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Learning Management in a Historical Perspective.
Alex Romiszowski.
(Educational Technology 47/6, November-December 2007, pp60-61)
Project PLAN – was it an early form of LMS?
The year was 1967. As a young researcher, working in the UK in the newly emerging field of Educational Technology, I arranged a 3-month study tour of centers of R&D in North America. It was a busy schedule: a couple of days at professor Skinner’s labs in Boston, reviewing the latest research on programmed instruction; a visit to OISE in Toronto where some of the earliest R+D on CAI was underway; a stay at a Job Core Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, where the whole program ran on contingency-management principles; a visit to New Mexico to see how some Zuni Indian villagers were studying by means of a system of learner-directed, on-demand-video (what’s new in ed. tech?).
However, the part of the trip that is most strongly rooted in memory is my visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I stayed much longer than originally planned. Part of the reason was the time and place – San Francisco in the summer of 1967, at the height of the flower-power movement. The scenes at the Haight/Ashbury intersection and the Golden Gate Park have left indelible impressions. But that was incidental to my principal reasons for staying, which were visits to several R+D projects that influenced my own research for many years to come: Berkley, where professors Crutchfield and Covington were using programmed instruction for the development of creativity and productive thinking skills; Stanford, where professor Suppes was conducting a multi-year study on the use of CAI for the teaching of arithmetic (the results are still relevant today); and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in Palo Alto, where professor Flanagan was then implementing project PLAN. It was at the AIR that I first met Robert Mager, who was running a workshop with a group of teachers developing performance objectives for all subject domains of the school curriculum. I sat in on the workshop for a week and got involved quite deeply in this project of “Program for Learning According to Needs”.
The goal of project PLAN was to support classroom teachers by computer-based analysis of the learning performance of individual students and matching of this data to suitable learning materials and methods. The teachers writing objectives in Mager’s workshop were creating the indicators and measuring instruments by which any teacher in any classroom could assess the strengths and weaknesses of each of the students and prescribe appropriate basic, remedial or enrichment learning activities on a highly individualized basis. The materials and activities themselves were not computer-based; the management system that supported the teachers in their lesson planning, delivery and evaluation activities was.
Project PLAN was one of the first large-scale implementations of CMI – computer-managed instruction. As such, it may possibly be considered as a precursor to today’s ever-growing number of LMS – learning management systems. What can we learn from revisiting this early project?
The management of learning, according to PLAN
The data collection system and interface used in project PLAN was an electronic “postbox” installed in every participating classroom. The learning progress of the students would be evaluated on a daily / weekly basis by means of objectives-based multiple choice tests. The students would respond on pre-printed cards, marking their choices of response for each question, and then “posted” the cards into the “postbox”. The data would be optically read and transferred to a mainframe computer located in Los Angeles, which would update the databases and provide, in real time to each teacher, detailed reports on the progress of each individual student in comparison to others in the class, of this class in comparison to that teacher’s previous classes, of this class in comparison to classes in other schools, and so on. In addition, the computer furnished recommendations as to the learning materials that would be most appropriate for each student to next study, given that student’s performance profile to date compared to the profiles of all other students who had previously followed similar learning pathways.
The system also made comparative analyses in order to generate long term educational advice. For instance, by linking the data of the project PLAN students to data collected in a previous long-term project (TALENT) that had correlated school performance and subsequent professional career success of millions of US youth, it was hoped to provide computer-assisted academic and career guidance counseling. I used the words “it was hoped” because the life of project PLAN was quite short – only a few years involving a few dozen schools spread across the USA – in fact, only as long as the funding lasted. So, some of the long-term hopes of project PLAN were not realized. But the short-term results were very promising and pointed to how the management of learning might be implemented once the necessary technology became generally accessible and affordable.
That stage was reached some 20 years later, in the late 1980’s when relatively cheap microcomputers and networks came to be part of the generally expected technology infrastructure of a modern educational institution. But the pioneering educators, who first got involved, devoted much more attention to using computers as content-presentation devices than as learning-management devices. This was partly due to the limited memory and power of early microcomputers – by the time the CAI or simulation software was loaded, there was little memory left to devote to the storage and analysis of learning results – and partly due to the use of microcomputers as stand-alone machines, which made it difficult to integrate the results of many students working on different computers.
Then along came the explosive growth in capacity and power of computers, the plummeting costs of technology in general, the Internet and the consequent interlinking of everything to everything else. So, let us look back from the vantage point of a further 20 years to see whether any large scale learning management systems based on lessons learned from projects like PLAN were ever implemented. Or alternatively, whether such initiatives perhaps superseded the approaches used in PLAN by more sophisticated and powerful methodologies based on more recent research and pedagogical theory? Where are we now in terms of computer-based management of learning?
