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Monoculture, Blackboard, the President’s Commission, and Accreditation
6/21/2006
By Terry Calhoun
I’m not a big fan of monoculture. It is the concept of everything being too much alike. I keep hearing that some people are beginning to feel like learning management systems (LMS) are creating a vast monocultural crop of online course information, much in the way that agribusiness has with wheat, corn, and soybeans.
A couple of months ago, during a great discussion on UWEBD, Skip Knox of Boise State University made a passionate post. In reply to a side query from me, he was even more passionate. He said of learning management systems, “We find our choices have become traps, that we've adorned ourselves with an albatross.”
Those are strong words, but as I thought on those and other words Skip wrote, I also noted some news items that relate to “monoculture” and that also constitute a possible threat to higher education’s system of accreditation.
Skip, who teaches history, continued:
We find our choices have become traps, that we've adorned ourselves with an albatross. It's not just that Blackboard (to give name to the devil) is a corporate vendor; it's that any LMS represents a particular pedagogical approach. No one seems to have questioned the wisdom of imposing one pedagogy across the entire curriculum. Well, that's not true; the faculty questioned it, loudly and persistently, and were basically told to sit down and be quiet and get on board. Grants were got that perpetuated the mentality. Deans were hired who fostered that mentality. It's so embedded now that the only way to break free is to found a new school.
With respect to IT’s “blame,” Skip said:
IT can't be blamed exclusively, as purchasing decisions get made in partnership with other key players on campus. I'm thinking more of decisions that get made by default, such as the decision to buy software at all. There was a massive move in the direction of ERPs that seemed like it was a good idea at the time. In the wake of corporate mergers, however, we find ourselves restricted to less than a handful of vendors who can never be fully responsive to our needs.
“[S]uch as the decision to buy software at all…” Hmm. Sometimes decisions are made and we don’t even realize that there was a decision.
On the other hand, I’m not such a big fan of “Balkanization,” either. But some people feel it is more of a natural human social state. I was recently struck by one writer’s turn of phrase in Monoculture: An Artifact of the 20th Century?:
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