More clicks aren’t always a good thing.
While they may be great in marketing and social media, students and faculty alike have spent the past school year adjusting to them in Taylor’s new learning management system (LMS) — Brightspace.
As the campus community has learned the platform together, one common, if minor, complaint has been the over-abundance of clicks users must perform to navigate courses. Love Brightspace or hate it, many seem to agree the inconvenience is unnecessary.
But our view as The Echo Editorial Board is that no system is going to be perfect.
As Tim Lehrian, Taylor University’s computer resource manager and professor for the Computing and Culture Applications and Context course, stated, there is no one-size-fits-all for every department on campus.
“Different areas are going to want to accentuate different things about what they're doing and they're going to want to lay things out differently,” Lehrian said. “It's sort of like when you're looking for a church or looking for a school … There's going to be parts of it that you're not going to like.”
It’s advice Julie Borkin, assistant professor of the Communication Department, shared as well.
After all, although Brightspace has been officially in place for nearly a full school year, many professors are still learning its ins and outs.
While Borkin counted the improved accessibility and streamlined nature of the system as wins, her utmost concern is maximizing student learning, a task which can be made more difficult by LMS complications.
“What can protect the learning?” she asked. “That really needs to be the guiding question all the time. What protects the learning, what grows the learning, what gets in the way of the learning? And if we have that conversation over and over again until we get to a place that we're all feeling a bit more confident, I think that will help.”
Understanding how to use course templates, access the student view and understand how students receive feedback have been some challenges professors have faced throughout the year.
But the new system has also prompted positive change for professors as they’ve rethought their course layouts. Greg MaGee, professor of biblical studies, found opportunity in the upheaval and believes some of his peers have done the same.
“Sometimes we need a good excuse to rethink how we're putting things together on a learning management system,” MaGee said. “It's a good opportunity to think through how might I organize things differently and put things together more effectively.”
The overwhelming change was more challenging for other professors. Christy Moore, assistant professor of education, noted training was more difficult with so much already on her workload.
She also expressed a desire for more training, as she missed the December sessions held for professors.
“Do you learn best by going to a little workshop that explains it or do you really do best at maybe just playing with it? I need an opportunity for both typically,” she said.
From a student perspective, praises and concerns were much the same.
Freshman Connor Takenaka used Blackboard and Brightspace this past year, but strongly preferred Brightspace’s user interface (UI), sharing how Blackboard’s system often kicked users out with one wrong click.
Sophomores Katrine Melika and Elisha Baker touched on the frustration of too many clicks in Brightspace.
“You need a roadmap to figure out where you're going,” Baker said. “And then you take a turn and it does not take you in the right direction.”
Still, Baker said she didn’t have a strong preference toward either LMS. Melika found negatives with both systems, going back to Blackboard’s poor UI and Brightspace’s neglect to show final grades for some classes.
One size simply doesn’t fit all when Taylor offers over 90 undergraduate programs, but we believe there isn’t a need for a perfect solution. We just need to walk in grace, celebrate the wins and converse about missteps.
After all, nothing is going to be perfect.
