Education Week - October 1, 2014 - Special Report - S5

EDUCATION WEEK

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Piecing Together a Smart LMS Strategy > www.edweek.org/go/LMS

In theory, an LMS could be this
magical platform that could show
you exactly what's happening with
every student in your classroom.
But in many schools, there is still
this big human lift that is
happening."
JULIA F. FREELAND

Research Fellow, Clayton Christensen Institute
for Disruptive Innovation

most of the changes throughout the marketplace as "old
stuff with new clothes on it."
That's not necessarily a bad development, he said.
To begin with, he pointed out that the lms software for the
education market has for years been more advanced than
similar software targeted to the corporate market when it
comes to incorporating communication and collaboration tools.
Many K-12 lms companies are also well down the road of
ensuring that their systems are accessible and user-friendly
on mobile devices.
And, he said, the "big data" and learning analytics features
touted by many vendors are not so different from the widely
underused reporting functions that learning management
systems have long contained.
"The data has always been there. People just haven't figured
out how to use it," Mr. McIntosh said. "The market is gradually developing more tools, but I think it's still in a state of
flux."

Sharing Data
Perhaps the one legitimate game-changer on the horizon is
the growing focus on making sure that lms software can easily and automatically share and receive information-from
other K-12 software, student-information systems, developers
of apps, and from publishers and other educational content
providers.
In June, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive
Innovation, a San Mateo, Calif.-based think tank that pushes
for digital, blended, and competency-based education models, released a report, "Schools and Software: What's Now and
What's Next," based on a survey of 30 small- to medium-sized
public school districts.
The key takeaway, said report author and research fellow
Julia F. Freeland, is that students and teachers are suffering because of a lack of integration among K-12 educational
software programs.
In an ideal world, Ms. Freeland said, the lms would serve as
a "hub" that works to constantly update and make available
to teachers, administrators, parents, and students-in real
time, in a single location-a wide range of data: What courses
a student is enrolled in, how well he or she performed on both
standardized and informal assessments, what learning software he or she is using, and what kind of content works best
to help that student master concepts.
The lingering reality, however, is that much of that work is
still done manually, if at all.
Barriers range from resistance to new technology inside district bureaucracies to competition among vendors to the failure of the ed-tech marketplace to settle on a single set of technical standards that might help facilitate such integrations.
"In theory, an lms could be this magical platform that could
show you exactly what's happening with every student in your
classroom," Ms. Freeland said. "But in many schools, there is
still this big human lift that is happening." n

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Education Week - October 1, 2014 - Special Report

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