In this episode, Open LMS Technical Support Engineer Ben Kahn and Senior Director of Customer Success Courtney Bentley share best practices and tools for making virtual learning experiences as compelling and engaging as possible.
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Viewpoint podcast. I'm Dian Schaffhauser, a reporter for Campus Technology and your host for today's episode.
Where would we be today if it were not for the humble learning management system? The LMS has become a must-have for the continued operation of teaching and learning on and off campus. Over the last year and a half, especially, colleges and universities have come to realize that they need platforms that are scalable, robust and future-proof.
Yet, as many a technologist will readily admit, software success is not about the technology. It's also about what you bring to the LMS that makes the difference in supporting your students and faculty.
In this podcast, I'm going to interview two LMS experts to find out what best practices make for the best virtual learning experiences and also to help identify some of the technology resources schools may want to add to their learning toolkits.
I'd like to welcome Ben Kahn, a technical support engineer, and Courtney Bentley, senior director of customer success, both with long histories of working in higher education and now both also working for Open LMS, an open source LMS built on Moodle and hosted on Amazon Web Services.
Ben, Courtney, welcome to the show.
Both of you have deep backgrounds in higher education. Courtney, can you tell us what your various roles have been and where you've worked?
Courtney Bentley: I actually got my start as a faculty member. I quickly realized that I did not like grading very much, but I really loved being in education and supporting my fellow faculty members. And so I quickly moved into roles within technology and supporting faculty. And that's really where I've been ever since, working in university settings and in liberal arts schools, and now here at Open LMS.
What are you doing at Open LMS?
Courtney: I'm actually the senior director. Customer Success. I oversee the teams that are supporting our clients at tier one and tier two, doing the technical support work and then also doing all of the education and engagement work and so, onboarding our new clients as well.
Ben, what about you?
Ben Kahn: I came to Open LMS starting in October. Prior to that, I was working in higher education in the Pacific Northwest for about close to 10 years. I went back to school to the re skill for IT during the 2009 era, when a lot of people were doing that thing. And I just realized that I really enjoyed the higher ed environment. I started working at the school while attending and I just never left for about 10 years. And then, more recently, since last fall, I just decided to take the next step into going deeper into supporting specifically Moodle and joining E-think at that time, which later then joined forces with Open LMS as a Moodle-focused support business.
Very good. Okay, based on those backgrounds, each of you must have some unique perspective on the great campus closure of 2020. What do you think schools got right and got wrong as they shifted to digital teaching and learning? Courtney, why don't you tackle that first?
Courtney: We definitely have an interesting vantage point for everything that went on last year. And I think the thing from my perspective that schools really got right is that they tended to dig deep and to make happen. We saw institutions who if they needed to purchase a Zoom application, or they needed to add something into their LMS, or purchase something to be successful, they were they were digging deep into their pockets and making that happen. And I think that's really one of the things that they got right last year.
Ben: That was before I joined Open LMS. I was boots on the ground at a school when that was all happening. So, I would say that we definitely saw that some institutions were probably better prepared than others, and were able to easier make that transition.
For instance, at the school I was at, we had an on premises LMS installation. And so rather than being able to scale that up to meet increased demand the on the fly, we had to make do with what we had to just the tweak on that first day of all-online classes and have that nail-biting -- like, is our system going to be up? Is it going to crash? Kind of ride that wave.
There are so many people that worked really, really hard to support that transition in difficult circumstances. And to me, I think what I hope people and institutions are getting right is to just take those experiences forward and to not kind of say, oh, that online learning was okay for COVID times, but we don't really need to retain that knowledge and experience and the gains we made there going forward.
Yeah, I think once folks have tasted the magic, it's going to be hard to go back for anybody. That transition to distance learning hasn't always been easy for the staff or the faculty. And so what have you seen that has helped to smooth the transition to online teaching and learning?
Ben: One thing that stood out to me was just utilizing resources to help faculty start supporting each other and taking some of those known strategies that we were just never really have been able to like scale before, and then all of a sudden, we had a willing pool of participants who were more eager to jump in and start doing some of that professional development and training.
