What is the future of full blown LMS in schools?

[Sam McNeill]

Dear All,

I attended a city wide meeting last week of "ICT champions" in schools where one of the biggest High Schools in our city was talking about dropping Moodle and were trialling Canvas and Schoology.

The conversation essentially went into the single question of "are teachers using the features in an LMS anymore?" The general points I took away were:

• Schools that had Google Docs or O365 (mostly OneNote) were seeing that was all teachers were using
• more advanced features like quizzes/forums/assignment submissions were NOT being used
• Schools that were using plagiarism tools like Turn It In were seeing usage of LMS for easier submission to the plagiarism checking website.
• schools that had adopted more basic LMS (if you could call them that) such as Google Classroom / Siteswere seeing greater/wider usage of them as they were so simple to use (again, mostly being used as an online repository of content, that something like OneNote is being used for in our school).

This got me thinking, especially after reading this article:

techcrunch.com

The LMS market glacier is melting

The world of edtech is strange and full of apparent contradictions. Venture capital investment has exploded since 2010, hitting an all-time high of $3.1..

A year ago (almost to the day!) I reflected on this issue around complexity vs simplicity in LMS here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/simplicity-vs-complexity-education-sam-mcneill?trk=mp-author-card

I know of the massive UI/UX improvements in modern LMS like Canvas and Schoolbox but what I'm really questioning is this: are teachers not using older style LMS because of the interface, or is it more because they find the very basic feature set of GAFE/O365 "meets their needs" sufficiently?

If that is the case, I don't think throwing $$ at a new, modern, better LMS will necessarily increase usage. And yes, we have spent considerable time, effort and resources on teaching our staff how to effectively use Moodle, highlighting the differences pros/cons of OneNote vs Moodle so it's not necessarily an ignorance thing. I have tried to push Turn it In via Moodle but it's not been endorsed by our Head of Teaching and Learning and I suspect it will never get traction if it's introduced as an ICT driven initiative.

So, if you have an LMS that you believe is successful and has wide spread usage amongst your staff, I'd LOVE to know what it is and how you've fostered a culture of usage amongst your teachers!

Cheers

Sam