LMS
There is a very substantial change underway in higher education that has been surprisingly little analyzed. Over the past several years, comprehensive computer systems called LMS have quickly developed and are having, and will increasingly have, a deep impact on university teaching and learning. They are enterprise-wide, internet-based systems, like WebCT and Blackboard, that consolidate multiple pedagogical and course administration tools. These systems can simulate virtual learning spaces for campus students and are being utilized to construct entirely online virtual universities.
They are becoming omnipresent at institutions of higher education worldwide, inserting a virtual aspect into even the most conventional campus-based institutions. In contrast to other financial or human resources management systems that have been newly implemented in universities, online LMS can potentially influence the business of teaching and learning in unforeseen ways. Notwithstanding this, studies on the implications of LMS, especially the pedagogical concerns, are in their early stages. In this paper, we thus investigate implications resulting from the integration into university teaching and learning curricula. Following a critical analysis of the importance of such online learning systems modern education, we will outline four particular academic issues related to their application.
Overview of Online Learning Management Systems
We are not aiming to provide a technical overview of LMS, but it is useful to provide some context for the less technically aware. LMS evolved from a variety of internet and multimedia advances in the 1990s. Over the past four years, the systems have developed and been implemented in most universities around the globe.
Also known as learning platforms, distributed learning systems, course management systems, content management systems, portals, and instructional management systems, they integrate a variety of course or subject management and pedagogical tools to offer a vehicle for designing, constructing, lms, lms training, best lms, free lms, online lms, and delivering online learning environments. LMS are scalable systems that can be utilized to support an entire university’s teaching and learning program. With proper elaboration, they can also be utilized to propel virtual universities. Global standards for are just beginning to emerge, and the different vendor products that are currently available differ in their adherence to these.
LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ADOPTION
Universities have embraced LMS readily despite the expense, intricacies, and perils involved. From a university planning perspective, the initial choice of an enterprise-level LMS is a high stakes and high risk undertaking that requires much technological and institutional forecasting. It may require grappling with inextricably intertwined educational, administrative, and technological concerns, the interests of a wide and varied set of stakeholders, and navigating new facets of entrenched institutional policy and procedures.
Management and utilization LMS may involve creating new lines and forms of accountability and control and taking dimensions of the interface between the administrative and the academic into account. There is something so alluring about that, although they are complex and risky, nearly every university feels obligated to have one. Three traditional reasons are regularly cited for the current relevance of information technology to higher education and the shift occurring in delivery modes. Access, cost, and quality can be singled out as the three usually provided explanations.
It is achievable to identify a lot more discrete drivers, nonetheless, which have made the systems more appealing to universities and precipitated their accelerating adoption. Finally, and by no means least, is part of a significant culture change occurring in teaching and learning at the university level. LMS provides universities with a previously unheard-of ability to manage and regulate instruction. From a management point of view, the chaos that comes with academic freedom and autonomy in teaching and learning may seem chaotic and anarchic.
The leadership and management of higher education communities entail, in turn, lms website, lms options, lms education, lms vendors, training lms a great tolerance of uncertainty, but tolerance of this sort is increasingly lacking in an age of concern for quality assurance and control. LMS can seem to provide a way of managing and packaging teaching activities by providing templates that promise order and tidiness and the ability to manage quality. The order that is perceived to be established through teaching and learning by is, we believe, one of the more compelling explanations for their widespread adoption.
THE EDUCATIONAL ISSUES
There is not much educational research on the pedagogical effect of LMS. In attempts to determine salient research topics, there has been an explosion of small-scale, localized, and descriptive case studies examining the impact of information and communication technologies on teaching and learning. These studies are generally concerned with the application of individual technologies in individual classes or subjects. With technology and economic considerations frequently being the dominant drivers of the technologies, researchers have often generated post hoc explanations and descriptions of their pedagogical attributes.
Although having significant practical influence and much exploratory interest in the research literature, researchers are only now starting to recognize the underlying practical and theoretical concerns. In light of this background, we will discuss four general concerns of Learning Management Systems. LMS analyses in undergraduate programmers tend to give attention to economic and technical concerns. This type of research is prone to bringing analysis of down to how they address shortcomings they close out in contemporary pedagogy or to the efficiency of the institutions they are purported to bring about. LMS educational tools, nonetheless, and one has to keep in mind pedagogical thinking when speaking of LMS.
EFFECTS OF LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
LMS are premised on an overly simplistic conception of teachers’ relationship to knowledge and the process of student learning. In-built functions might not promote attention to or experimentation with advanced pedagogical practice. The text-based nature of the internet might reinforce conceptions of teaching as the transmission of decontextualized and discrete bits of information. It has been contended that pedagogy’s flexibility and subtlety, which are necessary for successful teaching, can be lost once pedagogy has been coded and packaged software. At the extreme, in the guise of self-paced learning, LMS may even be promoting a trend toward preprogrammed modes of teaching.
One of the most glaring limitations is their dependence on forms of assessment that can be machine-marked, e.g., multiple choice and short response tests. Multiple choice tests have a place, and it seems they can be written to test reasonably sophisticated understandings, but it would be a matter of serious concern if this type of testing and feedback came to dominate in higher education.
It enforces positivist epistemological presumptions regarding the convergent nature of knowledge, which are contrary to the knowledge approaches embraced in most scholarly disciplines. The risk is that if this is the most salient feature of the assessment role in LMS, it will push pedagogy toward a reductionist, mechanistic version of the critically important assessment and feedback cycle.
Conclusion
The future of LMS in higher education must be the focus of intensive and extensive educationally oriented discussion and debate. These online systems have tended to appeal mainly to technicians, administrators, and a generally small group of academic staff with a clear interest in online learning. Because of the probable impact of the systems, however, debates on online learning systems need to engage a broad range of individuals and groups. Decisions regarding university learning and teaching need not be limited to checklist analysis of organizational and technical factors.
It is crucial to preserve the educational focus instead of highlighting any determinism of technology that assumes certain features of online systems or teaching as given. In particular, discussions regarding the adoption, implementation, usage, and assessment should include regular iterative conversations with the large and diverse community of academic stakeholders who are, and will be, impacted by the systems. Institutional managers and leaders must have central roles in such conversations. Institutional leadership must guarantee that employees are trained in pedagogy for the online and that they are exposed to broader debates and questions about online LMS.
While doing so, the leaders of institutions should build support among the staff using by, for instance, creating best practice models and establishing fora where staff may exchange ideas and discuss their experience with the systems. Efforts must be made to identify how online LMS can be employed to enhance and complement an institution main teaching goals but not replace them.