For instance, one thing that we did was we put an LMS course together for our faculty and rolled them all at students, so they had that experience of going through the LMS as a student, and then before we knew it, they were on the discussion boards, posting questions and helping each other out and looking to resources.
One additional thing that helped with that was that we actually established the specified peer mentors to be the designated point people in each department to help their peers out. That really helped to support some of the folks that have less experience going in.
Another one I'll touch on just briefly is -- and I think Courtney alluded to this -- was a utilizing the ability to integrate other tools into the LMS. You know, faculty may have had some tools that they rely on like maybe they like to do in class, like polling with clickers, or that sort of thing. And so finding digital tools that fits or integrate into the LMS and bring those capabilities all into one space that they can use during their online teaching I think helps to give them some additional resources and strategies that they could use for online teaching.
Let's talk about what some of the really innovative techniques are for college customers that they introduced to their instructional practices that you think ought to continue as students move back to campus this fall? Courtney, do you want to take that?
Courtney: I think this is the most exciting thing for me. As I mentioned in the introductions, I've been doing this for a lot of years. And I think the most exciting thing is that this last year really pushed people to try things that we've talked about for a lot of years.
As Ben mentioned, we got that push, we got that critical mass, to try some of these things.
In terms of innovative techniques, they're not necessarily new, but we had a lot of people doing things like that flipped model. We saw reinforcement of the benefits of that model. And what I mean is, we realized that having people sit in a chair on a Zoom call for multiple hours at a time listening to someone talk was not practical. But flipping that model, having someone listen to a recorded podcast in their pocket on their phone as they were moving about their day and then coming into the Zoom call for discussion and breakouts, and working with their colleagues on projects, really worked well, in this environment that we were forced to. And so I think that flipped model is one that we really ought to continue as we move back into the classroom.
What really benefited there was the use of recording. As we've touched on, I think this is one of the things that everyone can agree shot up in a lot of different ways, not just Zoom and Google Meet and Teams and those types of face-to-face types of recordings, but also recording beyond synchronous. People were expanding on that; they were doing lecture capture; they were recording office hours; they were recording one on one tutoring sessions. And they were making these available as study aids and as other types of materials for their learners to listen to, and to watch over and over again.
And so we really were beginning to see this used in a couple of different ways, not only as study aids and practical ways for learners to watch these as they needed to, but we're going to see that learners where English as a second language, or learners that have certain attention deficits, or just learners who have difficulty gathering certain concepts are going to get those at a higher rate, because they don't have to go back to an instructor and ask questions and feel awkward. They can just re-listen to the portions that they need until they get the information.
You asked for "innovative techniques," and I think that really we're seeing just practical techniques that we hope will carry on.
And really, I think it's just the flexibility in general. I think that people really were opened up to a lot of really flexible uses of different tools, different flexibility in our time, and so I think that's really what we'll see the carried in as people move back into campus.
Amen to that. Okay, a lot of really great education technology has emerged during the last few years. Let's talk about some of the tools that have really impressed you.
Ben: There have been a lot of new tools and practices that ed tech folks have been talking about for a number of years. But what really the impressed me as like an a LMS administrator and support person, as we made that shift was how I was able to integrate all those things into LMS and create a sandbox for faculty that give them like a wide range of things that they could try with, like minimal need for them to go off and explore different things. Just the ability for everyone's to have their Zoom or Teams meetings that go along with their class -- the ability to have those scheduled and show up from within the LMS course to centralize everything was one thing that really helped.
If you are doing more that flipped style, integrating any of those the video streaming tools that are out there, like TechSmith Relay or Kaltura. Or we actually have a sister company here at Open LMS, Instilled, that has a really cool product that they just demoed for us last week. Basically, it's allowing you to do screen capture, recording, add captioning for accessibility, and do those webcam recordings to do mini lectures right from the LMS, so that the content is getting created and then delivered to the students all in one place. It's very easy to manage.
Another thing that I would shout out just for Moodle in particular, which is the platform that we run at Open LMS is that because it's open source, it just has this like dizzying array of plugins that are out there. We like to say that if you run across a problem in Moodle, the chances are, someone else has already had that and developed a plugin to address it, right? We have a plugins repository, it's at moodle.org/plugins, where anyone can go code a plug in for Moodle and contribute it back to the community.
