In and Out of the Walled Garden

Joseph Thibault helps us tend to our learning crop.

I have a friend up in northern Vermont, where I grew up, who is an avid gardener. Beans, berries, tomatoes, carrots, beets, peas, even a few grape and hop vines. He’s got more of a green thumb than I do, but we both always loved playing in the dirt.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen an evolution of his garden moving from just a simple shovel-turned patch to a lush jungle of vegetables supported and defended by raised beds, a gate, a scarecrow, tin-pans, hanging shards of mirror, and wire. I asked him recently if he had added anything this year and he said “my uncle.” Upon clarification, I learned that said uncle was armed, scoped, and had a clear line of sight to the garden.

It’s the garden equivalent of Fort Knox (a US military base notorious for its security).

Now, it’s important to understand why his garden looks like this: deer and bears. The deer and bears are munch-machines. They’re after the fresh ready-to-eat smorgasbord. A veritable cornucopia of whole foods. Thankfully, he’s taking these precautions and cultivated quite the Walled Garden of vegetable production that I get to enjoy each summer on holiday.

But not all Walled Gardens produce fruits and veggies. For a long time the term has applied to “closed systems” describing an acronym soup of enterprise software (AI, CRM, CMS, HRM, SIS, etc.) highlighting the secure and private aspects of these platforms for their users.

In the 2000s, the phrase was applied to learning management systems (LMS) - the earliest online reference I found dates to 2006. This metaphor provides a useful mental model and framework for understanding how the LMS structures content delivery, interactions, and assessment across a range of applications, from schools to corporate learning to life-long learning.

There’s no single technical guide for setting up your LMS as a walled garden, but the components and tactics are not dissimilar to my friend’s approach. As Joseph Ugoretz, an early user of the phrase notes, “Walled means closed, but it can also mean protected.”

Over time, as needs, policies, and culture have changed, the notion of a walled garden has changed and evolved as well. At a minimum, a walled garden LMS is a repository of resources and materials that may or may not require login to access. Moving across the spectrum it may include a conduit for submitting artifacts, grading or assessing, including feedback, connections to other walled gardens (extensions and integrations), or a complete ecosystem for online interaction and learning in an online course.

Who tends the Walled Garden LMS?

In many cases, you probably rely on an IT person responsible for keeping the LMS up and available. My hat goes off to those single operators - who I’ve always found to be helpful, responsive, intelligent, and capable–who manage all technical aspects of the infrastructure supporting delivery for your courses (when they’re doing their job well, you don’t even know they’re there). In other cases, there may be a complete team of developers, sysadmins, devops professionals, and instructional designers who collectively run enterprise-grade software for you and your constituents. Gardens, like an LMS, can be large and small.

Gardens don’t tend or weed themselves: Teachers contribute through the curation and pruning of the resources as they’re offered through activities and materials. Often, teachers decide the read, write, create, delete, and update tools that might be part of a class or course.

Helpful contributions also come from the committees and decision makers contributing to the tools available to tend the garden and policies that dictate how accessible, vibrant, open, or protected the garden is.

What makes up the Walled Garden LMS?

The Gate

First, as ever, there’s the entryway to your Walled Garden. Authentication systems set access restrictions and rights for each user, and might include sign on, multifactor authentication, course rostering, guest access, enrollment policies, or custom roles and privileges.

The Rows

Each student enrollment and classroom creates order within the Walled Garden. This organizational layer gets students where they need to go in order to grow and thrive. Their presence in class gives them the sunlight (hopefully), water (yes, please), and nutrients (school lunch?) that they need to meet their full potential.

The Fence

Your walled garden may have IP restrictions, firewalls, or paywalls. There may also be rules about concurrent account access. At the minimum, for an LMS to be walled, some activities or resources require a user to be authenticated with an account granted the appropriate roles and permissions (otherwise you don’t have a Walled Garden, you just have a website).

The Scarecrow

In addition to the authentication process, the Walled Garden LMS is protected through stated policies, tools, norms, and culture. The academic integrity or honor code is a deterrent as is the end user license agreement, code of student conduct, and staff/HR handbook. If students know what integrity tools are in use, those become strong deterrents as well.

The Uncle

While a watchful eye can help keep real deer and bears at bay, let me break the fourth wall and clarify that vigilance - not aggression - is the key to a secure and protected LMS. There’s an increasing presence of surveillance capabilities in the modern LMS, whether that’s proactive proctoring and invigilation, use of latent log data, or other means. The role of the Uncle is to remain vigilant and watchful for new ways of breaching the walled garden (from hacking to steal user data, infiltration to spam users, or impersonation for the purpose of collusion). The Uncle has some view into the system with the ability to take some action (alerting IT of a necessary patch, investigating a compromised exam, or simply taking notes on where to invest for next year).

The Crop

Of course, without students, the walled garden LMS is essentially purposeless. All this effort and organization are to facilitate student growth. The goal is to get the mix of experience, learning, collaboration, communication, and opportunity just right to help students reach their full potential every year.

This year in Vermont my friend’s garden hasn’t been planted yet. It’s buried under snow.

My friend says that they’re still working through all the canned veggies and fruit from last year’s harvest. He, his wife, and kids are already picking out all of their favorite fruits and veggies to plant once the ground is thawed and spring is sprung. The first daffodils are just starting to poke through and the trees are starting to bud. He says he’s looking forward to tending “the best crop ever” and I believe him.

Whether your Walled Garden is for veggies or for learners: the best are tended by gardeners who care.

Joseph Thibault is a student for life and the founder of Cursive Inc.

Connect wth him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephthibault/