The Future of Course Mangement Systems

This one is a no brainer, because course management systems are not going away. Yes, I said it, despite what you read and hear they are here for the foreseeable future.

If course management systems are not going away, will they change? Yes, but not in ways that people think. Right now all you see, hear, and read about is that today’s students are "social." That may or not be true, but let's assume that it is for want of this discussion. People were social before Twitter and Facebook came along and will continue to be social when they fade away to be replaced with some type of "virtual reality" social tool, maybe a "my augmented life" app; hurry and trademark that, it could be worth millions some day :-)

Just because a student uses mobile or social technology to find out where their friends are or what they ate for breakfast has absolutely no bearing on teaching and learning. Do you think that an instructor is going to begin posting their whereabouts on Foursquare, just in-case a student happens to be in the vicinity and wants to confirm what the "c" stands for in the equation e=mc2? I doubt it!

Returning to the "social" part of the conversation, students were engaging in social activity when they played in the playground at recess. They were engaging in social activity when they picked-up the telephone and called a friend to see if they wanted to come out and play. They were socializing when they were using the AOL chat tool back in the day. Tomorrow they will be using something else, so what! None of this has to do with the classroom or learning. Yes, students can learn from one another, they learn how to play baseball by playing, observing, and interacting with friends. But the transfer of "new" knowledge does not occur without a content system expert being available to assist in the knowledge transfer! You know, someone who can fill-in the missing holes in the available data.

So what will a course management system of the future morph into? Here are a few possibilities:

1. Automatic "syncing" of course materials to any device or cloud storage service selected by the learner in a format of their choosing.
2. Resources, e.g., an uploaded document that uses the "intelligence" of the course management system to automatically "index" and link to external resources that expand upon the concepts contained in the uploaded document.
3. Course resources, files, and links that update themselves based upon the path a user takes though a course.
4. Courses that revise themselves, i.e., the organization of the materials based upon posts that users make to course discussion boards, blogs, journals, and to external resources like Twitter, Facebook, insert next futuristic app here, etc.!
5. Courses that "automatically" pull resources from other instructors at other institutions and insert them into the learning path for a user, based on their posts, that are monitored by "adaptive" technologies.
6. Your thought goes here . . .

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the course management system, i.e., the surrogate instructor is not going away. I'm not talking about a file repository but an actual teacher.

The instructor's role will become more important than ever, because someone has to help a "novice" make sense of the overwhelming sensor inputs and available data. The real question to ask is: "What company will be first to build a system that automatically adapts to a learner, regardless how they learn?" No, I'm no fan of learning styles, but resources, i.e., learning materials, in the hands of a content expert can and will make a difference. Couple that with adaptive technology and you have a win-win situation or merging of technology with mind, maybe I'm speaking to the "singularity" popularized by Ray Kurzweil; what do you think?