Evolving Learning Management Systems

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.