Education Policy, Business and Technology

Building an App Store for Learning Tools

Campus Technology: Matthew Rascoff has a name for the enterprise learning management system: a "Swiss Army Knife of mediocrity." As vice president of learning technology and innovation at the University of North Carolina General Administration, which oversees 17 university campuses with almost 225,000 students, Rascoff has observed that the most innovative faculty members at his institution use the LMS the least. Many professors working on experimental efforts hate the LMS and have sidestepped it, he noted.

Rather than rely on a single application to manage all aspects of teaching and learning, the UNC system has moved to an "app store" model it calls the Learning Technology Commons. "This gives faculty control over picking the tools they use and uses the crowd to decide which are the most effective, rather than one RFP committee," said Rascoff, speaking during a Dec. 16 Future Trends Forum video chat hosted by futurist Bryan Alexander.

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