Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Sakai working group on authoring about the work we've been doing on Widgets. I'm including it here as its got some more of the technical details.

I think a major implication of widgets is that it challenges the idea of writing tools as plugins just for one platform (e.g. Moodle, or Sakai) rather than as generic widgets usable in any "container", which can include personal as well as institutionally-offered web spaces. For example, a Moodle course can include things like a chat, voting, and forum widget - which you can then drag off into your personal site.

Perhaps make your own personal "dashboard" out of the widgets you've taken from several different courses you are participating in, originally offered in different LMS's by different organisations.

Yesterday I presented at an online seminar on Personal Learning Environments. The organisers - the Evolve project - also made a recording of the session so you can see how it went.

Thanks to everyone who took part and asked lots of difficult questions!

To download the recording, you need to click this link and let the Java weirdness happen. I guess a regular movie wouldn't have captured the chat backchannel, which is nice as I missed some of the comments while busy talking.

I'm off to Maastricht next week to take part in a workshop on mashup personal learning environments (MUPPLE) as part of the EC-TEL conference. I'll be presenting a demo of some work we've been doing on integrating widgets into various platforms.

I'll post a link to the paper when I get back, but in the meantime, here is a screenshot to give you an idea of what I'll be showing: spot the Apple Dashboard widgets in this Elgg 1.0 installation!

This is all possible at least partly through the efforts of W3C in coming up with a common Widget specification, but also through many modern platforms such as Elgg, Wordpress and Moodle having a "Widget" concept in their plugin architecture that makes embedding of other bits of web far easier. The combination of these factors made building a generic widget server technology that can serve widgets from existing platforms such as Dashboard, Sidebar, Konfabulator (etc.) into web environments feasible.

We've also extended the widget spec, and enabled stateful collaborative widgets, like the "Natter" synchronous chat widget you see in the image. With no special server-side coding whatsoever - its all Javascript and AJAX calls to standard widget service methods and events.

After MUPPLE I'll be at IMS in Birmingham, quite possibly for a repeat performance, but this time showing this technology being combined with learning design sequences.

More information on MUPPLE here.

So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?

That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and hopefully some of what I suggest below will point in that direction, but by no means put to rest the challenges and demands of such important caveats, and one can only hope for meaningful serendipity.

Ok, no more backsliding, avanti! The examples below will be centered around the work we have been doing at UMW with WordPress Multi-User (much of what I discus below can surely be done with Drupal and Movable Type —and probably several other applications I don’t know about), but this is my blog and I ain’t going to talk about those hippie applications anymore, ya hear?

Good.

An Example of a blogfolio?

Robert Lynne, a graduating Art major at UMW, will be my example for this post. I hope he can forgive me constantly harassing him, but his blogfolio (to quote D’Arcy) is a model of at least one way you can imagine the portfolio logic working. Rob has used his blog for several classes, an Art History course, an Art Studio course, a Sculpture course, as well as a Poetry Workshop course. He has had his blog for the 2007/2008 academic year, and the space demonstrates some of the questions of creative control, sequence, and serendipity that I mentioned earlier in regards to Chris and Phaedral’s concerns.

In his blogfolio he chronicled his trip to NYC, helped shape a manifesto, blogged for classes, sang songs, and even had time to heckle yours truly. All of this was an on-going stream of ideas and thoughts that framed a process, being an art major he also had a lot of completed work to present to his audience, and this is where the use of pages on his blog became the space for what many might understand as a more traditional portfolio. He has a page dedicated to his paintings, sculptures, final thesis presentation, as well as a more focused about page. In these pages he controls the sequence, presentation, and obviously decides what goes in and what is left out. The space captures a fascinating part of both his creative process and experience throughout the year, but italso quickly became a space for him to represent the products of that process. He controls his space, he can delete my comments, delete his blog, or export the contents and take them somewhere else. In fact, there is no reason why he couldn’t have done all of this on Blogger or WordPress.com. That said, I think the major reason he started it (but it probably was not the logic that ultimately drove it) was the fact that he was asked to blog for at least three different courses this academic year. Not all of which were in his discipline. I think the major reason his work branched out beyond the classes was that there was an audience, the UMW culture encouraged it, and he found it useful (at least to some degree) to frame his work and experience.

