First published on Jan. 21st 2016 as part of ETEC565:

 

After reading through the many excellent posts from my peers in the Oak group this week, I write this knowing that many great questions have already been asked!  Yet a post made by Mark in reply to Mo’s post sparked a new question in me, for Benoit: What is the goal of the long game? 

Mark brought up the point that LMS continue to be widely used, and the case study is currently applicable – but for how long?  I read the Porto (2015) and Spiro (2014) articles last, after completing readings for this and my other course, all of which have been about the viability of LMS or online teaching.  So after all that, to read pieces that essentially broke down the traditional LMS – well it almost made me laugh, in a way.  It became clear that in the long run, or in the ‘long game’ as I tend to think of it, Benoit is going to find himself on the other side of this project without much need for the results.

Previously asked questions regarding reliability, suitability, and ease of use are all excellent – but again I think I agree with the question of which has the best potential to evolve, as posed by Mark.  If it looks likely that LMS as we know them are already in flux, perhaps due to what Coates, James & Baldwin (2005) describes as their tendency to create an “overly systematised compression of different disciplines and styles of learning” (p.31).  But seeing as that article is 11 years old, the current LMS options are obviously still well-liked enough since then to have stuck around.

So to return to this week’s task of what to do for poor Benoit, out of the two options provided I would encourage him to go towards Moodle.  Although he would have less tech. support through the school (which is apparently unreliable, anyway), it sounds to me like the best option for him to grab the bull by the horns and a) learn how to design web spaces more purposefully and b) create such a space that will be available outside for the students in the longer term, even if eventually it is not used in favour of something else.  Considering Spiro’s list of what may herald the downfall of LMS in schools, Moodle seems to be the best compromise – it allows for the functionality of LMS for the school’s use, but will be open-share and thus not lose relevance (or accessibility) as the course closes.  Although it may require more independent work on Benoit’s part at the start, it sounds to me like a greater investment in his own skills, as well – no more uploading content to FTP and then walking away, now is the time to get his hands a little dirtier with the creation of things.  In terms of factors for the ‘long game’, I would say these would point him more in the direction of Moodle over Blackboard.

In regards to how long it might take him to approach this challenge given his 5 hour per week time allowance, I’m going to propose a longer time frame than many of my peers!  If we say that he spends 1 hour per day learning Moodle, 40 hours – or an average North American work week – would span 8 weeks.  Considering all that must go into the development of an online course, as Meghan beautifully outlined in her post (LMS learning time, content development, assessment, testing) – it would certainly be a lengthy process.  Imagining he had 8 hours per day to develop this, I would hazard to outline the following:

• 2 days to learn Moodle
• 8 days to curate course content
• 5 days to design assessment
• 2 days to test the platform

That would look like 17 8 hour days, or 136 working hours.   Considering he only has 5 hours per week to invest, if my math is right (and there is a VERY good chance it isn’t), Benoit would need approximately 27 weeks based on my timeline – about 6 months.  This is certainly much higher than it is for many of my peers, but to be honest I would think requesting 6 months to develop a new course, from scratch, sounds quite reasonable!  Then again I’ve never had to propose anything such as this before, so if anyone would like to comment, please do!