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New Features for Learning Management Systems

by Sloan-C

I. INTRODUCTION

In the future, learning systems will be omniscient and omnipresent. How do we begin the journey? This article suggests seven features--annotation, natural language integration, live multimedia interaction, quality control, spontaneous group formation, credits-royalties-modularity, and other structured interactions--for learning network users, researchers and developers to consider.

There is a now a choice of first generation approaches to developing courses. Major universities tend to have education services groups that develop in-house learning systems. They integrate component software such as Microsoft Netmeeting with course administration systems. An easier approach is to license complete Learning Management Systems (LMS) from companies like IBM, Asymetrix, Blackboard and WBT Systems. Meanwhile, smaller schools tend to contract with turnkey providers like Convene, Eduprise and eCollege that specialize in assisting faculty with the conversion of their course content.

Future generations of LMS will be able to leverage the unique attributes of computing and the Internet much more effectively. While it may be surprising that the outstanding benefits have yet to come, what we are seeing is entirely consistent with the typical adoption process of new technologies. For example, after indoor plumbing was invented, people said, "Aha, I no longer have to heat a kettle and bring the water over to the sink in order to wash my hands. I'll just pipe the hot water straight to a faucet." Just as owners of old homes replaced old faucets when they tired of alternately scalding and freezing their hands, the design of LMS will be reconsidered during the coming renovations.

The fundamental misconception of today's LMS is that core content can be developed without intimately integrating learners into the creative process. The coming advancements have many precedents. Marketers use focus groups while manufacturers intensively interview consumers to better hear what Total Quality Management (TQM) circles call "the voice of the customer." Also, doctors treat illnesses but patients have to say where it hurts. Ph.D.s, a.k.a. faculty, and students need to have much more continuous and fine grain transactions. For most teachers, mentoring and research will indeed displace "standing and delivering." As depicted in the movie, the teaching role is especially valued when teachers imbue students with a belief in themselves.

Back to the faucet metaphor, the core learning materials produced by today's course authoring tools is something like freezing water that users have to combine with hot, live components in order to create a learning community. Obviously, plumbers first had to bring the hot and cold outlets together in order to get warm water. That quickly begged the need for a new kind of mixing valve just as LMS now need "mixing" devices. The hot side will be derived from Internet legacies such as e-mail, threaded discussions and chat rooms but the new mixing devices will be markedly more effective for students and much more efficient for teachers.

Let us start with one simple assumption: students want to do all of their studying with a really sharp tutor always at their beck and call. They want to be able to ask any question, at any time It is no wonder that they may not even know that they want to do this. Few but royalty have been able to afford personal tutors. For the rest of us, large classes have stifled our voices. But history is full of examples of privileges of the wealthy that have become commonplace. We will soon enough be wirelessly connected with affordable sages at any time we wish.

We will not be able to leap into the omniscient and omnipresent network all at once but it will come very fast. The PCs and communications needed to support rapid responses from teachers and their assistants, at least during e-office hours, already exist. Those interactions should be recorded since students often repeat the same questions, mistakes and diversions. Instructors do not want to have to repeatedly hear exactly the same chatter and students want to get the best possible return on their tuition. We need software that helps people to build robust yet economical knowledge resources out of many thousands of pieces that are custom fitted, one at a time.

Future functionality will deliver value unimaginable in traditional classroom teaching and will be critical to the future success of the LMS's vendors and outsourcers mentioned above. There will also be continuing leadership from existing degree granting schools with strong online components such as UCLA and Stanford, as well as new comers like University of Phoenix, Cardean and Jones International University. There will be many more online universities and purveyors of technical and soft training skills. Textbook publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin have already developed e-learning programs; the new platforms will really drive the cannibalization of the textbook business. Meanwhile, open source software is emerging as a viable alternative to proprietary solutions and closed-end experiments. Foundations might be well advised to seed this kind of R&D.

