The Second Thoughts about Pedagogical Neutrality of LMS
Mart Laanpere, Centre for Educational Technology, Tallinn Pedagogical University
Hans Põldoja, Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki
Kaido Kikkas, Centre for Educational Technology, Tallinn Pedagogical University
Abstract
The goal of e-learning could not be just
economical (saving money on travel or
textbooks) or organisational (better and more
flexible access to education). E-learning is also
about bringing up the pedagogical innovation,
introducing the new ways of learning and
teaching that meet the needs of knowledge
society. Yet there is little empirical proof
regarding the strength of this link between new
learning
environments
and
innovative
educational practices. Teachers seem to use
up-to-date Learning Management Systems
(LMS) in conservative way, mostly for
publishing texts and collecting homeworks. But
maybe we should not blame the teachers,
maybe the outdated practices are promoted
also by the most modern learning
environments? In this paper we are going to
argue that trend towards taken-fo-granted
pedagogical neutrality of LMS is mainly good
for marketing purposes. From the viewpoint of
pedagogical
innovation,
the
built-in
pedagogical neutrality of LMS increases the
alienation of theoretical discourse of
educational science and technology from the
practice of teaching and learning. One solution
would be designing a 'pedagogically biased'
LMS, as it was done in the Centre for
Educational Technology, Tallinn Pedagogical
University.
1. A trend of pedagogical neutrality in
learning technology
The domain of learning technology has
recently
undergone
the
impressive
developments. Emerging standards for learning
object metadata, content packaging, learner
information and quizzes are bringing
interoperability of learning management
systems to a new level and signal the global
educational market that the field of e-learning
is becoming mature (Collier & Robson, 2001).
E-learning platforms are getting more
expensive and complex from the user's point of
view. Competition between commercial
learning management systems (LMS) is
increasing, many universities and companies
are considering to leave their current LMS in
favor of some alternative (Paulsen, 2002). One
of the main selection criteria is related with
'pedagogical neutrality' of the LMS, defined as
disconnection from any specific pedagogical
approach. This makes sense if we look at LMS
from the marketing perspective – keeping the
system detached from any certain methodology
seems to make it more attractive to largest
possible audience.
The concept of pedagogical neutrality is not a
new one, it has been known long before elearning era, with slightly different meaning.
The notion has been used while regarding to
the unwanted impact of teacher's religious
(Noddings 1993) or political (Kopelson, 2003)
beliefs to his/her teaching practices. Different
teaching methods are rooted in hardly
compatible (even incommensurable) belief
systems, ideological and theoretical paradigms.
Pedagogical neutrality implies the avoidance of
preferred paradigm, ideology or religion.
In the context of learning management
systems, pedagogical neutrality becomes
visible in user interface design – in the
vocabulary, functionalities, structure and
affordability. We use the term 'affordability'
here in the sense it is introduced in the domain
of HCI (Preece et al, 1993): as a property of
man-machine interface, allowing (or even:
calling to) the certain actions rather than others.
The user interface of pedagogically neutral
LMS does not contain by default the terms,
tools or substructures drawn from any specific
pedagogical approach or method.
Although the pedagogical neutrality is by most
LMS developers taken for granted as a desired
property of a system, it has been recently
criticized by some authors like Friesen, who
states that 'applications that are truly
pedagogically neutral cannot also be
pedagogically relevant' (Friesen, 2003).
2. De-theorizing the practice of e-learning
A
contemporary
American
pragmatist
philosopher Richard Rorty has explained the
history of science with it's 'paradigm wars' as a
process
of
evolution
of
competing
vocabularies. According to Rorty, the ultimate
ambition of every scientist (or school of
thought) is to provide a new, hopefully 'the
final' (meta)vocabulary which allows to
redescribe all previous theories in the field. The
new vocabularies are born first as the sets of
metaphors, 'borrowing' the semantics from
other domains. When the vocabulary develops,
metaphors are evolving into strictly defined
terms. People are
switching from one
vocabulary to another if it seems to be more
practical, useful (i.e. suits better for describing
and explaining the important phenomena).
