Swearing-at-the-LMS Season

I am not teaching, but I nonetheless think of this time of year as the swearing–at–the–learning management system period.

The swearing at the LMS commenced from the first moment of logging on and starting the inevitable jousting as I tried to corral an interface that seemingly was set up to do everything but nonetheless stubbornly resisted my desires. The swearing was always greater in the fall semester as some task I had previously learned how to do now had a different flow inside the system, requiring a perpetual process of unlearning and relearning.

I was not always angry at the LMS. When it first appeared in my life during my early-2000s stint at Virginia Tech, its utility seemed obvious to me. How great that I could warehouse documents, track assignments/attendance/grades, communicate with all students in one swoop and post messages, reminders and other assorted bits of class bric-a-brac that did not warrant full attention but might be interesting anyway.

This was a decided improvement over having to photocopy and distribute everything in class, or format my own bespoke grading spreadsheet in Excel. This was going to reduce my burdens, save my time and increase student responsibility. Win-win-win.

Fairly quickly, the bloom came off that rose.

Over time, this problem has improved, but I recall it taking six different clicking actions to upload each document I wanted in the system and nest it in an appropriate folder.

I thought I would enjoy knowing what and when students had accessed certain materials, but it was truly the opposite. I recall providing a document with tips for editing and polishing submissions that I told students to review and follow prior to turning in an assignment. Looking at the analytics the morning the assignment was due and seeing that fewer than half of students had accessed the file, I was distressed. I arrived at class pre-angered over the failure to follow directions.

I was trying to help them!

Teaching primarily freshmen, I saw the ways that students were often thwarted by the LMS. In a first-year experience course, prior to kicking off the day’s planned activities, I was casually asking students how school was going, and a glum-looking young man told me he was failing biology despite getting B’s on the exams because he couldn’t figure out how to submit the short five- to 10-question quizzes that accompanied the reading assignments. He was answering all the questions, but he never got credit. Biology was a large lecture, and he hadn’t felt comfortable or empowered enough to go to the professor about it.

With his permission, we logged on to his biology course page in the LMS on the class computer and went to one of the quizzes. Looking at the screen, the student immediately perked up, saying, “That doesn’t show up on my screen.”

He was pointing at a button that said “submit” at the bottom of the quiz.

This was mysterious.

He logged on to the quiz on his computer and said, “See, it’s not there!” I hit the arrow-down key on the keyboard, and after four or five strikes, the “submit” button appeared. The student had assumed that the answers were being recorded as he clicked, not realizing there was an additional bit of scrolling and clicking necessary.

Perhaps some will judge this student harshly, but when I asked this cohort of students how many of them were having at least some confusion about how to use the system, just about every hand shot up. I chucked the day’s plan, and we spent our time figuring out how to navigate the LMS.

I pretty much gave up on using the LMS toward the end of my full-time teaching career when it became clear that I could not kludge together a way to use the online grade book that could accommodate my alternative-grading approach.

When I give my talks on campuses now, I’m mostly speaking about writing and AI, but I also sometimes take a moment to ask faculty about how they view technology in general and its impact on their teaching. At a recent event, I asked how many people thought the LMS enhanced their course. The room laughed; no one raised their hand in the affirmative.

In many ways, the story of higher education in my lifetime is the story of technology. I went to college with a personal word-processing typewriter that displayed 30 characters of text on a liquid-crystal screen. When I returned to teaching post–grad school after a stint in private industry, we had the internet, and laptops were required materials. By the time I stopped teaching full-time, it was rare for anything to be distributed or turned in as anything other than as a digital file.

Where has this gotten us? My questions extend beyond the LMS as a portal between instructors and students to all manner of enterprise software, as the so-called learning analytics movement that was supposed to unlock the secrets of achievement by collecting all that could be quantified about student activity.

I believe one of the things we’re coming to understand is that quantified data is not sufficient to understand the full story of what’s happening when it comes to learning. The ways we’ve abused and misused this data will be a subject I’m hoping to explore in more posts over the course of this semester.

In the meantime, let me leave you with a thought experiment. Imagine a virus that wipes out all learning management software. How would you adapt your work? And is it possible that the atmosphere for teaching and learning would be improved?