A Consortial Approach to LMS

By Christopher Chase

Sharing our strengths – The Claremont Colleges are a consortium of LAC in california.

Overview

• 3/5 using one tool but each campus maintained their own infrastruction and lms
• received grant to to share strengths of lms
• Key Points – expanded courseware support, prof development, student production team, digital assests

Courseware support

• centralized support using a lead campus model
• added additional redundancy, extra services like streaming server, course request system, and user/password reset utility, etc.
• all this done by baby systems working with 8 institutions collaboration/consensus takes time
• Central Support and dedicated professional staff and a student production team.

A different approach Faculty Driven

• This seems to be a recurring theme of success. Keeping learning learning in the center and engage stakeholders
• Professional development – pedagogical workshops and tool based workshops. Hands on and developmental workshops. workshop leader allowed to keep workshop moving. Individual assistance given by pedagogical or technological experts. – A good idea if manpower can be arranged.
• follow up with a lot of one-one support
• connecting faculty with student from development team.
• Departent support staff also included in the training so that faculty could use their traditional departmental support structures to assist. – This is a good idea – does it help faculty to view teaching using these tools veiw their actions more as teaching and less like using technology for teaching?

Student Production Team

• 40 students trained to provide para-professional support. – Highly trained and expectations are high!
• See the handout of best practices – is this available online somewhere?
• Benefits include – Computer Lab Support, New Student Orientation, Peer to Peer Training – All residual effects of the highly trained student work force as they were able to hold ‘regular’ workstudy and student leader positions

The Pedagogy of the LMS – By Chris

• Use in the classrom/Guiding Principles/Resources that will help faculty do what they value better.
• Access to student, professor and content based on individual schedule
• CMS as a time-management tool more efficient that blogging/im

Uses of CMS -

• Presentation of content – stability
• Communication is digital outside of class efficient and nothing is lost
• Supplemental readings
• Provide lecture notes to allow students to focus on learning interactions and not taking notes word for word.
• Effective way to get feedback on what students need to get from class
• Digital drop boxes – efficiently manage paper flow in and out
• Archival advantages sharing of old excellent assignments
• Team teaching across discipline and institution – cms serves as a central clearing house.

The uses from his point of view really came from the vantage point of having the cms as a content manager and common place. Seems to really be saying that it is his job to enable learning and the cms is a tool to get there…

• uses the tool to accomplish tasks that will free up class time for interactions that can be only held face to face…

Questons from the crowd -

Talking more about the student project team – to keep it going student technology assistant department really picked up the slack for the whole of the grant.  They were intentional about not allowing sub par preformance.  They then used the successful students to recruit similar students to perpetuate the success.