Content Management Pedagogy

I remark often that I was in the last pre-LMS generation. For those unfamiliar, LMS stands for learning management system, and these systems are an extremely lucrative industry in higher education. A quick Google search lets me know the average cost per year for a university is $75,000, and that this figure doesn’t include the attendant hosting fees, support personnel, ADA compliance officers, and a variety of other ancillary costs.

The integration of the LMS and their assumed centrality to teaching happened sometime while I was in graduate school. When I was studying literature in college from 2009-2013–shit, statements like that are the beginning of the end, aren’t they?–classes essentially worked like this:

• A teacher handed out a course schedule and a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. I always read the former and skimmed the latter for required books I needed to buy. I truly, honestly cannot remember ever reading anything else on a syllabus besides the course title.
• On a day-to-day basis, teachers would remind students of what was due by the next class. Usually, these were readings. If I wasn’t paying attention (a typical situation by the way—this isn’t a kids these days screed) I would look at the aforementioned course schedule, which was probably in my bedroom somewhere. If not, I imagine I found another copy. I don’t remember how.
• Sometimes, the teacher would then hand out other sheets of paper called assignments. They would explain the assignments, and then students would go do them to the best of their ability, meeting with the teacher during their office hours as necessary.
• A grade was given at the end of the semester. Given that I never read a syllabus, the way these were calculated remains something of a mystery to me.

Essentially, the entire course was managed by teacher circulating print-based documents in class. This was a highly imperfect system for all sorts of reasons. But there are a few things it encouraged that were highly positive: attending class, the value of listening (even though, as mentioned, I often wasn’t), personal organization, and in-person interaction with a teacher.

I remember my first introduction to an LMS. A literature professor used Blackboard (a popular LMS), which she correctly identified as the future of education. She still circulated all the same documents, though, and I tried my best to ignore Blackboard.

Eventually, we were required to take an in-class quiz using her LMS, and I could ignore it no longer. We were told to bring a computer to class, which seemed very dumb to me in the context of a literature course. Wasn’t it easier just to take the quiz on paper? Whatever. I opened up the quiz on Blackboard and reviewed the questions. I was sitting at the back of the room and looked up. What I saw was about 75% of students cheating on the quiz.

Dear Critical Reader: I do not think all or most students, in general, are cheating. I’ll go even further and say that I think quizzes on literary texts are, themselves, a largely unproductive genre. And if a teacher is giving a quiz proctored through a networked computer, honestly, whatever happens happens. That’s on you.

It’s just the case that almost everyone on that day was cheating. And it set the tone—fairly or unfairly—for my view on these systems in general. Learning management systems solve a lot of problems. And they certainly enable important interactions for online classes. But for in-person classes, they’ve fostered a “web-first” assumption on the part of teachers and students that, in the final account, bad.

It’s bad because it affords new types of cheating, sure, but I don’t really care much about that. These systems are truly bad several other reasons:

• Reason 1. They completely alter the relationship between teachers and students, putting an incredibly poorly designed technology between them and telling both parties that they “solve” the “problem” of course communication.
• Reason 2: They track everything students and teachers do on and with them. This is both a privacy issue and a labor issue.
• Reason 3: They tell their audiences that their primary purpose is Reason 1 when it is actually Reason 2. Reason 2 provides data that is given back to both universities and private companies, which they then use/sell to earn profits in ways that are not only unrelated to but often in opposition to teaching and learning.
• Reason 4: Students, when you ask them, don’t even like these systems.
• Reason 5: The LMS are now widely assumed to be the class itself, not a tool used by a teacher within a larger class setting. This is demonstrated constantly by the language that surrounds them. Before the semester: “Do you have your class posted?” “Yeah I’m almost there. I just need to work on my classes a bit.”

I’ve taken to call this LMS-assumption “content management pedagogy.” Content management, to be clear, is the productive and necessary technical writing skill of managing and designing content for users. Content management pedagogy is the typically unproductive and less-necessary phenomenon where the processing and management of course material becomes unconsciously synonymous with teaching and learning. Content management pedagogy is evident when teachers are forced to spend valuable time (that could be used to design learning activities, for instance) updating overly complicated and borderline legalistic documents across multiple sections of a single course. Content management pedagogy accounts for the feeling that we’re teaching online courses when we’re in the classroom, opening online materials for in-person students who all have computers or phones. Content management pedagogy is what trains us all that a 20-email thread to not answer a question is flexible, accommodating efficiency, while answering that same question in four seconds in class is limiting.

The culprit here is, and never could be, students or teachers. It’s that technology changes the delivery of learning. It’s the LMS. And it’s bad.