Thinking About LMS/CMS . . . especially iLearn

Last semester was my first semester of learning with a CMS. At first, I found it alienating and irritating. I had trouble logging in and having to send messages to a help desk to get a username and password, simply to access the readings for class, seemed both unnecessary and unacceptable. It actually really pissed me off.

Now, though, I kind of enjoy iLearn. Possibly, partly because due to my earlier technological difficulties, I feel like I have accomplished something just by accessing it. I also like that if my syllabus is posted there it means it’s impossible to lose.

Two of my three graduate classes last semester used iLearn. In class A, we were required to post discussion questions on the week’s reading a day before class. This mainly irritated me.

(I feel I should pause here to point out that I consider myself a very patient and generally non-irritable person. Except around the issue of technology. I’m hoping to begin to change that with this class.)

Class A was an excellent class, but the iLearn component could have been improved, I think, by the professor speaking a little bit more about her philosophy on using a CMS and what she hoped we would accomplish with it, as well as by speaking about how much we were supposed to contribute on it. Somewhere around the last month of the semester, she told me she wanted me to start contributing to the discussion earlier on iLearn like I did in class. I felt admonished, but also confused, since I had actually assumed the iLearn stuff was mainly a way for shy students to participate in class without participating in class. I had never heard the terms LMS or CMS before and did not realize there was this whole philosophy about using New Media in the classroom.

The reading load for the class was very heavy, and I had class B, which had dense reading, the day before, along with class C—the one that didn’t use iLearn, but which still, of course, had it’s own reading load. I always ended up writing the questions for class A between classes B and C, upstairs in the computer lab. I always got kicked out of the computer lab before I had really finished writing the questions. And of course, every week I resolved to structure my time better next time, and every week the semester got heavier, and on Tuesday evening I got kicked out of the computer lab. Meanwhile, other people in the class were generating these lengthy discussions every week, which meant there was even more stuff to read for the class.

However, it was usually only a few of the same people who wrote so much, and then when the class met on Wednesday, the professor would prod people to replicate what they had been saying on iLearn in class, especially if she found it to be particularly useful, but, often, the people who had written the best stuff couldn’t remember what it was they had written, since it had been days before the class, and because their heads were so stuffed with the copious amount of reading which was to be completed that day. (A couple of times I wrote things our professor felt worth discussing, and this happened to me as well; I completely forgot what I had written, and felt dumb.)

Our professor solved this problem (I mean the class wide problem, not just how I’m an airhead) by printing out the most worthwhile discussion threads and bringing them to class. But anyway. Almost always in that class, no matter how much time I had spent reading for the class, or how early in the week I had begun, I had a squeamish, unprepared feeling before class because I had not read all of the stuff everyone was writing on iLearn in addition to the reading on the syllabus. But people could be writing on iLearn up until the moment of class, so having read all of it was pretty difficult. And it was unclear how much of it we were expected to be reading. It was kind of maddening.

As for what we were writing: 1) the assignment was to write questions to stimulate discussion, but I think a lot of us just wrote the kind of comments we would make in class and then added, “what do you think of this?” The answer often being, “not much,” since there was no guaranty anyone would read what you had written.

Our professor did not join the discussion, which meant that sometimes people would go off on tangents which would have nothing to do with what we would later do with the material in class. I felt guilty when I hadn’t read all the iLearn stuff, but when I had, I sometimes felt like I had wasted my time. Usually, there would be a lot of chatter on iLearn all week, and then on class day, there would be the grand unveiling of the professor’s actual lesson plan—why she had put what we were reading on the syllabus in the first place—and then the stuff on iLearn would for the most part just seem lame and irrelevant.

As far as class B, we were never required to write anything on it, which meant a few of us made use of the iLearn discussion forum, but most did not. Once, I thought I would have to miss class for something, but I wanted to show the professor that I had been prepared for the class even though I had to miss it, so I wrote a somewhat lengthy post. Then, it turned out I didn’t have to miss class after all. Writing that post was the kind of learning experience I could have brought up in our class this past Thursday. Though my motivation was simply to prove I had done the reading, writing about it made me process what we had read to a greater degree, and, I had the visceral experience of my brain booting up while I did it. However, I hardly ever had that experience on iLearn in class A, where writing on iLearn was not just encouraged but mandated. Then it was simply another obstacle in my day before getting to actually finish the reading for class.

Oh, as for class C. There was no iLearn component. I ended up losing the syllabus and I had to keep emailing Joseph & Denise to ask what we were reading. (As much a comment on me as on iLearn, clearly!)

Coopman criticizes Blackboard for encouraging linear discussion, whereas real life discussions involve tangents and digressions. Though digressions can definitely be stimulating, I think this linearity could actually be a benefit of a CMS. The fact is, tangents and digressions will take place anyway, but attempting to adhere to one subject title for the thread creates a form in which students are encouraged to build on the original idea.

This can be awkward, though, on iLearn. For example, if a student starts a thread, then two other students reply to it, and then I want to reply to something the third student said, which does not have much to do with what was said by the original student, then I am still “responding” to the subject title of the original post—though actually, that’s not what I am replying to. Once another student reads the thread, it’s not confusing anymore, but the new topic will not be listed under the forum subject titles unless I have started a new thread.

Both Coopman and Kotcamp seem to take for granted that student-student, as opposed to student-teacher or student-teacher-student, interactions are a good thing. I’m less convinced. It depends, I think, on the students involved, as well as on the subject matter. Though there may be many side benefits to student to student interactions, simply making us talk to each other is not the same thing as making us learn. Just like in the classroom, simply because a student takes the time to be more verbose does not mean she is more worthwhile for her classmates to listen to. (& this blog post might be a good example of that, ha.)

It strikes me that one good thing about CMS discussion forms might be that you can skim them, and even ignore them if you want to. As the wise MGMT song says: “Enjoy yourself. Take only what you need from it.” Unlike in the physical classroom, where if half the class isn’t paying attention, that is a bad thing that will probably stall class discussion, on iLearn if only some of the class is participating in the online class discussion, it doesn’t hurt the momentum in the classroom.