Martin Weller wrote a piece for On the Horizon about a challenge higher education is facing:
When learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?
A good question–and one that applies to instructors as well! Ars did a great write-up, and you’ll find a summary written by the author over at Michael Feldstein’s blog (he was the editor of the journal issue). Weller is a good writer, and makes his point much better than I could:
The monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums. Students [and instructors] will abandon these in favour of their tools, the back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.
This may seem like just a technological issue, but it runs deeper than this. If we add to the technological experience, the user participation one they will have had through social tools such as Flickr, YouTube, blogging, wikis, etc and compare this with the top-down, pre-filtered experience they have in courses and selected resources, it becomes obvious that this is about more than just technology, it is a social change.
I can think of two possible reasons behind this phenomenon.
The first is momentum. A university that runs an e-mail service, a web hosting service, a streaming video service, etc. sees all of these tools and wonders where to start and where to find the time and resources. Should they let something go, or try to do everything for everybody?
Second, FERPA has everybody scared. The purpose of the law was to protect student’s personal and grade information from things like the grade list on the door and prying parents. Yet fear over having students work on external commercial systems, which are largely secure from hacking and violate privacy only on the aggregate level of data, causes hesitation from using Web 2.0 systems or attempting to form partnerships with their owners.
I’m curious if anyone has written a recent history of educational technology. What did universities do when e-mail was the new thing? My guess is that they just bought a VAX system. If that “buy an X system” model is breaking down, how can institutions affordably buy or build an open platform that has the flexibility to work with existing apps, develop new programs, and protect user security–all at once?
When considering the complexities and potential pitfalls of FERPA it is easy to overlook the obvious: The student can provide his/her own education records to anyone, by any means, at any time. The student can also consent to the disclosure of his/her records by the school. When a student participates in web activities by his/her own volition, or provides consent for the school to include him/her in such activities, FERPA need not be feared!
Bob, I have to say I completely agree. Unfortunately, fear on the behalf of students (over schoolwork that might someday be seen as embarrassing) and of the possibility of a lawsuit has some educational technologists thinking about the law before thinking of the learning possibilities. The same phenomenon is also happening in the copyright arena.
And from some respects–who can blame them? Both are complicated laws. Directory vs educational information can sometimes be confusing and a fair use analysis gives no guarantees.
To some degree, this may be an effect of a societal rules reaching into more aspects of daily life (or the system colonizing lifeworld, for any Habermas fans). Your site has some great, clear information on FERPA–if we all are going to have to understand these laws on some level, we’ll need more work like yours.