Brandon Muramatsu

The Un-LMS: Moving to a Personal Learning Environment

I just attended this presentation at OpenEd 2009 by Jon Mott, “Bridging the Gap Between the PLE and the LMS”. Jon describes an “un-LMS”–a loosely coupled collection of services to support teaching and learning at a university. Jon talks about a structure, parallel to their Blackboard instance, that BYU is developing to link together separate applications to improve the user experience and service quality for elements typically provided in a LMS (or CMS or VLE) including gradebook, quizzing/assessments, content publishing, etc.

I believe this is the right way to go and ultimately is more useful/sustainable than large, monolithic applications.

Credits: Mott, J. (2009). Bridging the Gap Between the PLE and the LMS. Presented at OpenEd 2009
in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on August 13, 2009.

Jon’s also posted his slides to Slideshare.

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2 replies
  1. Jeff Bohrer
    Jeff Bohrer says:

    Thanks for posting this very important presentation. The following points by Mott were quite intriguing to me:
    1. PLE values (student-centric, openness) more closely match the values of the institution than do the values of the CMS
    2. Lack of continuity from semester to semester exists in the CMS. It’s the “chief demerit of the course mgmt system”
    3. Stand-alone gradebook. This is a highly important progression in the future of the course management system.
    4. Get rid of the dropbox? He says that instructors can now say, “don’t upload your paper, just give me the URL for where your paper lives on the web” and “maybe one of the requirements for being digitally literate in 2009 is being able to publish a web viewable document”. Very cool. However, I know that many instructors value the ability to zip and download all the submitted papers for an assignment — something the digital dropbox currently offers.

    Good stuff! I’ll be following Jon Mott and his work at BYU more closely these days.

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