Making the most of your Learning Management System
What's an LMS?
Learning management systems (LMS), also known as Course Management Systems, are software packages built to support the administrative functions and learning objectives of course delivery whether in online, face-to-face ("traditional" classroom model), or hybrid ("traditional" classroom model with online components) learning environments.
Software to support administrative and learning goals spans a broad spectrum of features and capabilities, but an LMS in this context refers to an enterprise-wide system, accessed through the Web by course administrators, moderators, and participants. Common features include the ability to upload and share course resources and maintain student grades. They also include collaboration tools, more notably asynchronous discussion boards. The market leader in LMS implementations is the closed-source Blackboard/WebCT and Desire2Learn; other popular products include Sakai, Moodle, and .LRN, which are all open-source.
Institutional benefits
Learning management systems provide many institutional benefits for course delivery. They streamline administrative processes, particularly when they are seamlessly integrated into enterprise data systems. Course administrators can take advantage of the integration of tools and processes and relaunch course sessions with reduced cost and effort. Courses are thus easily scalable; the same instances of configurations and resources can be repeated as often as needed, meaning that the time to develop course sessions is considerably reduced on a per-course basis.
These systems are also designed to support broad learning objectives. Moodle, for example, touts its commitment to constructivist learning through its use of collaborative technologies.
Another defining features of learning management systems is that they are also generally configured foremost for the ease of use by instructors and administrators, rather than students. The homepage of the Blackboard website states:
The Blackboard Learning System is a family of software applications designed to enhance teaching and learning. Intuitive and easy-to-use for instructors, the Blackboard Learning System is built on a scalable enterprise technology foundation that facilitates growth and performance.
What about ease of use by the students?
The underbelly of the LMS
This speaks to an interesting flip side to the convenience of integrated systems and ease of set-up that LMSs offer, in that the same attributes that make LMS setups organizationally viable and useful tend to be limiting factors to how well they can provide a foundation for effective learning environments.
For example, in the version of Blackboard used by Tufts University it is a simple matter for course administrators to create a new course session by uploading a "package" of resources and settings. Creating contextual hyperlinks between these resources, however, is near on impossible. Course participants are thus presented with a course session that does not present standard navigational affordances of most websites; they cannot move between, say, this week's session and this week's asynchronous discussion without voyaging back to the top level of the site.
And, the robustness of these enterprise systems can lead to technological stagnation as it is difficult and costly to change or modify these existing systems. Development of innovative technological approaches to pedagogical problems is stymied when the existing system does not support either the generative use of the existing systems or the integration of outside applications. (Worth noting is that Blackboard offers Building Block extensions, though at a relatively high cost and only for more recent versions of the software.) Course designers anecdotally estimate that particularly in regards to collaborative tools, learning management systems tend to lag behind current technology by three years or so.
Breaking free?
These limitations do not mean that course administrators have no options to improve their courses within a standard LMS implementation; depending on institutional culture and resources, course moderators and administrators have a spectrum of choices as to how to maximize the affordances of the LMS while providing the best learning experience for course participants. Stops along this spectrum include changing course management techniques ("soft skills" changes); bolstering the existing systems with additional tools, resources, or functionality; or putting an entirely new system into place.
The first step for course administrators, whether or not they are working towards the eventual goal of integrating additional tools, is to evaluate how they are using the existing technology suite to support learning objectives. Questions to ask include: Does the LMS include asynchronous discussion boards? If so, how are these being used? Are course moderators actively engaged in supporting the development of discussion norms? Are the course resources easy to find? Is it possible to include more contextual support for how to use the course elements, such as "help" documentation? Reviewing best practices in course moderation would be a good first step.
The course leaders might find that the existing tool set, even when optimized in regards to configuration and usage, does not provide the desired support for learning objectives. For example, a course objective might be to allow participants to communicate in real-time (chat) but the LMS only includes an asynchronous discussion board. Or, as researchers for the Fulcrum Institute project at Tufts and TERC found, participants could not share collected data within the confines of the existing LMS. They also wanted for participants to be able to easily share groups of images. Blackboard, the institutional tool of choice, did not provide adequate support for either of these needs. In this case course designers looked to using tools outside of the LMS tool set; examples that TERC has experimented with included Flickr, Yahoo photos, and Google Spreadsheets.
This approach offers many benefits; course leaders can leverage the features of the LMS that are the most useful, such as for maintaining class lists and storing core course materials. To support effective collaboration, course designers can use the best-of -breed tools available at the time the course session is delivered.
Before jumping to supplementing the institutional LMS with additional collaborative tools, consider: does this course need to scale? In other words, will we need to deliver this identical course to many groups? Will these additional sessions require manual intervention to identify tools and train/support participants? And what happens if the tool we've identified is taken off the market? Do we have a viable alternative available? And if it changes pricing structure suddenly would we need to limit its use? Is there even a line item in the budget to support additional tools? Will future institutions be limited in their ability to deliver this course if we make it too customized?
No facile solution exists. An instructional team would do well to consider where their institution and course goals fall out on this scale:
Customized |
.......................... | Scalable |
Easy for participants |
.......................... | Easy for instructors |
Free/beta version |
.......................... | Subscription/fee based |
Optimized for immediate needs |
.......................... | Optimized for future compatibility |
Risk of innovating too quickly |
.......................... | Risk of innovating too slowly |
Out with the old...
At some point, an LMS will live beyond its point of relevance and will need to be upgraded or replaced. Or, it could be an organizationally opportune juncture to explore buying or building a new tool set. It is vital to keep in mind that this is an expensive endeavor, requiring significant institutional buy in, and still doesn't necessarily address all of the challenges that an organization or course team might be facing. The decision should be based not only on on resource availability, but also learning objectives and overall organizational priorities.
Forging ahead
There is no magic bullet to optimize the use of learning management systems, but teams can make the most of the available systems by understanding and applying best practices in forum moderation, by strategically incorporating additional tools that support both organizational and learning priorities, and by helping to inform institutional decision making about enterprise-wide learning management system product choice and implementation.
photo: Andrew Lighten