Aggregation will be rough on Learning Management Systems

Peter Sefton comments on some of the material I have been reading lately:

I think that one of the pressures on current LMSs will be from the aggregator. An aggregator is a leveling technology that can pull all the stuff in which you are interested into a common interface; sort of a do it yourself ‘portal’ without the stupid little boxes and the feeble ‘customize’ button.

It will be interesting to see how some of these ideas play out over the next little while at USQ. For as long as I have known it, the prevailing local culture around distance and online education has been somewhat monolithic in its focus on materials production and distribution.

That was understandable in a period when students were isolated and course packages needed to supply essentially every need. At times that has given (at least) the appearance of technology driving teaching.

A few of us are working on constructing a vision for the future in which teaching drives the technology or at least the choice of what technology to use for a particular purpose. Of course, teaching in this instance means something more than delivery of content followed by assessment and a grade. There is a need to pay more attention to the actual activity of learning in which students engage.