Both Blackboard and Moodle provide
users with a wide variety of tools for enhancing and enriching the online
learning experience. Yet there is still a certain rigidity to them. They lack
the flexibility and openness that students are used to in social networks like
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networking tools available in web
2.0. Even the face-to-face communication
available in networking tools like Skype and Hangout are not available in Blackboard
or Moodle. As a result, students have
limited ability to create their own spaces, communicate student-to-student in
groups using a face-to-face basis. It is true that in Blackboard and Moodle,
students can be provided with blogs and wikis, but the LMS classroom still
lacks the ability for a student to personalize a space. There may be a class café
or a student lounge, but there is no individual “student locker” where a
student can show his or her individuality, create an online presence, and
relate person to person as someone more than a discussion response or an
assignment.
When I researched the literature, I
found a very interesting article that addresses this question: Enhancing e-learning experience with online social
networks (Rodrigues, J., Sabino,F, Zhou,L. 2011). In this article the authors
report on a project in which they created
a space within an e-learning LMS which
the learning modules were designed to incorporate social networks into “learning boxes” within the module. The
authors reported that this four month project to make the LMS more personal and
motivating by incorporating social networks was very promising and warranted
additional experimentation. The LMS has been an excellent vehicle for bringing
online learning this far, but it needs to continue to evolve and connect with
social networks in order for the next generation of LMS’s to emerge.
