Putting the Learning (back) Into the LMS

The case against the learning management system (LMS) is loud as it's ever been. From the early days of WebCT and Blackboard, in the early 2000s, to the present, critics have lambasted the LMS (also known as the CMS, or course management system) for institutionalizing learning, for putting fences around learning, for privileging efficiency over learning, for treating the learning process as a problem to solve rather than a state of inquiry to foster. The LMS, it is said, is designed for administrators, not teachers. Whether referred to as the LMS or the CMS, the latter two words are the same: "management system."

These criticisms are warranted. For the most part, I agree with all of them. Where I differ from many is in allowing the many problems with the LMS to direct my use of it. Blindly adopting the LMS without critically analyzing its features or refusing to use the LMS out of principle are equally problematic approaches: they're reactive.

I don't like being told what to do any more than anyone else. I naturally resist anything that even faintly smells authoritative. Yet resisting a system needn't mean refusing to participate in it at all. That, in effect, is allowing the system to win. A more responsible resistance requires more effort. A more responsible approach focuses on the first letter of the acronym: learning.

If you teach college students, I have some questions for you.

• Do you use online resources--readings, videos, websites, etc.-- in your course? 
• Do you expect your students to do any research for your course, be it through the free web or your library's databases?
• Do you include any kind of collaborative learning in your course, from ad hoc group work in class to longer group projects or assignments?
• Do you include any kind of discussions about your course topics and themes?
• Do you assign any readings? Do you want students to read those readings?
• Do you imagine that students can connect what happens in your course to the outside world?
• Do you respond to students' written work? Do you want them to make use of your feedback?
• Do you communicate with students between classes?
• Do you want your students to take ownership of their own learning? 
• Do you use any catch terms like "student-based learning," "learner-based learning," "active learning," "constructivist learning," or "community of inquiry" to describe your course? 

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, chances are that you and your students use the Internet in some way in your course.

If you use the Internet in some way in your course, and if you use it regularly, why not have a home for all of your online materials and activities? One home. One website. One place.

It's 2015. Our students live online. Our students deserve a website for our courses. This can be a non-LMS site; if you've been using your own website on WordPress, or Wix, or Weebly, or Google Sites, or something else, great. If you haven't, I recommend that you analyze, learn, and use your institution's LMS.

Here's why.

Making Your LMS Work for Students Will Improve Your Students' Learning

• Students Deserve to Understand How Your Course Works. We know how our course works; we designed it (at least, most of us have. More on this below, under Teaching). Yet our students don't. Ideally, you explain this in your syllabus, and ideally, you discuss this (and your syllabus) within the first week of classes. Yet once students are deep into the semester, they may not remember what you discussed in Week 1. They may not understand how the theory relates to the current assignment, or why you're skipping around the textbooks, or why they're seemingly working on multiple things at once. You can help them through your LMS, which is your 24/7 "office hour" that clarifies course concepts and instructions, with many features:
• Overview Pages: Much like the syllabus explains the course as a whole, overview pages explain the current unit or week (or however you organize your course). You can write a brief overview of what this unit is about, explain what students should know by the end of it, and include internal (in the LMS) links to related areas like the Modules or Content Area that for readings and resources, the discussion or blog areas, and other activities, practice and graded quizzes, assignments, and so forth.
• Key Links on the Home Page: Consider building a graphic syllabus so that students can see how the course is designed at a glance, or a page that's simply titled "How This Course is Organized" that supplements the syllabus and semester schedule.
• When Students Understand Your Course, They Can Take Ownership of it. Lauded practices that we want to foster like "student-directed learning" and "self-paced learning" aren't going to happen if your students don't feel as though they have agency in your course. Help them take control of their own learning by showing them how to take control of your course.
• Additional Resources: Do you provide any external links and resources to your students? These can include supplemental resources to reinforce what you go over in class for students who need a little bit more or additional resources that may be of interest to some students who are simply interested in going beyond what you do in class. How do you share these with students? How do you communicate that these are recommended, not required resources?
• Campus Resources: You probably include campus resources like the library home page, the student support office, the Writing Center, and so forth in your syllabus, but when students need these quickly, chance are that they're on their phone or their laptop and the syllabus is somewhere else. They have access to your website, not the syllabus. Where can you put these where students will find them quickly?
• Student Progress: If you use your LMS to track and grade any of your student assignments, students will automatically see that grade--regardless of whether you open the course's "grades" tool. The running grade automatically appears for students when they click on their grades area in their individual LMS account. Take advantage of this early and often by using your LMS to grade more than just the major assignments, which often give your students a distorted sense of how they are doing in your course. For example, if you only use the LMS to grade major assignments, and a student earned a C- on the first one, then that student will think that she has a C- in your course overall. She probably doesn't; you probably have other things like participation and discussions that also contribute to the overall course grade. Make grading areas for the additional assessments so that students have a realistic sense of their standing in your course. If you don't do this, you are inadvertently confusing students. Students deserve grade transparency. Students benefit from knowing how they're doing in your course. Knowing what their "real" grade is will keep them far more motivated than knowing that their "real" grade is different than what the LMS says yet not knowing what it is. 

Making Your LMS Work for You Will Improve Your Teaching

• Course Design: Where do your students start? Where do they end up? What are the main concepts, and how are they sequenced? Is that the best sequence? If you have broad, recursive concepts that you want students to work on over the course of the semester (e.g., "research skills,") do you return to those concepts at several different points in the semester, or do you handle all of that, say, in Week 4? Is that the best strategy? Why?
• Course Content and Materials: Making good use of your LMS's often ill-named sections like "content area" or "modules" requires that you take a bird's eye view of your course to understand how it's organized. Do you organize your course chronologically? Thematically? By the assignment sequence? By textbook chapter? When you see how you currently group your materials, ask yourself: does this make sense? Does it make sense to your students?
• Model Audience-based Writing: Those of us who teach (or assign) writing of any kind in our courses inherently deal with audience-based writing. Practice what you teach by designing your course site for those who are interacting with it: your students.
• Owning Your Course: When you've asked the questions above, you'll likely start reorganizing your course in the way that makes sense to you, the instructor. In so doing, you will improve your sense of agency over your course, especially if you are teaching an existing course that has been handed to you.
• Instructor Ethos: When students can log onto your course site and find what they are looking for easily, when all of the links work, when they can submit their activities without any hiccups, when your instructions are clear and your course is well-organized, you have demonstrated that you, the instructor, are trustworthy, knowledgable, and student-centered. This isn't to say that one broken link will ruin you; it will happen, and you and your students will survive. But the course site should work the way that it's supposed to most of the time. And when it does, you will earn your students' trust. This is particularly useful for novice instructors. You may not "own" your course (particularly if you've inherited it from your program) as much as you'd like to, but you can own your functional, user-friendly, aesthetically-pleasing course site, and that will go a long way to boosting your confidence in the classroom.