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Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 as the 21st-century LMS

Author(s)
Susan Gautsch
Director of e-Learning
Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University
Session Information
Academic Planning/Institutional Strategies
Workshop
April 19, 2010 - 1:00pm
80 Minutes
Salon B

Businesses, professional associations, peer groups, and university alumni groups eagerly embrace social learning, informal discover, peer collaboration, knowledge development and collective intelligence through Enterprise 2.0 frameworks and tools. Here, we explore how this model embodies 21st century learner-centered pedagogies we espouse and its application in an MBA program.

Since the first Learning Management Systems (LMS) emerged 15 years ago, we have enjoyed slow but steady improvements in user interfaces, administrative integration and support, and broader feature sets. Most institutions invest substantial resources on enterprise infrastructure, licensing, upgrades, administrative maintenance, technical support, faculty development and student training. While there are few ways to reduce resource allocations, most education institutions report their enterprise LMS systems are actually used at less than half of their supported capacity. Juxtapose this with the boom of Web 2.0 in the last five years, where consumers (including students and faculty) enjoy "freemium" online services including file sharing and content delivery; collaborative and rich-media workspaces including application sharing, Voice-over-IP (VOIP) and social networks; simple and intuitive interfaces requiring minimal if any training; peer-reviewed and collaboratively developed content with automatic tracking in tools such as blogs and wikis; and anytime/anywhere access from multiple devices big and small. Four years ago, Prof. Andrew McAfee of MIT's Sloan School of Business coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe an emerging trend that started with consumers taking their favorite Web 2.0 and social media tools to work. Today, hundreds of large and small corporations are adopting the tools and transforming the way they communicate, collaborate, discover, learn and innovate within and across divisions, with their customers, suppliers, and competitors. For good and ill, it is undoubtedly a socio-collaborative transformation. Such socio-collaborative transformations are increasingly familiar in blended learning programs. At Pepperdine's Business School, the Graziadio Learning Environment and Network (GLEAN) is being informally rolled-out in keeping with an Enterprise 2.0 framework. Unlike most instructor-centered LMSs, GLEAN promotes open and frequent communication, social learning, informal discovery, peer collaboration, knowledge management and collective intelligence. This session will highlight our successes, challenges, and lessons learned while questioning the future of the LMS.