A couple years ago, a colleague and I posited an instructional-design approach to improving learning and performance when utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. This approach was built upon the socio-constructivist philosophies of learning and emphasizes three dimensions in designing learning for the Web 2.0 environment—social/collaborative elements, user-generated design, and knowledge management. The motivation for this approach stemmed from the recent emergence of approaches to learning that are based on self-determination and networked contexts such as heutagogy (Phelps, Hase, & Ellis, 2005) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005), which help us understand learning as making connections with ideas, facts, people, and communities.

Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

All the talk about learning management systems (LMS) around the office lately reminded me of a dataset a couple of colleagues and I put together last year. Dr. Florence Martin, Dr. Yuyan Su, and I undertook the task of validating an instrument to measure LMS self-efficacy.

Bandura (1997) defined self-efficacy as beliefs in one’s abilities to carry out a desired course of action. I’ll spare you the details of orthogonal exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses.

One of the many variables we decided to examine was whether student LMS self-efficacy was a predictor of course performance. After all, is not learning the primary motivation for using a learning management system?

Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.