The Name of the Game is Spam-like Aggregation

The reason why blogs can be understood as more powerful, dynamic, and complex portfolio system is because of their Houdini like RSS ability. It really all revolves around the syndication infrastructure which makes all the difference, it affords flexibility, dispels the myth of a monolithic system, and allow for the more complex levels of filtering of content I will outline below. But for a portfolio system to work (and I think I feel the term portfolio falling apart right about now but bear with me) it has to be more than that. It has to be a space where people post there ideas for class, react to topics more informally, add resources about various issues they are thinking through (course related or not), and frame the academic work that they are amassing through their career as learners more generally. This is not a technological issue at all, this is a cultural one, and we have begun to see the beginnings of this at UMW (Roblog being an excellent example), but it is by no means ubiquitous, and there is much, much work to be done in terms of fostering the community to think about these elements together in a more orchestrated fashion.

One of the things about blogs more generally that have made this cultural leap a bit easier is that they are excellent at pulling together all the various online spaces a person may occupy and they are inherently open. Both of which allow for updates from Twitter or Facebook; embedding videos from YouTube or images from Flickr; providing extensibility for a wide range of multimedia and traditional site design. All of which forms a platform that is inviting for its protean ability to incorporate various media and one’s distributed presence into one, simple space. This is key, and it is beautifully illustrated by an imagie engineered by Tom Woodward, which once I am able to annoy him enough to post it will be below as a big, beautiful illustration of this profound point, but geared to all you visual learners.
[ Imagine an image of an Octopus here with many loosely joined Web 2.0 tools ]

So, while Roblog is an excellent example, how does this make sense across a larger campus, and can you create both a culture and harness a simple enough technology process so that Roblog (and hundreds of other students) can easily blog for three or even six different courses during the year, while at the same keep it all on spaces they control yet share it as need be with the appropriate class. That is where the questions of filtering, aggregation, and a little bit of spam-blogging emerge.

Let me outline how this might at our current stage of development.

Thanks To Andre Malan’s widgets BDP RSS Add Feed and Add Sidebar User, it is getting simpler all the time, but we still have to make a couple of more jumps. I’ll outline them all below.

Leap of faith, I’m a professor and I ask my 25 student to get blogs (whether on UMW Blogs or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter) and once the do to come back to my course blog and add their RSS feeds. This is made easy with Andre’s Add Feed widget, for I can easily limit who adds a feed by the blogging community. So, once the student set up their space they can drop the feed in in the text field on the sidebar. Easy enough. But wha if they are using their blog for three diferent classes, a film hobby, and to document their Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession? Well, then they could do one of two things, create a category for my class on their blog, lets call it bmoviemania, and if they are using WordPress (not sure how other blogging platforms handle category feeds) they can just add the RSS feed for that category like so:

http://myblog.com/category/bmoviemania/feed

Thereafter, everything they category as bmoviemania will be fed out to the course blog, keeping their Buffy posts and biology labs out of the b movie class blog (thanks goodness!). They could also do the same thing with a tag on wordpress, it would look like this:

http://myblog.com/tag/bmoviemania/feed

Now, we have a pretty straightforward method of taking these student blogs post for a specific course category or tag, and feeding them into an aggregated course blog. Now how does the aggregated course blog work? Well, it is much easier than it was a semester ago, but there is a little more automation that we need. (Warning: It gets a bit technical for the next few lines! But this information is not essential to the overall logic, so don’t let it throw you off, it is me calling or help ) The feed, once entered by the student, is immediately fed into the BDPRSS aggregator, this would need to be activated and the widget in the sidebar as soon as the professor creates this blog (any ideas Andre?).