There are all sorts of things that solve technical problems and also things that add any number of the teaching learning strategies, tools to support those strategies into the LMS.
Courtney, what about you? Do you have some tools that have really impressed you?
Courtney: Ben mentioned captioning with Instilled, and I think really a lot of the technologies that have impressed me are around accessibility. One of those is something called Ally, which is a Blackboard product, actually. And it will comb all of the contents within the LMS. It's pretty agnostic across different LMS platforms. But it will index the content, it will give things an accessibility score, and it will also go ahead and convert a lot of that content as well, so that it makes the content more accessible within the platform.
I think tools like that, tools like Instilled, which will do captioning on the fly, those I think are really pretty cool and obviously lead to more universal design and accessibility for all learners -- something that I think is insanely important.
We talked about video. Personally, I am sighted, I can hear, and I despise video personally. So, I am one that benefits greatly from having captions, because I can read the captions and learn a lot better from it.
And then I think the other one is adaptive courseware. This is another area that I'm really intrigued by that I see some really interesting facility with. Adaptive courseware, basically, takes some setup, obviously, but being able to really meet the learners where they are. We have a tool within our platform called PLD, Personal Learning Designer, and it works in some similar ways. You can set up triggers and allow it to send notifications and have it do certain things, depending on what the learner needs in the platform.
I think those are some really interesting technologies to keep eyes on as those continue to develop. Because really, it's beginning to put the learner at the center of what we're doing versus continuing to put the sage on the stage, if you will, to use the that older term.
That PLD functionality that you talked about, is that really tricky for the faculty member?
Courtney: It's really not. It's basically building up statements. When the learner does a certain action, do this other thing. You're basically building up sentences essentially, based on what you have in your course. Like building workflows essentially.
Let's shift gears here and talk about the challenges that are still lingering for schools in terms of their e learning practices.
Ben: One thing that I saw during that the rapid shift in the model of teaching and learning was just questions around equity and how we're ensuring that all of the learners are getting access to what they need in a fair and equitable way. Because things will come up like students that didn't have adequate access to technology, or maybe they needed to go shelter in place somewhere that didn't have adequate network access, or they didn't have the right devices, because they had been coming in to use the computer lab.
When they signed up for the course, it wasn't an online course. Right? They're not necessarily meeting all the all of the technical requirements that we would like. It's just a challenge, I think, going forward, about how do we strategize and think about how we as institutions are going to meet all the students where they're at in terms of those needs.
Another one that I see going forward coming out of this is, we did so much online in the last year, and it just generated this enormous trove of data in all these LMSs. Part of my day-to-day at Open LMS is actually a lot of report writing and trying to collect and help our customers make sense of some of that data. There's just so much out there, but figuring out how to leverage it, and to turn it into something sensible or comprehensible that you can then make decisions based on, it's a big challenge. It just goes back to I think even practices of how you're running your organization or your institution, such that you're generating data that's usable. You're having someone enter your student ID numbers or course numbers in your system, but they're sometimes using a prefix and sometimes they're not. Then all the data that you get out of that can be difficult to parse. It's just going back and thinking through some of those practices and figuring out how to generate data that's useful.
Good points. Talking about technology and new instructional practices is all well and good. But plenty of colleges and universities are just plain short-staffed on their instructional technology and IT sides, and they don't have the capacity to help faculty the way that they need sometimes. Explain how a company like Open LMS can help them with their LMS needs.
Ben: Instead of relying on the in-house staff who might have a lot of competing needs or a lot of different needs that are competing for their time and interests, it seemed like Open LMS were really laser focused on the LMS, and we have a pretty broad set of experiences, both on the technical side and on the instructional design or learning support side. I think that really helps just to make sure that all the bases are covered and we don't have those the gaps in support or knowledge that you might see when you're relying on your team.
Certainly, I see the difference coming from a school where I was the was the IT support for the LMS versus now, if I have a question about it, instead of trying to Google for an hour to look on a bunch of forums to see if I can find and piece together an answer, I have plenty of really, really smart people that I can bounce ideas off of on a daily basis.
What forms does the support that Open LMS provides to schools take?
