[trends] Learning 5 in 5 : striptease of the LMS

I haven't checked, but there are probably rules and imposed fines against making future predictions beyond January. So let me be quick then and get started then: here is my '5in5'. My 5 predictions for the learning and development world that will happen in the next 5 years. Today: number one.

1- Striptease of the LMS

What does it mean?


Over the next years, we'll witness the gradual stripping of the good ol' Learning MANAGEMENT System to its bare essentials. The LMS started out as a monolithic learning portal where students and learners would go to for their learning administration and their e-learning consumption. (We build it, so they would come...) That paradigm is the technical equivalent of the classroom : stop working, go to a place for learning, then go back. The pressures to get learning just-in-time within the workflow will strip the portal user interface off the LMS in the near future. We don't need people to go to the learning portal, we will bring the learning where-ever it needs to be. The LMS is not in 'the flow' of daily activities, so why guard the learning there?

That means we are left with the LMS back-end. Think about all the functions an LMS does but where we have better suited pieces of technology for now. Access management? There is dedicated software for that, there are protocols such as OpenID and closed/open platforms that allow you to use their authentication methods (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, ...). Storing learning content? There are plenty of very high quality content management systems out there, and these days you can upload snippets of learning for free anywhere. Reporting? There are excellent statistics and customizable reporting engines and middleware available. For basic tracking you can use free services like Google Analytics. Will we need the LMS for completion certificates to print and hang above your wall? Maybe, but we have excellent badge services for that. Catalogue? Search engines are so much better at giving people an overview of interesting and useful learning, and social recommendations even top that. Speaking of social, will we need the LMS to handle the discussions (forums, chat, ...) on the learning content? I'm sure we don't as other platforms allow for commenting and communicating much better. (Skype, IM, social software, etc)

So what remains? What remains when we strip out all pieces of the LMS that other, dedicated and readily available pieces of software don't provide? The pure 'learning' stuff. For example the tracking of the scores and completions of activities, the compliance check, the preferences to determine what to offer you next, the details of a particular learning interventions so we'll remember it for next time, etc. Over the next years, the LMS will undergo a striptease to its bare essentials: a backend service to handle the typical 'learning' information stream.

Sign of the times

• Have a look at the Tin Can Project (I've written about it before under the title : a simple future for scorm and LMS.). It aims to 'strip' the LMS to a 'Learning Record Store' and and simple API in the form of 'actor verb object' type.
• At the VDAB (Flemish employment mediation service), e-learning movies are all posted on their 'webleren' YouTube channel, and embedded in the courses (that still reside in the Moodle LMS) while also being available standalone for everyone to enjoy. Content chunks are effectively being stripped out of the LMS.

Agree? Disagree? Like? Dislike? Dear reader, what does it all mean?  :-)