Moreover, all the feeds that are fed into the BDP RSS aggregator would then have to be treated as an overall OPML which in turn is placed in the FeedWordPress plugin which actually taking all the posts from the respective student blogs and post them on this course blog (with the permalink pointing back to the students blog). Another automation needs to occur here, FeedWordPress needs to be automatically populated with the OPML feed from BDP RSS: http://bmoviecourse.com?bdprssfeed=1 The suffix will always be the same for this code, but the log domain, depending on the course will change.

So, save for two small bits of automation, we have a self-service aggregated course blog for aggregation, that allows all of the students responses, interaction, and posts to remain within their own space, while still capturing the logic of the course. A beautiful example of this is Gardner Campbell’s Rock/Soul Progressive course from Spring 2008. One additional benefit would be an automatically generated blogroll from the list of students who entered their feed, possibly drawn from the URLs in BDP RSS.

Sorry for the programmistan talk, I hope feedistan isn’t reading, but the larger point is that individuals now have their own space that they can grab the feed for, and even drill down and determine a feed for any given class with tags or categories, and then add it to a course aggregated blog.

But why all the talk about course blogs and aggregated such and such when this is about portfilios? Well, because I believe that this process is part and parcel of the archive/raw material that will ultimately populate this portolio. And as we saw with Roblog, the process is often just as relevant and important as the “product.” This is also where the importance of community and the push for students to have their own space and create within their own Personal Learning Environment (their I said it), but alow it to be fed and captured within an aggregated course blog navigates liminal space between the increasingly irrelevant LMSs, and the free-for-all hippie PLEs

Also, think about what just happened with the course blog for a second. What was outlined there is now the basis of a publishing framework for an individual’s portfolio that pulls from his/her blog archive of posts and class materials in a way that, like the course blog, they have the option to further tag or categorize the work in their personal archives that deal with all sorts of subjects, topics, experiences, and projects from their experience, and allow them to feed it into a site that reflects them in some way outside of the more conventional ideas of a blog (this would be available for UMW Bloggers and those who self-hosted—not free, hosted solutions like wp.com, Blogger, etc.). Now some might be saying but why? The blog is them? And Roblog is an excellent example of this, so I don’t necessarily disagree, yet the overarching archie blog may not be where they want to frame their work as a photographer, present lab work, field work, films, music, poetry, or business case study. The idea here is that anyone can choose how the fed out the relevant categories, that let’s say are tagged with portfolio, and these spaces become more elegant and malleable presentation spaces for for particalar elements of their work wherein they control the sequence, aestheitc, and in many ways the experience of the visitor.

In many ways the is the aggregation/syndication infrastructure brought down to the human scale. yet, if you have students adding feeds to course blogs, why couldn’t they do the same to directories, aggregated discipline channels, a Blogging platform hompage, or what have you. The fact that the syndication architecture is brought down to the atomic level of the individual, makes for the power of the site to scale more globally. More than that, the community will have a good sense of what it is they are doing and why!

I’ll end here because it’s three am, and a man’s gotta sleep, but sometime tomorrow look for part 3 of This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio

Featuring: Biology Lab portfolios at UMW & an experiment with an English course using portfolios for anonymous assessment? Who knew?

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It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.

This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of e-portfolios. Or Helen Barrett’s ongoing discussion of all things e-portfolio. Or Gardner’s vision of the feedbook back in the day. Or Stephen Downes’s on the subject of the space of RSS, aggregation, and distributed student and course content way, way back in the day. The conversation has been one that has unfurled over time for a long while and I enter it very late and only capture a snippet of its history. It’s by no means new, in fact it has held a pretty steady space in the imagination of educational technology for well over a decade, if not longer. In fact, many have moved away from the idea of an e-portfolio altogether, re-framing it as a Personal Learning Environment that can take into account the dynamic, distributed personalized spaces wherein we network, interact, create, commune and by extension learn.