Courtney: It really ranges. We have clients who may be new to the LMS or new to Moodle. And so they may be asking pretty basic questions about how do I do something in the LMS? How do I set up a quiz How do I troubleshoot this gradebook? How do I accomplish some task?
But it may also be other more philosophical questions. I spent 90 minutes this morning with a large university in the UK and a whole group of their faculty, and we talked about the philosophy behind an E-portfolio, and is that graded? Is it not graded? What assets does a learner put in that? Do you grade it before or after they put it together? And just talking with them about the philosophy and how that might work for them, and how it works in conjunction with the LMS. A lot of it is more consultation as well.
That's really what we bring to the table. I think that Open LMS is a bit different in this capacity than a lot of other LMS providers. We have tons of people on staff like Ben and I who have really deep experience in education and in learning and teaching and technology. And so we can have that broad range of conversations.
Ben earlier was writing SQL reports and helping troubleshoot Active Directory and now he's sitting down and having this conversation about equity in e-learning practice, right? And that's what we want to do; we want to bring that to the table so that we can really act as that extension of, of our clients' teams. It really is the range of what we support here.
Good point Open LMS is built on Moodle, as I understand, but it works with Amazon Web Services. And so what advantages does that bring to LMS usage for schools?
Courtney: Open LMS is an AWS advanced technology partner. That's a lot of big words. That means that our team has advanced training and has passed different exams related to our understanding and use of AWS tools and services. For other people listening who are familiar with Moodle, especially for a lot of years, like a lot of us, Moodle was not written to work on virtualized servers. It was not written to work in the types of loads that we're pushing it to. And so our team really has built up a lot of skill, to be able to make it work really well, to scale, to have the type of uptime that we're able to provide, to have the level of security and to just really work so well in the AWS environment. It just provides that consistent platform for our clients that they expect.
The LMS is no longer that side box that we use periodically. It's more electric company level, right? Electricity goes out and everyone loses their minds. It's become the same way with the LMS.
And the other thing I would say is that a lot of people -- I think they think that hosting a web application is really a science. But I would say that there's a lot more art to it than people realize. Working on scaling, working on making sure that all these tools talk to one another in the right ways, making sure things are configured so that they really act in harmony is something that our team has really done a fantastic job of pulling all together.
I'd like to leave with this, I would like each one of you to offer some advice to listeners about how to better leverage their LMS specifically for eLearning. Ben, why don't you go first?
Ben: I think it the goes back to just training and supporting the people that are going to be using it. And so that can include, of course, you've got to train your faculty on how to use it effectively. It also is very beneficial to provide learners with some amount of training at least to help them navigate around and understand how they're expected to use the system. And of course, the support staff that are going to be there day in and day out, supporting the entire community that's using the LMS. I'll mention a quote that my old boss at the college had on his door. He had the CFO of the company, asking, "What happens if we spend all this money training all of our employees and then they leave?" And then the CIO says, "Well, what if we don't, and then they stay?" That just shows the importance of staying on top of these technology tools as they continue to evolve.
Courtney, what about your advice?
Courtney: My advice is talk to your LMS partner. And if you don't have an LMS partner, invest in one. In order to really leverage your LMS and to get the most out of what you're doing, I really think that it is a team approach at this point. So, talk to your LMS partner; see what they can do for you. And if they're not doing enough for you, come talk to us.
I have seen a report that Open LMS produced, which is called "Back to School: Leveraging Your LMS to Create a Successful e-Learning Program," which has all kinds of great little tips and, and suggestions in it. How can somebody get hold of that report?
Courtney: I think it's probably linked to from the main splash page from this episode. And if it's not, I'm pretty sure you can go straight to our OpenLMS.net website, and you can get it from there.
Perfect. And that is our show for today. I want to thank our guests, Courtney Bentley and Ben Khan with AWS consulting partner Open LMS. I also want to thank our sponsor for today's program, Amazon Web Services. To learn more about Open LMS just visit OpenLMS.net, as Courtney told you, and that's where you can also find that copy of "Back to School: Leveraging Your LMS to create a Successful E learning Program." I'm Dian Schaffhauser. And I want to thank you for being a valued listener of Campus Technology Viewpoint Podcast.