What the state of learning management systems can tell us about digital innovation
By: Jason Cole
Tags: Education, Lms Software, Innovation, Digitalization

I’ve worked in the learning management system (LMS) ecosystem for more than 20 years. I started writing bits of LMS functionality for projects in grad school. We wrote discussion boards, quizzes, and authentication systems for various projects. I sketched ideas for LMS systems as Blackboard, WebCT, and others started. I worked for an early commercial LMS provider, Click2Learn. Later, I helped San Francisco State and the Open University move to Moodle. Then I ran a Moodle company. Most recently (sadly) oversaw the transition from Moodle to Canvas at Peralta.

After all this time, I am struck by how little actual innovation has taken place. Analysts tend to talk about various vendors and the struggle between them. Blackboard hoovered up vast swaths of market share. Moodle emerged as the upstart pirate. Then Instructure came along with a cloud architecture and a boatload of FUD to elbow a place at the table. But they were all selling the same product which hasn’t fundamentally changed in over 20 years.

I’ve spent some time thinking about why there hasn’t been significant innovation in the LMS space in 20 years. The first generation LMS systems depended on a very narrow set of tools. The technology of the time, web forms and relational databases, enabled but also constrained early systems. But the web has evolved in the last 20 years. Why hasn’t the LMS?

The answer is the market for LMS products hasn’t changed. The modern LMS expresses a particular set of assumptions about the delivery of learning. These assumptions include:

Knowledge is best delivered in a discrete, time-bound, linear set of experiences known as “courses.” Courses are designed by an individual instructor or a professional learning designer. Learners are consumers of instructor defined content, assessment, and activities. They may share some work products, but only when and if allowed by the instructor. Learners are responsible for the meta cognitive load of interacting with the course. Only instructors design or select the learning experiences for a given course instance.

These assumptions create a limited option space for any designer. If you design a learning environment that doesn’t look like a course, it will be challenging to find a market.

It is not possible to sell an LMS to a learning provider that does not conform to these assumptions. So LMS developers will not develop an alternative. The value chain assumptions of the users constrain the tools themselves. Schools and colleges developed value chains to create and deliver courses. Courses create credits which create diplomas.

Courses are an invention to solve a particular set of constraints. They are a measurable, repeatable unit of learning to meet the needs of a growing, industrializing nation. Courses the time limit constraints of an individual instructor who transmits knowledge. They restrict access to scare physical resources of seats in a classroom and laboratory equipment. Courses are one answer to meet the growing demand for a constrained resource.

The idea of courses is an anachronism based on early industrial design techniques. Courses are a batch process. They take a large, theoretically undifferentiated input, process it for a given amount of time, and then release an output. They are time-bound to allow the processing of the next batch. They are linear because they must process all inputs in the same order and the same amount of time. A process manager creates the process in any way they see fit. The outputs are a single measure on a uni-dimensional scale.