II. SEVEN FEATURES

A. Annotation
Microsoft Word supports annotation and so does Third Voice on the WWW, but the capacity for fine grain retroactive linking has not yet been integrated into any LMS. For example, a Java applet could allow a student to highlight text, or a location on an image, that would become the anchor for the question. The student would then type the text of a question that would be queued for online staff, or even other students. The system should present the respondent with the question in context and, if lacking facilities for real-time communication, should automatically notify the questioner of the response.

This is similar to the e-mail interactions that some LMS already support, where the URL of the originating web page is automatically included in a student's e-mail. There are two differences here: 1) The interactions would be used to augment the original content so subsequent students could then mouse over an appropriate icon to reveal the text of a question and click to view answers. 2) The links would be anchored to specific locations in the content. This is not just a threaded discussion tacked on at the end of a learning module. Students are constantly looking for specific answers and they waste a lot of time trying to find them. Since there may be many questions associated with a web page, there is no more reason to make a student read through a lengthy threaded discussion than to wait for a recitation the next day or next week.

B. Natural Language Integration
There are several reasons why semantic interpretation will be necessary:

• The same question may arise in multiple contexts.
• Different questions may arise in the same context.
• Some questions won't have any specific attachment points at all.
• A dense thicket of links could arise in some areas of content.
• The learner should be able to stop and enter a reflective mode that is distinct from mere surfing, to point at something on the screen or stop the soundtrack to ask questions like, "Did she just say ____?" or "How did she deduce this?" or "Does this also mean ____?"
• We still want to give students the illusion that a personal tutor is always hovering nearby.

The semantic degree of fit of typed or even spoken questions would then become inputs, in addition to context, for a matching algorithm. Closely matching questions could be displayed so that the student, in selecting the most similar question, provides feedback about the matching algorithm itself. Then learning algorithms could be used to optimize the relative weighting of the proximity and the linguistic components.

C. Live Multimedia Interaction
The demand for synchronous distance classes is evidenced by the success of virtual classroom providers like Centra and LearnLinc that feature a workspace that can show slides, be pointed at, and drawn upon by all parties, even at modem speeds.

LMS need to integrate these capabilities so that students can get attention as quickly as possible for questions that have not already been answered satisfactorily. While a few typed words will be sufficient for many responses, a graphics tablet and/or camera will be needed to enable free form diagramming. It should also be possible to easily edit the time-based recordings for re-use. If a segment turns out to be popular, production values can be improved later.

D. Quality Control
The recordings will be of highly variable quality so control will be paramount. Let's consider two apparently divergent approaches. One is to give professors control over everything. But it probably won't be possible for busy faculty members to review everything generated with a system designed to simulate tutors by capturing very large numbers of interactions. In fact, it would not be necessary for them to do so. Many of the live interactions will never be accessed again so it will be highly desirable to limit reviews to those answers that are being heavily used.

The second approach is to have students provide feedback about the usefulness of every interaction. In the short term at least, it will suffice to ask students to provide feedback about whether the interaction was "useful." This information should be captured in conjunction with navigation. A good rating would signal that the answer was satisfactory and return the user to the place where the question arose. A poor rating would take the user to the next most highly ranked answer or else queue the question for a person to answer. In the long run, this feedback will come from computer recognition of gesture, facial expression, and physiologic parameters.

Both of these quality control approaches have limitations. Professor Marvin Minsky tells a story about a young professor who has just given his first lecture. When a colleague asks him how it went, he replies that it went terribly. The colleague asks why and the young professor says, "I've forgotten what's hard." Students, on the other hand, know what's hard for them but can be easily mislead. This suggests the need for both forms of review. Students should identify content that they find to be useful and the faculty can then verify the quality of the content and provide, in effect, a stamp of approval.

This leaves open the possibility that students will identify content that is useful to them but that the professor does not find relevant! Long standing questions about the mission of academe to stimulate intellectual inquiry vs. providing vocational training will continue, and courses will continue to link to chatty interactions.

