rad-lt

a learning technologies blog by rachel a dallman (rad)

Tinkering toward connection: Lessons from Justin Reich’s “Failure to Disrupt” and the LMS

a learning-at-scale environment, with many learners connected to a single instructor for guidance, emphasizing the vast and interconnected digital classroom
Image generated by ChatGPT

Learning-at-scale: “learning environments with many, many learners and few experts to guide them” (pg. 6)

Defining the genres of learning at scale

In the first half of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Cannot Transform Education, author Justin Reich supports his first premise, “new technologies in education are not, in fact, wholly new; they build on a long history of education innovations.” (pg. 6). To do this, outlines the history, research and practical examples of the three genres of learning-at-scale: instructor-guided, algorithm-guided, and peer-guided.

Reich argues this categorization is useful for two key reasons:

“First, based on the prior per­for­mance of similar approaches, you can make predictions about what outcomes ­will emerge as new technologies are integrated into complex systems of schooling. Second, understanding what is old and recycled can throw into relief what is genuinely innovative in a new product or approach. Identifying the modest innovations in emerging technologies can help predict how a new offering might offer some incremental improvement over past efforts.” (pg. 20)

On tinkering

I’ve found a lot of joy in reading this book, and Reich’s attitude towards learning technologies is deeply inspiring. I think there is a challenging tension between optimism and skepticism in this field,as discussed in my first blog post. Reich’s idea of the “tinkerer,” drawn from Larry Cuban and David Tyack’s Tinkering toward Utopia, offers an insightful middle ground:

“Tinkerers see schools and universities as complex systems that can be improved, but they believe that major improvement is the product of many years of incremental changes to existing institutions rather than the result of one stroke of wholesale renewal.” (pg. 10)

In each chapter, Reich gives specific guidance for how a tinkerer might approach new technologies. As a person who sometimes scoffs at research with a, “that’s great, now what does this mean in practice?” Reich’s approach is a breath of fresh air.

A personal reflection on Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Moving into the technologies that Reich discusses in Failure to Disrupt, I want to zoom in on my experience of one instructor-guided tool I hold dear: the LMS. No, that was not a joke! As an academic technologist, much of my daily work involves learning management systems, as has every job I’ve held for the past eight years.

I love that my job allows me to be a bridge between people and technology. When faculty over-apologize for asking “too many” questions, I sometimes joke that their struggle is my job security, and I hope they keep having questions. This is a light-hearted attempt to show they are not burdening me, but the root of the joke has truth. LMS work is not all I do, but it is a significant portion. Dozens to hundreds of positions at our university alone are focused on Canvas LMS support, depending on how specific you’d like to be with that definition. Maintaining an LMS at the university scale is a massive, expensive undertaking, and I have found a career in being one piece of that machine. 

My student job and first position after college involved migrating course sites from Moodle to Canvas, and I’ve had the opportunity to see a wide range of LMS uses, and changes, over the years. The Moodle-to-Canvas migration came around 2018. And while by then, a majority of courses had Moodle sites, LMS use was certainly not universal. I remember as an art student, many of my studio professors did not use the LMS at all, but others used it heavily in other departments.

My first encounter with an LMS was my first semester as a PSEO student at a community college in my hometown. I heard people mentioning this “D2L,” and I didn’t realize what it was or that it was important until the first assignment was due. We were given printed syllabi in class, and I was puzzled by the due date of 11:59 pm. How would I turn in my assignment that late? I figured it must be a typo. 

The next class, I brought my printed essay with me and assumed the instructor would collect it at some point. They did not. After class, I brought my paper to the podium and attempted to turn it in to the instructor. Instead, I was told to “put it in the dropbox on D2L.” These words meant nothing to me.

Thankfully, this instructor recognized my confused stare and was generous enough to give me a personal demo, explaining that Desire2Learn, D2L for short, was a website where they would post assignments and I could submit my work online. I am forever grateful to the human instructor who saw that I was lost and took the time to explain things to me, and I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure this out on my own. If I had started my college career in a university setting, with its large lecture sizes, how long would it have taken for someone to notice I needed this help? 

I think my first LMS experience underscores the critical role instructors play in bridging gaps for students unfamiliar with new tools, a challenge Reich identifies as a systemic obstacle for scaling learning effectively. However, increasingly, the “How to College” parts of university orientation are managed online, through e-learning or near-MOOC-scale online courses. Even the resources to teach students how to use Canvas, and Learning Online 101, are themselves LMS experiences.

Reich makes a powerful statement that makes me question this practice for students so early in their higher education experience,

“The bulk of ­people who succeed in this kind of instructor-guided, self-­paced online learning, however, are typically already-educated, affluent learners with strong self-­regulated learning skills.” (pg. 33).

I wonder if we do first-year students a disservice by using a MOOC-like approach to orientations, especially related to technology skills.

Homogenization of the LMS

These days, I find myself more often on the other end of the LMS, helping professors design their course sites, offering tech support, and giving LMS training to new instructors. Canvas sites are now required for most undergraduate courses, and have become more standardized post-pandemic. Reich’s description perfectly matches my experience working with LMS systems:

“Learning management systems are boring. They fall into that class of infrastructure—­ pipes, wires, roads, authentication protocols—that are essential to everyday experience even as they are mostly invisible. But LMSs play a power­ful role in shaping ­ people’s learning experiences, mostly by homogenizing them” (pg. 24)

I’d argue, and I think Reich would agree, that while this description sounds bland… a boring, predictable, nearly-invisible LMS is ideal. In focus groups, students here at the U have reported their LMS experience is most functional when they can quickly and easily find what they need, when they need it. Homogenization and templating is the standard strategy to achieve this, because it creates predictability. When courses present information in similar locations, learners spend less time looking for content and more time engaging with it. 

As one student in the 2021 focus group was quoted,

“I swear I spend hours just trying to figure out where the heck everything is. Modules [in Canvas] are greatly appreciated when I don’t have to hunt around to find the files, then the discussion, then back to files for the prompt.”

I think most students of this age have shared this exact experience.

Pandemic insights from Justin Reich

I’ve also enjoyed listening to a couple of Justin Reich’s talks posted on YouTube, especially hearing how he responds to student questions. In one talk for the MIT Comparative Studies/Writing channel in 2020, Reich brings up his observation that the pandemic did not bring a mass exodus of college students to MOOCs or online-only schools, which generally are better developed in terms of their technology use. Instead, students preferred to stay in their pivot-to-online university classes, even as faculty fumbled with the technology or used it in suboptimal ways. Reich states, in response to a student question about how the pandemic might affect learning-at-scale,

You know, I actually thought it would have been more of a moment for MOOCs and some other kinds of things. But it turns out that at MIT, and as far as I can tell, in lots of other places around the world, as well, it’s not what people wanted. There has been nowhere that I can see some groundswell of students saying, like, you know, my introductory microeconomics professor is doing a crappy job teaching us intro micro online, and I just want to be able to take a MOOC and learn it myself. Instead, I think what we overwhelmingly see is like, people really do want the connection to their individual professor who’s like doing lousy job managing kids in the background, and putting together their first online course. Because I think that human connections are enormously important.” (55:22)

There are other contributing factors with this pandemic example, of course, but I could not agree more that human connection is the key to learning. Many students need to feel “seen” by a real, human teacher, and often other students, in order to learn. Even if only through a screen and an imperfect LMS. In this context, I think the tinkerer’s role, and dilemma, is to make course sites more human while still prioritizing usability and student perspectives.

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