LMS Usage Transparency

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/Abstract/AStudentFeedbackToolThatL/48087.

I was pretty conflicted whether to post this at all - you may have noted the frequency of posting on anything LMS-related is WAY down on edtechpost, ever since I got born-again, and the vision of learning here seems, well, problematic at least (which is why I removed the title “A Student Feedback Tool That Links CMS Use with Good Grades” from the original link).

But…this is interesting and does deserve some attention both for its steps towards transparency and some of the ways in which transparency is being used to engender positive faculty peer pressure. I can already hear all sorts of howls from every direction - about faculty rights and independence, about the shallowness of this as a ‘ratings’ scheme, of students gaming the system, of… Yeah, I get it.

But if you find yourself charged with supporting and promoting a campus system (and don’t actually feel like answering for yourself the soul destroying question of why you have to sell something if it is actually as valuable as it’s supposed to be) then maybe this will jog some ideas loose. While I will continue to suggest that simply being fully open is ultimately a better way to address many of these issues, until that ideal situation pertains, sometimes we gotta take our ‘openings’ where we can find them. “There is a crack in everything…” - SWL