Interaction Style 2: Discussion
This data flow diagram illustrates the how students and teachers could interact in a distributed LMS to engage in a group discussion.
A discussion tool is another typical tool found in courseware. The discussion tool is used to allow a teacher to set of "forums" or "threads" of conversation related to the course material. Like the assignment tool, it also lives and dies with the course worksite.
An alternative approach would be to distribute the messages between the courseware system and a learner centered platform, much like email systems do. The difference between the a distributed leaning management system discussion and traditional email systems would be that this content would be stored in a standardized format that allowed users to easily re-use the content in their other courses or portfolios.
Again, once the course ends or the student leaves the institution, they have the option to keep a copy of all of these discussions for there own use, much like they do with email.
Again, there is a lot of duplicated data in distributed system like this which may end up causing issues for storage. However, this does allow each learner to retain a record of all of the discussions that occurred in their classes...forever if they wish to. Similarly, this frees the institution from maintaining the course indefinitely "just in case" students need access to their data.
An important assumption is that a system that can engage in this sort of messaging becomes standardized, allowing students to remix and reuse their content in multiple classes at multiple institutions.