All this said, I want to return to one simple and very unrevelatory idea, how might we imagine a campus cyber-infrastructure for managing a cheap, flexible, and dynamic e-portfolio system? And with that, I’m off…

Barbara Ganley’s 21st century proverb, “Twitter to connect, the blog to reflect,” will lay the groundwork of how we might think about the blog as e-portfolio and much more (I’ll ask many of you to forgive the limitations of my terminology as we get started). This blog/e-portfolio creature might be better understood as a digital frame for experiences or a personal archive of one’s thinking over time (an idea laid out nicely here by Martin Weller as he articulates our collective wondering whether the blogosphere is moribund). I like the idea of understanding a student blog/portfolio as an archive of their throught over the course of their time as a member of an academic community. A space that they can share, interact in, take with them, and build upon as they move onwards and upwards with their lives.

But a portfolio isn’t an archive, right? Well, yes, you’re right smart guy, but we need to spend a bit more time here to move to the idea of featuring and presenting one’s best work as a portfolio so often connotes. An archive becomes the raw material of thought that can be categorized, tagged, fed out, and re-worked in whole series of different and exciting ways. I have said it before, and I’ll say it a gain. With a blogging platform like WordPress and Drupal† you can feed off of categories or tags, which makes the work students file under a particular tag or category easily syndicated to an aggregated course blog –I talk at length about this here, here, here, and here and see Andre Malan’s frighteningly lucid post on the subject of different kinds of course blogs). And by extension, students can use categories and tags to filter specific work for a course blog, a group blog, or even a separate portfolio blog that they feed in only the things they want to feature (keep in mind that students, faculty and staff can have as many blogs as they want, wither on the campus system or elsewhere–more on this soon).

Cole Camplese had brought up the point of using the PSU network drive, or storage space, as a private repository for files that students wanted to keep separate from the blog. I think this is a great feature, and given that PSU has the infrastructure to integrate it with their blogging system it is a bonus. Fore those who don’t have it, I’m not sure you would require a locally supported infrastructure for the job. Might this be better provided by services like divShare, Google Docs, Blip.tv, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. The more I think about it, the shear simplicity of integrating selected Google Docs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, divShare files, etc. into a blog often makes these services easier to work with then a centralized campus storage/file sharing network. The small pieces loosely joined approach guarantees that everyone takes ownership of their work, takes responsibility for the services they choose, and defines their own digital management plan which isn’t premised on the outdated notion of a central network/storage backbone provided by colleges and universities. Universities can make recommendations, and IT departments and/or libraries might make recommendations, but the choice rests with the individual. As Jon Udell outlines the logic of a syndication oriented infrastructure which makes far more sense for universities and colleges than the current practices of continually trying to maintain and host everything locally. As Brian Lamb put it (and I shamefully keep quoting this, sorry Brian!):

Schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?

In my mind, the key to such syndication driven architecture has everything to do with tweaking a few tools (like Andre Malan’s Add BDP RSS and Add User widgets) and perhaps a hack or two to make this work so that the the campus community is sharing their work with one another in a way that is visible and open, while at the same time as simple as a tool like Facebook (which qualifies under Ganley’s notion of connect), but unlike Facebook this system would be open and students, faculty, and staff would control their data (see Justin Ball’s post here).

This is the key, we cannot build a monolithic system that will represent the new breed of “Learning Management Systems” on campus, rather we need provide possibilities for a community to come into conversation with itself and the rest of the world by making it easy for everyone to share their feeds, filter their work to appropriate spaces, and become part of larger community that is not dictated by an overarching logic of management, control, and isolation–those are the tools of nefarious capital D’Arcy Norman and Bill Fitzgerald have come up with an excellent prototype of such a system for Drupal both here and here, respectively.

So, with that, I’ll end the overview and brief and idiosyncratic context and move into some specific examples and how blogs (and in my case WPMu specifically) might be used for eportfolios. I just wanted to stop here and pace myself a bit because my posts are becoming ever-longer, and Jerry reminded me I should make break thi stuff up so that someone will actually read it.

Part deux out at 3 am tomorrow morning

† I imagine applications like Movable Type and Blogger can do something like this with tag/category feeds, I’m just not familiar enough with them, so I haven’t been able to find such features on blogs that are using these applications.

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My PLE is really quite simple. It's my network.

My personal/professional learning network is scalable--it's organic and expands/contracts as needed.

