Has the subject of learning platforms joined those of politics and religion to form a trinity of topics one should avoid talking about in polite society? Having been engaged in a flurry of fact-finding, interviewing people and other research on learning platforms for a chapter I’ve been asked to write for a forthcoming book about networked school communities, I have certainly been left with that impression. Shout learning platform at your next ICT Co-ordinators event, and I guarantee that half the room will become apoplectic with rage over wasted money, bureaucracy, hype and top-down change management, and the other half will close its eyes and take on an Elysian, dreamlike quality as it rhapsodises about the transformation their learning platform has helped to bring about. In short, its a topic which does nothing if not polarize people into opposing camps. It is almost as though the age old battle between good and evil has resurfaced in a new guise.
Yet if we calm down and look at what is really going on, the underlying issues have very little, if indeed anything at all, to do with technology. After all, one could adopt a very pragmatic definition of a learning platform and say, to plagiarise the economists definition of money, that a learning platform is what a learning platform does. In other words, if the set-up allows teachers and pupils to collaborate on documents, exchange ideas and views, and upload and download resources ñ all within a safe environment then itís a learning platform. Nothing too contentious there then. From what I can see, the real issue is change management, or lack of it.
Any change process, including the adoption of a learning platform, requires an investment of time. Even if the switch-over from one way of working to another is quick, a lot of work has to go into the process. A good analogy here would be changing over from driving on the left to driving on the right. If that were to be decided as a new transport policy, the switchover would have to take place on a particular date: if there was a transition period there would be utter chaos on the roads! But to actually get to that date there would need to be lot of discussion, plenty of opportunities to find out more information, perhaps even driving centres where motorists could go to safely practise driving on the ìwrongî side.
In the schools where the adoption of a learning platform has worked very well, that appears to have been the approach taken:
- Plenty of opportunity to discuss what would be required in a learning platform, so that the right one could be bought or commissioned, with agreement by all or at least most staff;
- Time to learn how to use the new system and practise with it;
- A commitment to using it as a whole school.
But there is something else as well. The best use of learning platforms is to be found where the learning platform is regarded as not so much a substitute for, but complementary to, ‘offline’ working. This approach, variously called ‘braided’ learning or blended learning, seeks to combine the best of offline the dynamic interplay between people in a room and the buzz of an exciting activity with the best of the online the facility to contribute your views without drawing attention to yourself, the ability to go back and see who said what three weeks ago because nothing is ever lost.
As has been found in other revolutions, such as whiteboards and Web 2.0, to understand why the same technology evokes such different reactions and is adopted at such different rates between institutions, you need to look at factors like:
- The commitment of senior management;
- How the people who will be using the technology have been involved in the decision-making;
- The adequacy of the training provided.
In the final analysis, the success or otherwise of the initiative comes down to two key questions:
- For the teacher: How will this enable me to do better what I’m doing already? What will it let me do that I can’t do now?
- For the pupil: How will this help me learn better? What will this let me do that I can’t do now on my iphone/mp3 player/netbook etc?
In short, what everyone concerned needs to know, and which senior leaders fail to address at their peril (and, in the long-term, the school’s expense) is the answer to just one question: what’s in it for me?
Terry Freedman is an independent educational ICT consultant. He publishes the ICT in Education website and Computers in Classrooms, the free newsletter for educational ICT professionals. He has also written the best-selling Go On, Bore Em: How to make ICT lessons excruciatingly dull.