I’m messing around with rehashing my old writing with AI… here is an example from a chapter I wrote several years ago. In the chapter, I described several projects in which we supported education in rural areas using open source technology.
Rural educators and school leaders face an often-exacerbated set of challenges, including limited financial resources, smaller schools lacking the economy of scale of larger districts, and widely dispersed sites that complicate shared professional support. Furthermore, rural educators frequently teach outside their area of specialty.
However, the technology used to deliver online learning—specifically Learning Management Systems (LMS)—offers robust solutions to address these difficulties. By adapting these technologies, schools can expand opportunities for students, facilitate teacher professional learning, and support authentic learning and assessment. While proprietary platforms are available, open source solutions like Moodle can be obtained and installed at no cost, offering a particularly appealing option for rural communities dealing with minimal budgets.
Here is how LMS platforms can be successfully deployed and utilized to support rural educators and students, drawing on real-world cases:
Expanding Student Opportunities Through Distance Learning
One of the most immediate challenges for rural schools is providing access to advanced or specialized courses when personnel are limited.
LMS infrastructure and related technologies can solve staffing issues, such as the problem faced by Crossroads Elementary School when they lacked a teacher for high school Algebra 1. The solution involved using distance learning infrastructure, including an open source video conferencing platform called Jitsi, to connect remote students synchronously with a qualified teacher at an allied school.
This connectivity yielded several unpredicted benefits, including:
- Increased Oversight: The high school mathematics chairperson was able to attend distance classes by connecting to the video conference, providing greater oversight than previously possible.
- Resource Creation: The Algebra teacher began recording portions of the sessions, which became resources posted online for students and parents to use during homework, and even served as material for professional development (PD) for high school math teachers.
- Shift in Pedagogy: The course transitioned from traditional content delivery via video conference to a problem-solving course where students explored content and shared their own solutions using technology.
Facilitating Collaborative Professional Development
Online learning platforms are powerful tools for facilitating teachers’ professional learning. In schools where administrators were focusing on initiatives like problem-based learning or integrating new hardware (like Chromebooks), Moodle was adopted to create an online professional development space.
These virtual PD classrooms supported:
- Curriculum Development: Teachers collaboratively developed new curricula and unfamiliar methods and tools.
- Resource Organization: Teachers shared links and materials. To solve the problem of overwhelming disorganization, teacher-leaders demonstrated various options (like folders or wikis) before the faculty agreed on tagging as the preferred method for organizing resources. This decision was primarily driven by the fact that tagging was the easiest of the options for teachers to use.
- Peer Support: Forums were added to Moodle to facilitate questions and answers regarding new technology. In one case, an initial lack of participation in the forums was addressed by providing brief, in-person training, which immediately resulted in far greater participation, with teachers posting suggestions and answering colleagues’ questions.
Creating Flexible, Integrated Learning Environments
An LMS should be a space where students and teachers interact and collaborate, moving beyond simply serving as a “digital drop box” or file repository. When Northern Middle and High School replaced their limited proprietary LMS, they selected the open source Moodle for its flexibility.
Through iterative design based on user feedback, they expanded Moodle’s functionality:
- Advanced Features: Moodle was used for threaded discussions, embedded media, and PDF assignments with comments, activities that were not utilized on the replaced LMS.
- System Integration: The LMS was later integrated with Mahara (an open source portfolio platform). This integration created a single online space where students’ work could flow easily between the online classroom and the online portfolio, helping teachers document authentic learning more seriously and consistently than before.
- Improving Ease of Use: Decisions were made to boost technology acceptance. For example, the committee addressed the issue of students having “too many usernames and passwords” by adding a plugin allowing users to log on using their existing Google Applications for Education (now called Google Workspaces) accounts (a single sign-on solution). This reduced friction and improved the perceived ease of use (effort expectancy) of the system.
Keys to Successful LMS Deployment in Rural Settings
The success of these projects, often utilizing open source solutions, was not purely based on cost or technology, but on the planning strategy employed.
- Iterative Planning: School leaders used planning grounded in educational design research, which is iterative and continuously improving. This approach involves deploying a solution, observing its effect, and refining it based on observations and feedback gathered from active users, ensuring the technology better reflects teaching and learning goals.
- Collaboration is Essential: Effective technology solutions required collaborative efforts between educators (who provided input on needs and user experience) and technologists (who configured the systems). This division of labor led to solutions that were both effective for teachers and easy to deploy.
- Recognizing Expertise Limitations: While open source platforms eliminate licensing costs, they often require technical expertise to install and maintain. Lack of sufficient expertise can be a major challenge in rural communities, where budgets limit hiring experts or existing staff have reduced schedules. School leaders must ensure they have access to individuals who can properly configure the systems to reflect the needs of teachers and learners.
Adopting and refining an LMS in a rural environment is like tailoring a custom suit: it requires careful measurement, iterative adjustments, and the collaborative input of both the expert tailor (technologist) and the wearer (educator) to ensure the fit is perfect and allows for flexible movement in the classroom.