the form of a course cartridge, which is used to build an entire course, but also as a library of shared resources that can be used piecemeal. The materials are stored in an institutional library in the LMS so that specific items can be pulled into a variety of courses. The materials are used for review and remediation in the higher level courses that follow from the lower level course that used the course cartridge. They are also used by faculty in other disciplines where there are overlapping skill sets. Each piece of content is tagged with meta data to make it easy to find and identify, and the meta data also identifies the owner of the content and the restrictions on revision and reuse.

Possibilities

· LMS allow the institution to collect course materials in a central repository. From this “institutional library,” faculty and departments can share materials.

· Shared repositories of course materials can facilitate institutional, departmental, and/or peer review of materials for quality, consistency, timeliness, and other characteristics.

· Using common materials can make students’ learning experiences more consistent, esp. in different sections of the same course.

· Common materials and even standard course structures or templates that have been reviewed for quality can enhance the pedagogical soundness of online teaching, esp. in cases where faculty are having difficulty adapting their materials and/or their pedagogical practices.

· The common context of the LMS produces a predictable, common environment for teaching and learning, making these activities more efficient and allowing faculty and students to focus on content rather than spending time navigating the differences among random online materials developed and delivered in a variety of ad hoc ways.

· Sharing materials can save faculty time.

· Effective reuse of materials can leverage the institutional investment in production of those materials, esp. in cases where expensive multimedia development is involved.

· Effective reuse can reduce redundancies and make online storage of materials more efficient.

· Centralized control of course materials can empower the institution to market those materials outside the institution, for example to other institutions. This could be done through publishers, consortia, organizations, and even through direct connections among different institutions’ LMS. These arrangements could lead to income for the institution, to be shared with faculty (depending on intellectual property ownership agreements), and perhaps producing funding for production of more high-quality, marketable online course materials.

Issues/Concerns/Questions

· Conversion

· How can course materials that are still outside the LMS be effectively incorporated?

· Is this content still in hardcopy?

· Does it need to be converted from another electronic format?

· What is the cost of getting content into the LMS?

· Who will do the labor and who will absorb the costs?

· Version control

· If there are multiple parties using course materials, what constitutes the “master copy” of the materials?

· Who has rights to alter the master copy?

· Who has rights to make derivative copies?

· Are derivative copies ever reconciled with the master copy, and if so, how?

· If the materials are shared or sold outside the institution, does the outside party have the right to alter the materials and/or make derivative copies?

· Meta data

· What meta data standards will be used to ensure that the materials can be sorted and tracked effectively?

· How will the producers of course materials, esp. faculty, be educated as to the importance of meta data and how to use it?

· Will the institution develop its own meta data to supplement standards? If so, how will it be formulated and managed?

· Migration and Interoperability

· If the institution already has a significant amount of content in one LMS and decides to change to another LMS, how easily can the content be migrated?

· If content is available in different online contexts, are there mechanisms for creating links from one context to another?

· Do these links among contexts require passing authorization from one context to another? Do users have separate logins for different contexts?

· Portability

· When faculty leave the institution, can they take their course materials with them?

· Can the materials be used in contexts outside the institutional LMS (for example, if the institution sells another institution rights to use the materials)?

· Quality

· Who determines the quality of course materials?

· Will only high-quality materials be centrally stored and shared?

· Who decides the level of “quality control”?

· Can internal, departmental review provide effective quality control, or is external peer review and outside authority required?