This post first appeared on aud.life
Phil Hill has a new op-ed at The Chronicle of Higher Education (also re-posted to the E-Literate blog) about the need for ed-tech to support “vastly different types of professors,” not just the “ed-tech enthusiasts” but the “mainstream professors” as well.
Let’s admit it, there can be some real tension when a college is faced with choosing a new learning-management system, or any software used by more than one department.
Since the decision involves the administrators who will support the system – commonly called an LMS – and professors who will use it, who should lead the process? Should staff members just get input from faculty members, or should professors vote on the final decision? Or should professors run the process?
After our weekend at the Indie Ed-Tech event at Davidson, the use of the singular article to describe ed-tech adoption really struck me. An LMS choice. “The system.”
At Davidson, the folks from BYU’s CIO office – who I think are breaking new ed-tech ground in many interesting ways – told us that they support all LMSes, whichever the instructor chooses to adopt. In order to make this less burdensome for students, who now have courses scattered across multiple platforms, they’ve built an interface where notifications and calendaring can be centralized for each student.
This gets at the importance of APIs, no doubt: the ability to have modular, interchangeable, interoperable pieces of software that can be assembled or ignored as needed. It’s certainly a very different approach than adopting one, single enterprise system that will, inevitably, fail to meet everyone’s needs, no matter how much you try to support “vastly different types of professors.”
But BYU’s approach is notable too because it isn’t simply an effort at the latter; it’s also about rethinking education technology infrastructure so that it supports students’ diverse needs via a personal API. And to quote Kin,
No single API implementation, tool, service, specification or standard will set into motion the change that is needed. The real API story is about empowering every single individual to take control over their own digital self using APIs....
Indie ed-tech are a plural noun.