As we worked through this assignment, we ran into a number of typical group challenges with 4 time zones and various commitments outside of the course. I found we did a great job of meeting and collaborating to deliver a solid proposal. We started out with a few Google Hangouts to get to know each other and have some very thorough discussions about our scenario and the possible LMS choice. We followed up these discussions with a week-long collaboration using Google Drive and Google Docs. These products enabled us to share articles and work together to build the evaluation.
As has been the case in many of my other ETEC courses, everyone was willing and able to help with the development of our evaluation. At times it was difficult to make sure everyone had enough work to satisfy their desire to be a solid contributor to the team, but I think this is a good problem!! Again, my experience in this program has been that everyone is really passionate and dedicated to learning.
What I did find unique to this project was the challenge that we faced when it came to evaluating the LMS and the varying perspectives that each member had. When we first started to have a discussion about particular LMS, you could see that there were different views when it came to Connect versus Moodle, open source versus proprietary, and even the criteria that should be most important for the organization. Should the evaluation be made primarily based on administration needs, the instructors, students, or a combination of all factors? Although this made for some “engaging” discussions, I think it was a great experience to provide us with a glimpse of what happens on post-secondary campuses every day. When committees go through this process at different institutions, they are bound to have people on all sides of the fence. Even though we had different ideas, you could see that everyone had prior experiences or solid research to back up their thoughts, which made it tough, but also informative.
In the end, we were able to establish a criteria that worked for everyone and then we let the evaluation process lead us to the best LMS choice. Even though we had some ups and downs, I found it a great learning experience to understand all the various viewpoints and research involving different LMS.
Thanks team!!