We’ve heard a lot of rumbling on campuses across the country – for a number of years now – relating to the broken price to value equation for learning management systems. Part of this is frustration by customers of the many acquired companies by Blackboard but there is certainly a building undercurrent that becomes quite clear when spending time with instructors and seeing how few of them actually use an LMS beyond mandated tasks of posting a syllabus and submitting final grades. However, it seems few institutions have been taking the next step to figure out what may work better for them. Until now it seems.
Rather than rely on a single LMS to manage all aspects of teaching and learning on its 17 campuses, the University of North Carolina system created an app store that gives faculty a chance to experiment with cutting-edge tech.
If you’re looking for voices that may indicate where the market may move, one to listen to is Matthew Rascoff who runs technology innovation for the UNC system. Having spoken with Matthew before, he’s one of the folks who “gets it”…and is ready and willing to help lead his member colleges to a more productive and effective future.
Matthew Rascoff has a name for the enterprise learning management system: a “Swiss Army Knife of mediocrity.” As vice president of learning technology and innovation at the University of North Carolina General Administration, which oversees 17 university campuses with almost 225,000 students, Rascoff has observed that the most innovative faculty members at his institution use the LMS the least. Many professors working on experimental efforts hate the LMS and have sidestepped it, he noted.
We’ve been asked before about why didn’t we build Junction to operate as a cartridge within an LMS – usually by people who haven’t yet tried Junction. However, once they do experience Junction and see what an intuitive, engaging and easy-to-use learning experience looks and feels like the next question is often “How quickly can I get set up to use Junction with my students?”. Integrating with the LMS for single sign-on and gradebook sync is fine, and we support it with every LMS we’ve encountered including Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle, Schoology, and more. The unspoken question is that if all you’re using an LMS for is single sign-on and passing final grades to an SIS how much should that be worth to an institution and does that value align with what the institution is actually paying?
Now, the UNC app store is not all polished and ready to scale globally, but Matthew and the team at UNC are trying and taking steps forward and that should be both applauded and supported. Until we take more steps away from the LMS, it’s going to be difficult to realize the long-standing potential of technology to help drive significant improvements in learning outcomes, with better efficiency and at lower prices. It all starts with helping instructors help students.
Building an App Store for Learning Tools — Campus Technology
