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Thursday, January 11, 2007

New Kind of LMS?

Some interesting thinking going on by Lee Kraus and Mark Oehlert around where the LMS is going to need to go if we really are going to allow for small content chunks that can be quickly accessed.

I personally think that the LMS is quickly being relegated to longer, developmental activities and compliance activities. I've talked about some of these problems before:

When I looked at what Lee and Mark had to say, I find myself nodding my head in agreement that there has to be a different kind of LMS that will emerge. It will be much more like a combination of Communication, Search Support and Web Analytics (for tracking), and less like the current self-contained entities that are today's LMS. It won't get in your way when you want to get to information, but may come up along the side to show you other resources. It will track your access of content of various forms without login, provide suggestions for additional content, suggest learning paths based on what you are doing. It's going to be on-the-side and below your activities, not on-top.

I here a lot of what I'm saying in what Lee and Mark had to say. I'll be curious to see if anyone is actually trying to make this happen.

2 comments:

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David Wilson said...

Tony. It's funny because we've been working on some thinking similar to this internally within Elearnity. Some recent corporate discussions together with some of our futures research has also pointed us towards rethinking the model underlying the LMS, but to be honest, not necessarily many of the drivers for wanting an LMS.

Its interesing about you and Lee likening it to Google Analytics. Our current thinking is that the LMS will become like Google - a diversified mix of services and interfaces - anarchic but inherently with underlying structure and connectively. Systems that can optimise our experience of it are critical, but so are systems that can optimise how the connections work behind the scene. This is potentially what the LMS will become.

... an interesting discussion ...