I have been so broken by the LMS that…
“…it never occurred to me that I could do anything other than manually copy all my edits. Mariana, it was a horrible semester and I cannot even bear to think of it.”
[This was written once upon a time when I worked at a mythical university which shall remain nameless. All similarities with a university or faculty members near you are purely coincidental.]
I have been so broken. I understand that. I have been broken too.
The quote above is from a colleague who ran 3 sections of the same course on the Blackboard LMS and was almost in tears remembering the experience. They had no intelligent technical support and did not know how to use Blackboard, so they manually copied all edits during the whole semester in 3 places rather than work from a development shell that could then be copied 3 times. They did not know what they did not know.
Was it just Blackboard?
May be also of relevance was using Blackboard whilst being ‘helped’ by a ‘learning and instructional support’ team whose idea of helping seems to be copying and pasting bits of manual with a free sprinkle of screenshots that can barely be deciphered by the technically adept, let alone by non-technical faculty.
My dear colleague is one of those ‘digitally disadvantaged’ faculty instructional designers often like to patronise and confuse with jargon. They cannot question what they do not understand and they are given the run around and left holding the baby: teach their specialism and become a competent computer geek or perish and watch their soul die in the LMS.
We are part of the kind of faculty in Higher Education that can be labelled as the Have-to-Haves. The Have-Nots want a digital life but have no access, and the Haves love technology and need little support— they are the lucky ones. The have-to-haves are being given no choice by the powers that be, you have to take your course online end of discussion. You do not believe it can or should be done? that is because you need some educational technology support, we will provide you with that. Far too many people are being simply forced to make the ‘move to online’. I have been helping my colleagues to find a way, but they cannot find a way out — the course will be online and it will be on Blackboard.
But here is the thing. Even ‘the haves’ are not that lucky in this situation. I should know, I am one of those haves.
I know what I am doing technically as well a being a subject expert in what I teach, yet Blackboard has broken me too. Working within it, reminds me of certain big cities I visit. I notice a while after arriving, I start to behave in ways I don’t like if I want to get things done. In the same way, I do not like the person I become when I have to wrestle Blackboard to the floor and show up unhelpful ‘instructional’ (I much prefer learning)designers, their obfuscations do not play well with me, I do the same job they do elsewhere. So I find myself solving problems and showing them up to other faculty in the process. I don’t like behaving like that towards another human being. Yet, I feel so hopeless and helpless that it brings out a survival instinct, I will get my work done in spite of you bunch of morons. Ill will. So much ill will that harms me and harms others.
We are unable to dedicate staff to individual faculty members and support them for tool use, copying courses or other instructional technology-related issues. We cannot do this for a number of reasons: one is quantity of requests we get and another is that our help desk staff take time off and are replaced by others temporarily.
So if a faculty member has no clue they (ah! the freedom of ‘they’ as singular)are left to flounder in the LMS with their students and ‘raise support tickets’ …over and over and over…I wish this was the situation only at my institution, it is not. The wonders of global faculty connections tell me that our situation is not that different from many others. And that ill will towards instructional designers is alive and well elsewhere. What infuriates me is that those educational technologists who are passionate about supporting faculty in a collaborative and consultative way, get a bad name because of departments set up as little more than nameless call centres for a cheap computer. It is shameful.
It is not that instructional designers are mean. It is not that faculty are dense. Some are mean and some are dense, not all. As somebody who operates on ‘both’ camps; the fast world of technology and the slow world of research psychology, I understand. I understand that EdTech departments are often staffed with an assumption that faculty will ‘learn how to use the system’ and that faculty when told ‘you will need to teach online’ assume (nay, are explicitly told) ‘you will have an instructional designer hold your hand all the way’. Yet, some faculty not only do not believe in teaching everything online (mindful movement as a fully online course, anyone? I wish I were joking) and they also do not want (and have the right not to want) to become competent geeks, this is not their chosen career. Higher education institutions as forcing (hence, have-to-haves) faculty to work in ways they might not want or chose to work. The ethics of this stink, but money talks everywhere in education these days, sadly. The scene is set for conflict and difficulties between departments. The spoilt 2-year old in all of us is never far from our conversations. We protect. We defend. We feel vulnerable. EdTech does not have resources to help faculty in the way they need it, and faculty have no interest or time to learn EdTech.
