Universty LMS

What is LMS?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software platform for creating, administering and delivering courses. It is used by students, administrators and lecturers. Universities, corporations and schools all need LMS. Each of these organisations has their specific needs. In this post, we focus on university LMS.

LMS software in university elearning offers cost effective delivery of courses and enable students to access interactive teaching materials for self study. Another important part of these platforms are tools to facilitate student collaboration and social learning through forums, chat rooms, emails and wikis.

LMS Benefits

An LMS platform automates the education process and makes it more efficient, cost effective, scalable and adaptable. It provides benefits to the university administrators, lecturers and students.

LMS Benefits for Management

Simplify management
Save time and cost on administration
Enable efficient and easy communication with students

LMS Benefits for Lecturers

Provide resources for course planning and information sharing
Give access to teaching material from other sources
Offer multiple teaching styles
Make assessment easy and varied

LMS Benefits for Students

Give students personal space on the web for creating their assignments and projects
Improve learning through discussions and collaboration with other students
Display their work to peers and teachers.

What Is the Best LMS?

While an LMS should be tailored to specific university needs, there are some general attributes that are desirable for any institution.

From the operational point of view, LMS software should be easy and reliable to use, able to suport many users and interoperate with other software tools and systems, such as intranet, university student management system, HR, library of online courses, elearning authoring tools etc.

From a learning point of view, LMS need to provide opportunities for students to engage with the learning environment, enable access to real data and experiences, support group work and student interactions, provide personalized learning, enable students to display and publish their work and offer mechanisms for monitoring progress.

LMS Comparison

LMS platforms are available as open source or proprietary software. Proprietary software is licensed computer software restricted from modification. Open software is freely available for downloading and modification by users. Although open source LMS is license free, it is not necessarily a most cost effective solution for each university, as it requires programming for customization and maintenance. However, colleges and universities are increasingly making use of open source LMS.

All these systems have numerous features available, suited for both university and corporate applications. In selecting a particular system for your institution, your first step is to identify your unique training requirements and the respective features in your LMS solution. In the next step you will need to contact the vendors, trial the products and compare their features.

Blackboard is the most popular proprietary LMS and Moodle is the dominant open source LMS. Other popular choices are Bodington and Sakai among open source solutions and eCollege and Desire2Learn within proprietary ones.

For example, Moodle is used by the UK Open University, MIT, University of California, Irvine, Monash Univesity, and Australian National University. Blackboard management system is used by University of Sydney , Carnegie Mellon, and University of Melbourne.

LMS Trends

The latest versions of LMSs contain Web 2.0 tools enabling social networking and collaboration. These features include course wikis, blogs and journals, that encourage discussion and reflection. Another novel feature is Web 2.0 interface, making easy for lecturers to add content and students to access courses on the web.

A leader in online learning, University of Phoenix, is using a home grown LMS, which is now being adapted and personalized to each student. This has a potential to take learning to a new level.

Curtin University in Perth and RMIT in Melbourne became some of the first Australian universities to outsource the LMS service, with the University of Western Sydney following the suite. This migration has provided hardware and maintenance cost savings and student support 24 hours a day.

If you have experience with using LMS in education, please feel free to contribute to this post. We would like to hear your opinion on how Moodle and Blackboard compare in this application.