Claire Amos

A couple of months ago I was pondering the BIG question - to LMS or not to LMS ? For those of you who are not down with the edu lingo, LMS stands for learning management system, which is a term for an online environment or platform that is used as a means for managing learning online...funny that. Well, ponder I did, and still do, asking myself if we are actually in a post-LMS world. Part of me was convinced we are, that the concept of a LMS was singular and restrictive and quite frankly a bit 'yesterday'. But then, mid-ponder it struck me. I was asking the wrong question. It was not a question of 'To LMS or not to LMS?' It should have actually been the question - 'How do you we evolve the LMS to best meet the changing needs of schools and learners? It was not a matter of 'throwing the baby out with the bath water', it was more about teaching that baby to swim! So how is the LMS evolving (or does it need to evolve)? The evolution for me is that it i...

Interestingly, when I started out at HPSS I was completely convinced that we would not need a formal LMS (Learning Management System). I believed the time of Moodle, KnowledgeNet and UltraNet was behind us. I believed that students should manage themselves and teachers and students should have free choice. I believed that providing one LMS as our main online space was simply no longer needed. Then, as time passed, I reconsidered, I started to look back on Moodle with increasingly rose tinted glasses. I remembered the structure, the untapped potential of all those activities, all those plugins. Before I knew it I was making a steady u-turn. I began thinking, yes, we do need a LMS, we need that Moodle - even if only as a front door, a front door that allowed us to mash up Google Apps, Gmail, KAMAR student portal, MyPortfolio and links to eTV and our Library Management System. Moodle, Google and MyPortfolio supported by SSO (single sign-on) became the vision once more.  With this thin...