Introduction
Educational technologists have come up with many metaphors for the Learning Managements System (LMS), including a "walled garden" with rich functionalities but closed to the external world \cite{Mott2009-sn}, a "minivan" with utility features but nothing very exciting \cite{Hill2015-sb}, or a "bus" driven not by the instructor or learners but someone else \cite{Downes2015-iw}. Despite the prevalence of LMSs in higher education, they are often criticized for not doing certain things well, among which is to support learner discussions \cite{Brown2015-wh}. While the LMS will remain broadly relevant, they indeed only represent one genre of digital learning environments, especially given the increasingly complex terrains of digital learning (e.g., \citealt{Ito2013-xf,Siemens2011-gg}). Researchers and practitioners are experimenting to unLMS---i.e., to defy traditional dependence on the LMS with emerging solutions---in order to better support particular learning experiences in classrooms.
The design case introduced in this paper represents one example of the unLMS approach. In particular, when designing a new graduate-level course, in order to promote collaborative learner discourse, the author of this design case---also the designer and initial instructor of this course---chose to architect a digital learning environment based on recent technological innovations in open textbooks, web annotation, and team communication. As defined by \citet{Boling2010-ae}, a design case is "a description of a real artifact or experience that has been intentionally designed"(p. 2), and is then disseminated as a form of designer knowledge, or precedent, to benefit other designers (see \citealt{Roxanne_Russell2014-bi,Langub2017-tn} for examples). In this paper, I introduce design goals, rationales, the designed environment, and key design considerations given in the design process.
Design Context
The designer, also the author of this paper, was an instructor in learning technologies at a large public university in the United States. The designer held bachelor's and master's degrees in educational technology and a Ph.D. degree in learning sciences. After joining the university, he was charged with the development of new courses in learning analytics and was actively teaching online and face-to-face classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has participated in a number of technology-related pilots at his university, which is a member of the Unizin consortium and has an active agenda in exploring learning technologies. During these pilots, he experimented with the Canvas LMS, a Unizin dashboard tool, and a Unizin online reading environment. Overall, the designer has been actively exploring various digital learning environments in his teaching career.
A newly proposed online course on "Social Network Analysis in Education" served as the design context. Built by the designer from scratch, this course was a graduate-level methodology course not previously offered at the designer's college. The course attracted 15 enrollees from four departments in the college, as well as expressed desires to participate from several faculty members.
Design Goals: Collaborative Discourse with a Taste
"Digital pedagogy is important because it is willing to improvise, to respond to a new environment, to experiment. The digital pedagogue is not the same as an online teacher. The digital pedagogue looks at the options, refuses the limitations of the LMS, invites her students to participate in---indeed, create---networked learning." \cite{Morris2013-fw}
Positioning himself as a "digital pedagogue," the designer-instructor elected to adapt his teaching to nurture networked, collaborative learning in this course. This intent was reflected in his ongoing research on collaborative knowledge building \cite{Chen2016-od}, and was also aligned with the course's focus on sociocultural aspects of learning. Indeed, facilitating rich social, collaborative interactions was no longer optional but imperative for this course.
Collaboration, as defined by \citet{Roschelle1995-fv} in the context of collaborative problem solving, is "a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem" (p. 70). In their context, collaboration requires a joint problem space between students so that they have a shared conception of the problem. In this design case, collaborative discourse is rather broadly conceptualized as a discourse practice where students engage constructively with each other's ideas about their joint or overlapping problem spaces, with support from external meditational artifacts (e.g., discussion posts, web annotations, electronic documents). Collaborative discourse involves a social process in which individuals work together to tackle problems of understanding through a variety of discursive activities such as explanation building, argumentation, and consensus building \cite{Osborne2010-se,Nussbaum2008-gd}. As such, even though learners may not necessarily converge on a same joint problem, they share adjacent, overlapping problem spaces in collaborative discourse.