Environment Matters
Lately, I spend a lot of time talking about the context in which technological shifts happen. While the technology itself is interesting, if we don’t address the environment in which these shifts occur, we miss a huge piece of the puzzle.
Here’s the truth about where we are right now: educators are exhausted. Not ordinary end-of-term tired. The kind of exhaustion that comes from being asked to change everything, again, while everything else gets harder too.
Educators tell me their classrooms are quiet when they walk in. Gone are the days when they had to repeatedly ask students to quiet down and stop discussing their weekend plans. They’re all heads down on their phones. Sometimes it’s because they’re working on assignments or sending a quick message to a friend. Sometimes the reality is harder: they’re disengaged because they don’t think anyone in the system cares about them.
Before we talk about platforms, I want to name what’s under the question of preparedness. When someone asks whether their LMS is ready for the future, what they are really asking is whether technology is built to actually help the people doing the work.
That is the question I care about.
Every Change Carries Some Grief
Here is what we don’t say enough: every real shift in how we teach asks people to let go of something they built. This often means mourning years of craft, assignments they were proud of and a way of working that felt like theirs. That loss is real even when the change is positive.
Grief that goes unnamed does not dissipate. It settles in as resistance and resentment. Increasingly, you might experience a quiet cynicism that makes a faculty meeting feel like a standoff. You can’t innovate your way past a room that feels unseen, and you shouldn’t try.
What helps is not simply a more exciting piece of technology. It’s more complicated than that and requires:
- Connecting to purpose: Connecting technological change to what people already care about and showing them plainly how it helps.
- Encouraging agency: Giving educators and learners real choices in how change unfolds rather than handing them a decision already made can empower them to move in a productive direction for everyone.
- Fostering community: I spend a lot of time in rooms with very smart people, but I haven’t met one person who has everything figured out. We all have a piece of the puzzle. When we make room for people to figure it out together, we not only come up with better solutions, but build a community of partners.
The right platform empowers this work and ultimately encourages educators and learners to look towards the future.
What Learners Actually Need From Us
As we examine and make decisions about technology, we must keep in mind the deeply human things our learners are asking for:
- Connection: As the technology evolves, learners need to know that real people in their lives care whether they make it.
- Guidance: Some students already know what to ask about ethics, privacy and security. Many do not. Teaching them is our work, not a test we leave them to fail alone.
- The why: As it gets easier to produce the finished product, learners need to understand why we ask them to do any given task. We cannot turn off the answer machine. We can motivate students to use it in ways that benefit rather than bypass their cognitive abilities.
So, how do we use technology to address all of this?
What a Future-ready LMS Looks Like
If the goal is to support people through real change while keeping learners at the center, then four things matter more than any feature list. The LMS of the future must:
- Be designed for learning: As educators find their way forward in this new landscape, your learning platform should allow for that innovation rather than impede it. It should be simple to build AI-robust assignments, to teach toward process over product, to design assessments that reward the work you want and to support alternative grading methods and criteria.
- Create a secure learning environment with innovation you can trust: AI should be present where it’s most helpful to support the existing workflows of learners, educators and administrators, and it should be built in a way that ensures security and privacy. Innovation at the cost of security, privacy or how learner data is handled is not progress.
- Be built to last: Technology is changing rapidly and your platform should be built to account for that. A platform built to last is built to keep moving as policy, practice and expectation shift, so you are not perpetually a year behind your own learners.
- Center true partnership for success: The platform of the future is not the SaaS of the past. The people behind the platform must understand the human side of technology and change and must meet institutions where they actually are: walking with faculty, staff and students from where they stand today to where they need to be. This requires long term partnership that evolves over time and centers the needs of the institution.
Let Us Build It On Purpose
If I could offer only one piece of advice to the institutions I work with, it’s this: don’t treat your challenges as merely technological ones. Treat them as human challenges and ask how the technology can support those needs.
This can look like:
- Acknowledging how people are feeling about technological change and meeting them there.
- Providing guidance and technology that protects students, faculty and staff rather than leaving them to improvise in an unproductive way.
- Redesigning learning to be AI-robust, and being clear about when you want students to use AI and when you’d like them to complete a task without it.
The platform you choose will either make that human work lighter or heavier. You get to decide.
Ready to explore what a future-ready LMS could look like for your institution? I’d love to learn about your goals, share what I’m seeing across the industry, and help you think through what’s next. Book a time to connect with me.
About D2L
D2L is the maker of Brightspace, a leading learning platform used by millions of learners across higher education, K-12 and corporate sectors worldwide. We are on a mission to transform the way the world learns.
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