Abstract:

The Learning Management System (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), is widely regarded as a key element of the modern university learning infrastructure. The rise of the MOOC has seen the creation of a range of LMS products designed to operate collaboratively between many institutions, seeing the creation of hybrid experiences and opening possibilities for other models of learning enablement by systems and in collaboration with a variety of organisations. Organisationally the reality of the LMS is now a complex web of systems integrated locally with others operated by a range of vendors on cloud sharing platforms. This is more than a shift of hardware to the virtual cloud environment, or outsourcing of complex technical functions. It reflects a desire to have systems that sustain current activities but also allow for rapid shifts in focus, scale and context without the historical constraints of sunk investment in traditionally constructed systems. LMS architecture is evolving to enable a dynamic process of unbundling and rebundling, with the decisions about structure and purpose defined by the users on an individual basis rather than generically applied. This presents challenges both for the management of information derived from learner activities but also in the user expectation that tools “just work,” avoiding the need for detailed training to be useful. Increasingly, rather than a product model of the LMS, organizations need to focus on the Learning Platform, a conception that extends from a technological construct defined by a vendor to consider the broader physical and organisational context that frames, enables and sustains learning within the organisation. Globally, there has been a massive growth in different models for tertiary education including the MOOC, micro-credentials and a complex array of commercial educational service providers engaged in a complex process of unbundling (disaggregating educational provision into its component parts and rebundling (the re-aggregation of those parts into new components and models). A modern LMS must be more than a product, it must be a process, a representation of the dynamic reality of modern learning and the values of the organizations using its facilities. This examines the unbundling of the LMS – the intersection of increasingly disaggregated curricula and services, the affordances of digital technologies, the growing marketisation of higher education and the deep inequalities which characterise both the sector and the contexts in which they are located.

Keywords:

LMS, unbundling, rebundling, VLE.