My PLE is a joint effort between me, social software applications, and my networks. And It's ultimately about working with people.

Here's how I connect:

Gmail -- love my email, can't live without it

del.icio.us -- the personal/social dimensions of this application are mindblowing

friendfeed -- a new way for me to browse network member's online activity

popurls -- an aggregation of feeds from popular Websites -- this is a pop culture paradise

Twitter -- my network's spinal column

Google Reader -- selected sites that generally pique my interests

My weblog -- the place where I go to reflect, synthesize, publish, and connect

Finally, I think it's important to mention the glu that holds my PLE together: Firefox.

I use other tools like Skype, a thesaurus, Wikipedia, YouTube, various wikis, Elluminate, Last FM, my office's Moodle installation, and a host of Google search engines at various times, for a variety of purposes. I also pop into various online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, a few Ning sites, and Metafilter, as a way to get a general sense of things online.

Your turn

So, now I've showed you mine. It's your turn to show me yours. What does your PLE look like? How are you connecting and what are you connecting to? 

Individual/social aspect of sharing
I've been thinking a lot about the notion of sharing (on the Internet), how it can both serve an individual's self interest and contribute to a larger social knowledge base. Tagging bookmarks on del.icio.us, for example, is one way we serve our own interest (cataloging our links) and contribute to a collective interest (the application provides links to others who have found and tagged the same item).

Lurking
In this regard, I have developed a fascination with the literal idea of lurking. On the outside, it carries a kind of creepy connotation, lascivious even. Another way to think about this type of non-participatory viewing might include spying or espying: we act as watchers, we take notes, we peek around the corner catching a glimpse of our target stepping into a cab. It almost sounds melodramatic. As I recall (trans. no authority), the term lurking as it relates to cyberspace dates back to a usage associated with MUDs and MOOs where people entered a room and then said nothing while others chatted all around them.

Social networking as (e)spyware?
Yet, when you begin to really look closely, lurking and espying represent a large amount of what happens on the Web. I am not suggesting any malicious intent is necessarily involved by those who prefer to look rather than participate. Social networking sites encourage us to search and browse, to share and compare. That's what friends do, right? RSS and aggregators, for example, automate our ability to eavesdrop on conversations around the globe. But on the Web, eavesdropping is necessarily encouraged. And what we're seeing on the Web is not secret, per se. Eavesdropping on the Web is a way to learn things you might not learn if you were directly looking for a particular answer. On the Web, voyeurism is implicit and might not necessarily symbolize a deviant act. [Of course, it can be quite the deviant act when people use social networking sites for purposes other than interacting truthfully.]

Friends
Friends share. So people who don't share are not your friends, right? So what do we call people who we share with who are not our friends? Residue? By standers? Neutrons? What greater affect does not sharing or participating create? Global warming? War? Famine? A surplus of antique lamps no one will buy on eBay?

Agora
Ideally, the various social and participatory applications available to us can serve us as an agora, not necessarily a marketplace, in a capitalist sense, but more like the Greek verb ageiro which means to gather. The Web affords a means of convergence of commercial and civic life that can be more than about buying and selling merchandise--it can also serve as a place where people can freely examine a wide range of ideas and ideals. Which we are doing now.

Reflection as Action
But the next step requires us to be reflective. The Internet and Web have afforded us an opportunity to re-examine and re-define our morals, our communities, our nations, and the globe. But will these conversations be limited to only a few? What mechanisms are in place to encourage and support a wide range of thought and activity? Perhaps now that we have the ability to connect one-to-one-one-to-many, we should begin thinking about how to harness this collective social power and turn it into meaningful social action, promote open and meaningful dialogue, and serve as a platform for experimentation built on a wide range of perspectives. This is already happening in many ways and will, no doubt, continue to grow and become part of the water. But it should never be taken for granted. If the last U.S. presidential regime has taught us anything, it's that freedom is just another word for everything to lose.

Is the tent too big? Is there such a thing as too many voices in a democracy?  I think we need to explore these ideas more and continue to experiment on smaller scales to see how social software can serve as both a personal learning environment (PLE) and support positive social action.

