Implementing Individualized Learning in a Legacy Learning Management System

Educators are being encouraged to shift their instructional paradigm from teacher-centered to learner-centered through the use of technology. For online courses, legacy learning management products originally designed to support and deliver teacher-centered instruction may represent a constraint to implementing the learner-centered paradigm. Yet, replacement of these systems presents a formidable hurdle to educators wishing to initiate learner-centered online courses. This hurdle could be lowered significantly by a transitional approach that allows learner-centered strategies to be delivered within the framework of existing learning management systems. This paper describes our efforts to prototype such a transitional approach for an online statistics course. Pedagogical and technological objectives were successfully achieved by combining the technologies of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), a legacy learning management system, and a standalone course authoring tool to deliver an example course demonstrating adaptive, competency-based student progress instruction that personalizes one’s learning path with topic-contingent assessment feedback.