One of the most contested areas in online learning is what I sometimes call the “front page” – usually the user interface or splash page or whatever main area learners first see when they start a course/learning experience/etc (usually also the main area they have to come back to every time). Schools want to control the “front page” learners see first in their class (usually always the learning management system they paid big money for). Ed-Tech companies want to control the “front page” learners see when they use their product. Other non-educational websites that get used in education like Twitter or Facebook want to control the “front page” of what users see. Of course, the average learner uses many of these services and has to navigate through many tools that are trying to control what you see while they learn, to control the “front page” of their learning experience.

The “front page” is how companies gather data for analytics so they can monetize users. Think back to the major changes between MySpace and Facebook. As horrible as MySpace could look at times, users could insert CSS and control all manner of aspects of their front page. That control was a good thing, despite the eye sores it created from time to time. How can a company monetize a MySpace user page when users can completely remove portions of the page? How can a company monetize interactions when users rarely have to leave their “space” to interact with others? The changes between MySpace and Twitter/Facebook resolve a lot of those issues, and hence created the battle for the “front page” of users’ internet experience.

This may not seem to be a big deal to many, but as we have been researching learner agency by giving learners modality choice in a customizable modality pathway design (aka “dual-layer”), the “front page” becomes a very, very important space that existentially affects learner choice in major ways. The tool that learners begins a learning experience in becomes the place they are comfortable with, and they resist venturing past the “front page” of that tool. You might have run into this problem with, say, introducing Twitter into a course taught in Blackboard. Many learners start to complain that the Bb forums would work just fine. There is a stickiness to the front page that keeps learners in there and away from other tools.

Shouldn’t the learner be in control of this “front page?” Shouldn’t this “front page” display their map of what they want to learn? Shouldn’t the tools and content and things they want to learn with/from support this map, linking from the learners “front page” rather than competing with it?

This is pretty much the big problem we run into with the customizable modality pathway design. The “front page” control battle segments the learning process, pulls learners away, makes them comfortable with giving up control of that space, and enforces the status quo of instructor-controlled learning. Up to this point, we have been working on design and structure – all of which is, for better or worse, coalescing into a design theory/method of some kind. However, the technology is simply in the way most of the time, mainly because very few tools actually work to give the learner control. They mostly all attempt to put their tool in control, and by extension, the person (instructor and school admins) behind the tool in control as well.

edugeek-journal-avatarIn many ways, I think this issue connects to the Indie Ed-Tech movement. I’ll be blogging more about that over the next few weeks/months. I’ll need to cover how the technology that allows learners to reclaim the “front page” of their learning experience could look – turning the idea of a “Neutral Zone” into a learning map that learners build (and then connect artifacts to create a “portfolio” map of what they did). This will allow learners to mix and match what tools, services, course, etc they learn from, leading to alternative ways to prove/certify that they have specific knowledge and skills, fueled by owning their own domain, APIs, cool stuff, etc. Of course, since any work in Indie Ed-Tech needs a music reference, I will be taking up Adam Croom’s challenge for someone to write about grunge rock (not my favorite style of music – Audrey Watters already used that one – but a good genre to represent the angle I am going for). So, yes, I have a good dozen blog posts in mind already, so time to get cracking.

(image credit: “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” by Nina Vital)

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