Thus, we can interpret the modern pedagogical
theories as advanced vocabularies, that help us
better describe and explain the aspects of
learning and instruction. It is inevitable that
advanced terminology, methods and models are
not trivial an need certain level of expertise in
the domain. Unfortunately, the education
seems to be a domain in which anyone feels
him/herself as an expert.
As it was shown before, the call for
pedagogical neutrality of learning management
systems implies the avoidance of any
pedagogical vocabularies and structures in
designing the user interface of LMS. Instead,
concepts from technical domain or 'neutral'
school practice are used: file upload, chat,
forum discussions, whiteboard, assignmnet
handin or dropbox, helpdesk, student tracking
etc. There is almost no pre-structuring
(WebCT, Optima Discendum, Fronter, Luvit,
Moodle, LearnLoop) or structural categories
are made according to the type of tools
(Blackboard). One could hardly imagine a
project management, publishing or imaging
software, which carefully avoids central
concepts of the domain. Why should we do this
with learning technology?
3. IVA – a “pedagogically biased” learning
environment
The starting point of the IVA project was the
assumption
that
carefully
planned,
pedagogically biased UI design, structure and
functionality of the system (alongside with the
relevant pedagogical training) can lead to the
catalytical influence on the learning paradigms
held by the teachers and students, therefore
gradually changing these paradigms as well as
resulting strategies of learning and teaching.
We did not start developing IVA from scratch,
but built it on top of a constructivist learning
environment Fle3 from University of Art and
Design Helsinki (see Leinonen et al, 2002). In
order to avoid enforcement of only one narrow
pedagogical theory, the structure and
functionalities of IVA have developed to be
quite flexible (as opposed to the somewhat
stricter approach of Fle3) which allows the use
of various teaching and learning strategies. Yet
the vocabulary and structure of IVA are biased
towards constructivist approach to learning and
teaching. The conceptual model of IVA is
based on the suggestions by D.H.Jonassen
(1994), who defined the three cornerstones for
constructivist learning environments (referred
below as 3C-model):
 authentic and meaningful Context for
learning, provided by teacher,
 support, time and space for personal
knowledge Construction,
 opportunities for Collaboration between
students.
Figure 1. Concept map of the conrnerstones for
a
constructivist learning environments.
(Jonassen, 1993)
To achieve ease of use and intuitiveness, many
familiar metaphors (both verbal and visual)
have been used in designing the user interface
of IVA. For instance, the private, closed part of
the Webtop has been named to Drawer, while
personal area with public access is called the
Portfolio. Materials prepared by teachers are
put onto the Bookshelf, communication and
collaboration between students takes place in
the Workshops area.
Directly drawn from the 3C model by
Jonassen, the user interface of IVA is
structured into three sections:
 Webtop (personal knowledge construction
area) – learner's personal, web-based
„workbench“
 Bookshelf (area for establishing a
meaningful context for learning) – the place
where learning resources and guidelines are
provided by teachers
 Workshops (collaboration area) – section
for groupwork and discussions.
The idea behind this kind of enforced prestructuring of the learning environment is
based on expectation that teacher should keep
these three sections (pro: 3 C-s) in balance and
thus, support and promote the constructivist
approach to learning.
In addition to these three sections, there is the
Management section accessible for teachers
only (for managing participants, tests, inner
groups etc) and administrator. Aside the readonly rights for students in the Bookshelf
section, the work environment for teachers and
students is identical.
functionalities, which
described below.
are
more
closely
3.1. Webtop section
After logging into IVA, a user is directed to the
personal Logpage which is part of Webtop
section. This page displays events, calendar,
course logo/slogan and link for applying to
open courses. Events can be either personal,
subgroup or course events. An event can be
copied to user's MS Outlook calendar with a
mouseclick. IVA has a built-in internal mail
system with e-mail gateway.
Each user has a separate instance of Webtop
for every course (s)he is enrolled to. The
purpose of the Webtop is to keep and publish
different materials during a course. The
Webtop is divided into three sections:
1. Portfolio is a public part for presenting
course-related documents like assignments,
lecture notes and reflections. Other
participants in the course have read-only
access to all Portfolios in the course.
2. Drawer is almost identical to the Portfolio,
but lacks the public access.