This is the elephant in the room.
The learning and instructional support department tells faculty how to become geeks, send them endless tutorials, screenshots, colourful arrows pointing where to click…Faculty keeps looking at this stuff, feeling dense and more and more demotivated. Suddenly, not only can they not teach how they want to, but they are expected to add a new specialisms to their resume in order to do what they do not want to do. Human beings are not motivated in this way, do the powers that be in universities need a psychology degree to get this?
And if they do not learn? Well, just cry at night when they cannot figure out how to use the LMS, knowing the students will be logging on in the morning and they are still waiting for the ticket they raised to be dealt with…and the module will just not be available. The ivory tower of the manual and screeshot pushers, will not have to tackle the problem, faculty will. Students come to their teacher not to IT when they are lost.
How can one remember or remind others that we are all there to be of service to those we teach? We are drowning in tickets if in IT or drowning in bad LMS formatting, absurd security checks and bad design if we are faculty. How can we serve education in separate departments without any understanding of the whole? How can my course design be reduced to one support ticket at a time? How can I help faculty if they just do not want to learn?
It is not individuals, it is a system that refuses to name the elephant. It would cost money.
Faculty do not want to be computer geeks, they want specialist geeks to work alongside and give them what they need to run a good course and support them by doing the work not telling them how to do the work whilst they are lost in teaching content. Their job is not to design online, their job is not to RTFM, their job is to teach their subject.
The specialist geeks cannot offer that support until their departments are resourced in a way that addreses the elephant — faculty will not do your job or learn how to do your job nor should they be expected to. The only rationale here is cost — if nobody helps, you no longer have the option to teach face to face and you have your students waiting for you, you will make yourself learn. You will save the university money, so much cheaper to have manual and screeshot pushers than enough client centred online learning designers working within a school to understand the nature of the content they are designing for.
It has broken me too. I can do the development yet I will not do the development. I am not paid to be a geek though I love geeking in my own time, I am paid to teach my specialism. I can fix problems, yet I will not fix problems. I will refer my students to IT and let them wait for a response to their ticket with me. I offered much help of the financial kind to my institution — share my fees with a Teaching Assistant, invite colleagues from other institutions to come and work for free, my own time to design something outside the LMS. They refused my creative solutions on no grounds I can explain beyond ‘we have no time to think about what you suggest’.
So, the LMS broke me too.
I am now running the least pedagogically sensitive course I have ever run. I am embarrassed to admit it but somebody has to. I should say I am now running a course as Blackboard wants me to design it. This means I am not teaching how I would want to teach online. Blackboard is about as pedagogically backward as I have found, especially when one is not allowed to integrate it with other tools. Forgive me, I lie. I can use anything I like to design my courses, I simply need to provide technical support to all my students as well as teach my content, if I do. I refuse to do that. I did it one semested and it nearly destroyed me. How can we keep going in a system that is destroying educators’ souls?
Why bother with creative ways? Nobody wants to know. It costs money to teach sustainably and creatively. The system is supported by people who overwork and burnout and do not get paid for their efforts.
The powers that be want me to be invisible, many students want the easy button to an A, all I need to do is seem like I am teaching. We measure quantity not quality these days, so if they have the right number of blog posts, comments, attendance to office hours they get an A. Is it up to standard? Here is another elephant: nobody is paying attention to that. We are all just trying to get through having to log on to a primitive system that makes me feel suicidal at the end of each day. Even when I have simplified my course beyond all recognition. I want to do my best, not my worst just to get through the day. After my Blackboard experience, I find myself only just able to do my worst to survive. The alternative is to collude with a system that would let me do anything I want outside of it so long as “I deliver the modules for the LMS” — I did that before. I ran an amazing learning experience, the school never paid for the resources I used to deliver it. The stress nearly consumed me. It is everywhere, educators’ free labour invested to teach according to our heart and passion with the byeproduct of adding to the problem: The system gets what it wants, is not forced to change and can continue to abuse vocation.
Quit pissing on my back and telling me it’s raining, will you?
No, I won’t be teaching in the LMS no more. My soul is one of those things that counts but cannot be counted and watching it die slowly 15 weeks at a time each semester in Blackboard has been enough (after years of going around in circles) to teach me to stop contributing to the problem.