As always, your thoughts and corrections are encouraged.

Drop.io is a service that lets you create your own dropboxes for people to send you files. They can use email, a web widget, or even their phone to pop stuff into your dropbox. An RSS feed lets you know when you have new stuff. Why is this interesting? Well, when you start to move away from using a monolithic LMS, one of the first features you miss, and which doesn't have an obvious replacement, is a way of handling assignment submissions.

Drop.io lets you create any number of drop boxes, so it would be fairly simple to create them for particular lecturers, departments, or even specific essays. You can put the "drop it here" widget on the teacher's blog, the department website, or wherever you like.

Darren Draper is keen to see educational uses of this, and so am I!

Via OLDaily

Chris posted a question on Twitter today asking for people to send him images representing our PLE (Personal Learning Environment). I sent back a flip, sarcastic response pointing to this photo set, saying that is what my PLE is. I didn’t think much more about it, but then I read later that Chris was taken aback by my (and others’) response. That surprised me, but caused me to take a step back to think about what my PLE really is, and what it would look like if I were to describe it to someone else.

My PLE is in a constant state of flux. My previous response to Chris was that my “PLE is people” (alluding to Soylent Green) - it’s a sarcastic shorthand that I use to mean that the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is that the people are the important part of the equation. At that level, my PLE looks like this:

I admit that the image is way oversimplified, but the exact incantations of magic varies dramatically over time. For me, it began as BBS over 300 BAUD modems, extending over FidoNet to let me reach people in other cities. When I started my undergrad program, my PLE was listservs and gopher sites. Eventually, my PLE was listservs and community websites. It has occasionally included intense periods of instant messaging and video conferencing (with full screen video conferences combined with VNC screen sharing). This eventually evolved to what my current PLE looks like today:

Even this diagram is quite oversimplified. The “communities” item is a shorthand for things like project websites, open source project sites, wikis, BaseCamp, etc…

One of the things that I’ve had trouble with is defining what is in my PLE and what isn’t - it varies so rapidly based on context. Even within something like Twitter, there are people whom I consider part of a learning environment, and others are there for social value. They are both valid, but does that make Twitter a PLE tool or something else? Same with blogs. I follow a whole bunch of blogs - many I consider critical to my personal learning environment, but many are there for entertainment, distraction, or social value. Defining “blogs” as PLE or not-PLE isn’t a clean distinction. Even the core PLE blogs vary in content from day to day, so I can’t even provide a list of blog URLs to say “this is my definitive set of PLE-enable blogs that I follow”.

In the end, I sincerely do not mean to belittle or de-emphasize the genuine questions about PLEs - I just struggle to provide a concrete description of something that is by its very nature organic, dynamic, responsive, and intensely, individually unique.

I think the more important question involves the philosophy and strategies that make various tools effective (or not) as part of the “magic happens” cloud that helps connect people. I’m not sure what the concise definition would be, but I believe that it is strongly based on real, meaningful discussions as opposed to static publishing. I believe that it involves community and real involvement and interaction between members of the community. Tools that enable these kinds of interactions are viable candidates for inclusion in a PLE - but even that definition is so vague as to be essentially meaningless.

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Given a lot of recent comments we really have to elaborate the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage. I've tried to put some of how I think this should work in a diagram (as usual).

I'll try and get some time to elaborate the thinking here, but basically imagine this entire model is sitting on the line from "Future VLE" to each education institution in the original PLE diagram. Originally I thought that a personal system could manage all the variety of all connected institutions, but more realistically there does seem to be a real need for a more concrete coordination system sitting between the personal system and the enterprise, for handling jobs such as initial rendezvous and peer association. For some users this disappears quickly in favour of directly incorporating course feeds and widgets into their own environments. For others, this coordination system becomes a primary point of use. However, it is clearly not an LMS in the traditional sense.

I hope this better articulates the institution-personal relationship and responsibilities. However, I've left off some assessment pieces as the diagram is cluttered enough already!