Management of learning, today
One confusing development is the plethora of names that have been invented to label, or mislabel the recent spate of educational management software and systems. First, were the so-called course management systems, or CMS, which provide instructors with the ability to perform tasks such as: putting course materials online; tracking student progress through assignments, quizzes and tests; maintaining online grade books; using discussion boards, group email and chat; generating course statistics and a limited range of reports. Academic literature sources that have attempted to classify the technology alternatives cite among the examples of CMS such commercial products as FirstClass, Blackboard and Desire2Learn, and also many open source systems such as Aulanet, Sakai and Moodle. However, other sources, including in many cases the brochures of the manufacturers themselves, refer to these as learning management systems, or LMS.
So are these terms synonymous? Apparently they are not. Writers who have attempted to classify the functionality of existing products, define LMS as software that may perform some or all of the above mentioned CMS tasks, but also performs other tasks such as: student registration; keeping track of participation and attendance; keeping track of completion of assignments, test scores and grades; testing the students; providing feedback, learning advice and follow-up; preparing a wider range of reports, aggregating data across various repetitions of a course; processing tuition charges, keeping financial records and transferring payments among departments; providing course catalogues and other orientation or marketing information. These authors would not classify most of the previously cited list as examples of LMS, but rather as CMS, due to their limited functionality. They quote such systems as NetDimensions EKP, Saba, and SumTotal Systems as true examples of LMS – products that are found most frequently in corporate training contexts, but rarely in universities and almost never in schools.
Then along came Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS). This led Leonard Greenberg, writing in the ASTD’s Source for eLearning (www.learningcircuits.org) to comment: “If you’re confused about the differences between a learning management system (LMS) and a learning content management system (LCMS), you’re not alone”. He states that an LMS and an LCMS are “complementary but very different systems that serve different masters”: an LMS is “a high-level, strategic solution for planning, delivering, and managing all learning events within an organization, including online, virtual classroom, and instructor-led courses”; an LCMS “gives authors, instructional designers, and subject matter experts the means to create e-learning content more efficiently …. just in time to meet the needs of individual learners or groups of learners”. But once more, other sources, including the manufacturers, do not always agree on these definitions.
So, it would seem that confusion reigns, and the use of the different labels is often driven more by marketing considerations than descriptive clarity. However, it would seem that today’s LMS (but not LCMS), while performing a much broader range of management functions, are still recognizable as the descendants of systems such as PLAN. They find ready application in corporate training, but they are not being widely used in school or university contexts, where the most popular systems seem to be the less comprehensive and multipurpose CMS systems. This may, at least in part, be due to their being somewhat out of tune with the reigning educational philosophies. A glance at literature that is critical of the use of LMS reveals statements such as: learning — is not a process to be managed — is by nature multi-faceted and chaotic; using an LMS — dictates the nature of interactions between instructors, learners and content — limits discovery/ exploratory/ constructivist learning; one-way instruction doesn’t work well in the information society — networks do — blogs, wikis and collaborative learning spaces are more relevant. However, it is not at all clear from this literature how and indeed whether the resultant learning is tracked, evaluated and managed. Maybe that is the real reason for the historical discontinuity in the development of LMS for education – the management of learning is anathema to the formal education system. Is this so? And is this a problem?
A historical postscript
The year is 1971. My boss and I were teaching a workshop in Egypt. During a week-long break we made a rapid tour of the antiquities, flying from Cairo to Luxor, Aswan and the Abu Simbel temple in the Nubian Desert. On the third leg of this trip, our plane broke down and we spent a day in Aswan waiting for it to be fixed. The other passengers were mostly members of a tour group of Americans working in Saudi Arabia for the oil company ARAMCO. I spent the day chatting to the Director of Human Resources. He told me that his job was tough, as the Saudi government made ARAMCO responsible for providing all health and education services to family members of local employees, and the local concept of family was very much extended.
“I have five times as many children in our primary school as I have local hires” he said.
He then continued: “But we got that running really efficiently - we use Project PLAN”.
He proceeded to describe a scenario of Saudi children learning American history (“nothing in the contract about curriculum”) from English-language materials (“that can’t be bad”), supervised by untrained monitors, and managed by a computer in California.
“The technology works real well!” He concluded.
I was dumbfounded. But on reflection, is this all that different from some e-learning systems we might find operating today, right here, just around the corner?
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