Here’s an article to make you think about whether you are conforming to your Course Management System (CMS) or whether you are making it conform to your pedagogy. Lane suggests that novice Web instructors who learn the basics of their institution’s system before they think about the principles of teaching their course are working backwards and risk forgetting what they know about teaching well. The CMS dominates their course organization and, consequently, their teaching.
As someone who supports faculty use of Blackboard, and who is involved in the ritual training in its features, this article has me thinking. As an online instructor, it has me wondering how to evaluate what I’ve been doing. I think I started with the course and course objectives, and then moved into how it could be expressed within Blackboard, but we’ll see when I get a chance to reflect at the end of the semester.
If you have recently been trained to use Blackboard, do you think it has been dominating your pedagogy?
Lane, Lisa M. “Insidious Pedagogy: How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching.” First Monday 14.10 (5 October 2009).
Filed under: course design, online learning, pedagogy, teaching, technology
