LMS of the Future- E. Smith

LMS of the Future
Many of the concepts and ideas brought up by the article, as presented by Dr. Saba, are very interesting and hold many ramifications to the future of education. I would agree the one size fits all education of today is not working and there must be a new system with a focus on the student and their needs in the education. My LMS would contain a piece in which the student would determine the outcome of their own education within a course; a “Choose your own adventure” idea for their own educational experience. Students would enroll in the course and take an initial assessment to determine their prior knowledge. Based upon their responses the LMS would organize the course content based on their proficiency of the topics. Students would be able to choose the type of assessments for their content knowledge as well to best suit their desired outcomes for the course. This would involve a process of artificial intelligence on the computer part to place the modules of learning in the proper order based upon the learner’s knowledge base.

The one item which concerns me the most is the interaction within the “classroom environment” for socialization purposes. The use of LMS’s would substantially inhibit people from working together, in person, rather than from a distance. When it comes to working in the “real world”, meetings will be in person some of the time and the learners may become too dependent on computer based interaction rather than face to face. I would make sure the LMS of the future would require a socialization piece such as video conferencing with a “live” view of the person. It is important to be able to read facial expressions and voice intonation to determine if a conversation is going well for a presentation or other personal interaction.

Everything mentioned in the article is valuable and I would not be surprised if this eventually happens at some time down the road. I feel having more and more institutions going to an online medium for education will definitely have a significant effect on the growth of personalities in our nation. I feel we will be perpetuating the problem of people interacting with other people out in the world. We see it now with Facebook and online dating sites. Everything has become less personal and more virtual. I truly believe their needs to be a physical component to school no matter the level of education because this loss of interaction will severely endanger our ability to interact with each other in person. There needs to be a balance with online and face to face instruction and the use of an LMS.