3. Logpage (described above).
At the moment, Portfolio and Drawer (as well
as Bookshelf and Subgroup workshops) can
contain five content types: folders, uploaded
files, WWW-links, short text memos and Wikiwebs (simple hypertext documents, created and
edited online using Zwiki tool). Several files
can be uploaded to IVA at once, as a zip-file.
Figure 2. The structure of IVA LMS
Portfolio, Drawer, Bookshelf and Subgroup
Workshop are based on Fle3 Webtop structure,
which has been expanded by IVA developers.
Knowledge Building and Jamming tools are
also inherited from the Fle3 modules with
similar names. In addition to the substantial
changes in structure and design of user
interface, IVA has number of additional
3.2. Bookshelf section
The bookshelf is an area for teachers to store
study materials and other course-related
information in. In structure and functionalities
it is similar to Portfolio and Drawer, but it has
just read-only access for students. The only
default element in the Bookshelf is a link to the
Course Information page which contains
description (name, goals, content, grading
rules, literature, dates) and participants list of
the course.
3.3. Workshops section
The most important and feature-rich section of
IVA is Workshops area with four workshops:
 a structured discussion forum called
Knowledge Building


Jamming is a kind of versioning tool that
allows student collaboration in working
with different media files (graphics, sound)
GroupPortfolios and GroupDrawers, used
as a common working area for smaller
subgroups (GroupDrawer is visible only for
subgroup members).
As implemented already in Fle3, the
Knowledge Building (KB) is an asynchronous
discussion forum with structure and
functionalities strongly rooted in social
constructivist learning theory. KB discussions
are oriented towards finding solutions to
research problems which are set up on a basis
of an authentic context (e.g. real-life case)
provided by teacher. Before submitting a
message to KB forum, user has to specify the
knowledge type of his/her submission. IVA has
multiple knowledge type sets, drawn from
different learning theories. For example, the
typeset based on Hakkarainen's Progressive
Inquiry learning theory (1999) contains the
following knowledge types: problem statement,
own explanation, scientific explanation,
evaluation of the process and summary.
Teachers can create new knowledge type sets
with knowledge type management tool. As the
structure of KB is stricter than usually in web
forums, teachers can more easily influence and
guide the discussion, preventing straying off
the main focus.
3.4. Management section
Management section contains tools for
managing course participants, subgroups,
assignments, quizzes and course events.
Assignments management tool provides an
easy way for teacher to access and grade the
students' homeworks. A submission folder is
created automatically for every assignment
inside of each student Portfolio (in case of
group assignment – in GroupPortfolio).
Teacher has access to a grading table with links
to all students assignments (both individual and
groupwork).
The academic traditions in Estonian
universities enforced us to include multiplechoice quiz tool in learning management
system, although the computer-assessed
quizzes do not fit well with constructivism
learning paradigm. Available question types
are coherent with the IMS Question and Tests
Interoperability specification. Students can
access quizzes under Workshops section. After
the quiz has been marked by system and/or
teacher, a student is able to view his/her quiz
results only in private Drawer.
3.5. Technical implementation
IVA is built on Zope, the leading open-source
application server. Data is stored in the Zope
Object Database (ZODB). IVA is available in
five languages (Estonian, English, German,
Finnish, Russian) under GPL licence. The
source code, documentation and detailed
information about IVA is available on IVA
home page at http://www.htk.tpu.ee/iva. The
course content can be exported and imported
in the format of IMS-compliant XML-files.
4. Conclusions
The first experiences of using IVA in Tallinn
Pedagogical University during 2003 (about
2000 user accounts, over 60 courses online)
have shown that metaphor-based vocabulary
eases
significantly
the
learning
and
implementation of complex LMS. Prestructuring of the user interface has not been
perceived as a problem by the users of IVA, 3C
balancing model is accepted well both by
instructors and students. In fall term 2004, the
comparative studies will be carried out in order
to estimate the impact of 'pedagogically biased'
LMS on teaching and learning practices of IVA
users.
Acknowledgements
The development of IVA learning management
system in Tallinn Pedagogical University was
partly supported by Ministry of Education and
Research of Estonia and The Estonian
Information Technology Foundation.
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