Week 6 Post: Distance and Open Learning Technologies in Adult Learning

Moodle (https://moodle.org/) and Desire2learn (http://www.desire2learn.com/) are asynchronous online learning technologies.  Of course, the big name in this act is Blackboard, which Walden uses, but since we are all familiar with that, I decided to have a look at some other names in the business.  

            On the first page of Moodle, I clicked on “Join Us” and was taken to another page where there were several links to various discussions.  Of course, the discussion topic I zeroed in on was entitled “Teaching with Moodle”.  This page was a kind of troubleshooting / suggestion grab-bag page, where teachers either wrote about glitches and other technical problems, or where they simply posted questions on anything from how to implement a particular learning objective to how to split a class of one hundred plus students into groups.  I went back to the main “Join Us” page and this time clicked on “Lounge”, which is where teachers share anything from articles and links of interest or teaching suggestions and lesson plans.

            I then decided to take a tour of the facilities and was impressed with the user-friendly interface and the customizable dashboard.  The interface is specifically designed to be compatible with mobile technologies, which is a significant advantage as learning becomes more and more mobile (Park, 2011).  Moodle contains many tools (such as wikis, forums, and chats) to promote, foster, and implement collaborative learning.  Basically, I got the impression that Moodle is teacher- and user-friendly, and as anyone who has ever taken an online course knows, that kind of friendliness is one of the most important factors to consider when incorporating learning management systems into courses.  At the end of the day, how pretty the page is and whether or not it is compatible with your mobile will not matter if, among other things, your students have problems accessing their pages, you cannot see their grades, or announcement do not get published in time.

            Neither Moodle nor Desire2learn appear to have such problems.  Desire2learn is not that different from Moodle.  Indeed, perhaps it is safe to assume, on a superficial level at least, that all LMSs are more or less variations on a similar theme.  The basic premise is this: Teachers get to put their courses online and manage them quite easily.  With distance learning becoming ever more prevalent (Bonk, 2009), LMSs are going to become more and more important in our lives.  Who knows, with learning becoming ongoing and lifelong, perhaps LMS and social networking will combine to form a symbiotic whole in which learning and networking are one and the same.

            Fantastical as that may sound, it probably will not provide learning in a formal capacity.  In fact, while I was reading class materials for the assignments this week I kept asking myself what the difference was between open learning and distance learning.  Of course, the differences became clear as I was reading and the main difference is that distance learning is formal and credited.  Therefore, the utopic and fantasy combination of social networking and LMS would be fine if we were talking about open learning.  Indeed, if you go to the MIT OpenCourseWare website, you can see links to their Facebook and Twitter pages.  However, when it comes to official and formal learning endeavors, it would perhaps be better to stick with LMS and network with classmates via the tools provided by the system.  

            There is no doubt that such technologies enhance adult learning.  I mean, that is what we are doing right now, is it not?  We are benefiting from an LMS and we are receiving a formal credited education through it.  In a language learning context and LMS can provide learners with valuable opportunities to practice online.  Mostly, the LMS is used for work on grammar or practicing reading skills.  The main thing to keep in mind is that along with the efficiency of the LMS, the meaningfulness of the tasks is equally important.  If we do not provide learners with learning tasks and objectives that are meaningful to them, then using LMS would be no different than any other kind of teaching-learning interaction.   

References

Bonk, C. J. (2009). The world is open: How web technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

Park, Y. (2011). A pedagogical framework for mobile learning: Categorizing educational applications of mobile technologies into four types. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(2), 78–102.
Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.