E. Spontaneous Group Formation
The ratings, as well as the kinds of questions asked, will serve to identify teachers and peers that a student likes. These will also become inputs to the evaluation function previously based on distance and semantics. Perhaps more importantly this "association" data will help to identify groups of individuals who can move through the material in largely self-supporting cohorts. Online classes could then be scheduled in order to foster live group discussion and private conversations among these individuals.

The individual profile data needed to support these agent functions should be kept private but in an interchangeable format and at a place on the network where several levels of keys can provide access at the individual owner's discretion. Standards organizations could help to reduce balkanization among many teaching systems while independent authorities could provide the lockable databases. This might be a natural role for education portals.

F. Credits, Royalties and Modularity
Interactivity is the key difference that gives online learning an edge over textbooks. Yet publishers still have a major advantage. They identify star talent and provide advances to help write books for wide distribution. The same economies of scale will eventually dominate e-learning. Publishers will attempt to take the lead by giving star talent the opportunity to develop content using next generation LMS. Local professors would then be able to assign modules, just as they now assign chapters from textbooks. The rich content will reduce the reliance on routine lectures that students usually dread anyway and shift the emphasis to special events, as Philip Morrison anticipated. In order to allow local faculty to continue to add value in a unique way, schools could license the core content and, using the same platform, augment it through e-office hours and regular classes.

Of course, online interactions do not have to be limited to any particular campus or school. While there will continue to be a need for accredited schools to offer degrees, and a need for campuses where young people can congregate, high quality content will attract students enrolled in many institutions. Is it better to limit the requests for help to a campus where face-to-face classroom interactions create a cohesive group of cohorts, or to distribute requests for help more globally?
In the latter case, students, and even faculty, might well ask questions of leading experts at other institutions. This will beg the need for payment arrangements such as royalty streams based on use. Naturally, there would then be competition to create the best interactive components. Ownership would become distributed among many connected modules.
While some professors may object that they want sole discretion to modify the source materials and control the content, this desire conflicts with the needs of "Communities for Learning" (C4L), an objective voiced by Andy diPaolo. In C4L, students will often prove themselves to be the best instructors and faculty will often find themselves learning from the students. This need for integrated systems of credits will be most acute for rapidly evolving subjects.

G. Other Structured Interactions
LMS's researchers, developers and marketers can expect to be faced with competition from more general tools for cooperative work when those corporate tools trickle down for educational use. LMS will need a competitive strategy. Academic societies constitute markets where LMS could counter the impending attack by upgrading from teaching systems to the discussion and consensus systems that are the natural evolution of research journals.

There is already an established trend towards publishing academic papers on line so articles can be quickly located. The inclusion of retroactive links will better refer readers not only to supporting work and explanation of underlying concepts that the original author could not anticipate, but also directly to areas of developing controversy and further work. These latter types of structured annotations, different from questions and answers, will require their own protocols and inevitably involve not only payments but also security.

III. CONCLUSION

The next generations of Leaning Management Systems will take advantage of the unique ability of the Internet to bridge space and time in ways classroom-based instruction cannot. The new attributes of these systems will have applications beyond education so LMS vendors should prepare to compete in a much larger marketplace where competition will come from unexpected quarters. The copycat functionality now seen from many providers will be upgraded to support Communities for Learning at about the same time as the users embrace changes in their own methodologies. Ultimately, the network will serve, oracle-like, with much greater knowledge that any of us could ever possess as individuals. Accepting the challenge of building such systems will be no less difficult than accepting the changes that we will need to make in our assumptions about teaching and, finally, our selves.

IV. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Feelie Lee for providing an intelligent layperson's comments and Nishikant Sonwalkar for providing a faculty member's viewpoint about student ratings. Howard Block and Brandon Dobell, Banc of America Equity Research, provided an education industry overview dated September, 1999, that provided references to many of the links herein. Thanks to Denis Newman for telling me about the term, "Learning Management System" and Dr. Frederick Seitz for supporting my attendance at the Fifth International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks, On-line Learning '99, Eduprise '99 and the iCS conference.