What is LMS? Is it only online teaching?

By Sudesh Mendis

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many restrictions were imposed on our society among which is the closure of all schools and other educational institutions. This situation has given rise to a new challenge of finding a suitable method of continuing the already disrupted teaching process while adhering to the strict medical guidelines proposed to combat the possible spread of the virus.

Out of the many challenges confronting the process of schools reopening, the biggest and the most vital is the ‘social distancing’. When considering the average Sri Lankan classroom, this is an obvious impossibility. To get over this impediment Educational experts suggest the implementation of e-learning methods.

The requirement of e-learning brings forth in to discussion the concept most popularly known as LMS, which stands for Learning Management Systems. Since LMS is a new concept for most of our school authorities, many of them don’t have a clear understanding of what LMS really is and what it is capable of. Many school authorities have either misunderstood or deliberately misled to believe LMS is only for on-line teaching. Many software solution providers are cashing in on this sudden demand for these services. They have come up with fascinating marketing gimmicks to sell their products. It is reliably learnt that certain schools have even committed to purchase these products without a proper evaluation of their suitability to meet the specific requirement.

For all those who are interested in implementing LMS in their institutions, it is absolutely necessary to first understand their requirement and also to understand what LMS actually is.

LMS (Learning Management System) is a software application that powers e-learning. They are used to administrate, document, track and report on the delivery of educational courses and training programs. They are the central hubs for learning within a School or Business environment and they are where individuals, learners, teachers, trainers and managers come together and share their knowledge for the benefit of everyone.

Anyone who’s involved with e-learning is using a learning management system whether you are a small, medium or large School or organization and are designed and developed to adapt to your School or business objectives. A Learning Management System allows you to create e-learning content, organize it into courses, deliver the content, enroll students to courses and monitor and assess their performances.

With the passage of time, educational institutions need to regularly upgrade their learning tools to provide the best experience to students. The process of learning has migrated online some time ago and educational institutions have begun to rely on cloud storage for their study material. In this context, a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) can supplement, if not replace altogether, the learning in traditional classrooms and bring multiple benefits to students.

By embracing an LMS tool, schools, colleges and universities stand to gain numerous advantages as below.

• Students, different groups study independently, without interfering one another.

An LMS allows moving a school to the digital format, herewith saving the very structure teachers are used to: a school board, departments, teachers, classes, students. Independent teachers manage multiple classes with separate curriculums, scoring, attendance tracking, assessments, reports, systems of communication and parents’ involvement. The difference lies in wider opportunities, including a chance to teach students worldwide.

• Can access it from anywhere  

One of the principal advantages of adopting an LMS tool in centers of learning is that it offers a centralized and consolidated storehouse of educational data. All study materials can be kept in one single location and students can access them anytime, anywhere from different locations . This cuts down administrative hassles associated with maintaining learning materials in multiple places.

• Time-Saving

Since all the study materials are placed in a centralized location, students are able to access them easily anytime, anywhere. Right from creating courses to assigning of tasks to grading, reporting, and feedback, everything is automated. This saves valuable time. Instant results and feedback delight both teachers and students in a big way. Further, you can train hundreds or thousands of students online at a time without the need for arranging different classrooms for training different groups of students.

• Personalized attention to each student.

Giving personalized attention to each student in a large classroom is pretty difficult. A learning management system overcomes this hurdle through its student-centric approach. By studying their individual needs, this software tool creates equal opportunities for learning for each student. You can create learning paths using different types of courses to give unique learning experience to each student in a classroom. This would be really hard to achieve when you deal with students in a traditional classroom setting.

• Increased engagement and students’ collaboration

Have you ever noticed how different the behavior of students with a low self-esteem is when they are in the classroom with peers and online? I am sure you have. A low self-esteem and shyness are obstacles towards an active participation and engagement in the classroom activities, which, in their turn, are easily overcome in the online learning environment, where a student sits in a comfortable chair in front of the monitor and doesn’t fear to express the thoughts. The number of communication tools, offered by a Learning Management System, such as a chat, a forum, social communities, blogs, wikis etc. allows a teacher to engage students and give a voice to less confident ones.

• Flexibility, a room for pedagogical experiments and innovations

In comparison with a traditional classroom-based teaching, where a teacher has to follow a prescribed program, teaching online, with the help of an LMS, lets a teacher experiment, applying different learning models and techniques such as blended learning, rapid learning, storytelling, flipped learning, gamification, social learning etc., thereby find the approach working in this or that particular case.

• Performance and gapes of students.

An LMS grants access to unlimited tracking data such as the time spent completing a specific assignment or test; documents download statistics, the latest course activities, learning paths statistics, completion reports, user grades statistics and much more. With all this data available, a teacher can not only improve students’ performance by finding the gaps in their knowledge but find shortcomings in the teaching process to maximize the teaching effectiveness.

• Parents’ involvement

An LMS has a set of predefined roles, including a role of a parent who can log in to the system to check the child’s attendance, track the grades, and communicate with a teacher or other parents. It helps to build better parent-teacher-student relationships, achieve more effective communication and parents’ involvement with the students’ learning.

• Teacher can fully control

Another great thing about an LMS is that you can customize it to meet the specific teaching needs of your institution. In addition to creating tailor-made courses for different classes, you can also provide personalized attention to each user with reminders, notifications, restricting attempts, authentication, and more. You can do a bit of personalization as well by incorporating images, logo, and messages into the courses.Teacher or admin can control the class room by blocking, mute or allowing to chat and circulating things to group.

• Interactive Learning

In an online learning environment powered by a user-friendly learning management system, students are encouraged to communicate freely. They can build connections with peers for learning purposes, share opinions, and collaborate on different assignments. They also keep themselves posted on the latest updates from instructors and fellow students. Further, integration with other tools such as live chat can enable interactions between teachers and students without meeting face to face.

Today most think that LMS is all about conducting online teaching. Actually, this is not part of LMS. It’s a different tool, the output of which could be uploaded to LMS. As we are aware, today there are many live meeting options available on internet. Most of them have the recording option. This could be easily used to record a lesson or lecture by the teacher, which could later be uploaded to the institution’s LMS to be used by the students of the target classroom. The relevant students can access it any time, at any place in the world again and again. Same could even be shared with other classroom teachers or even with other schools!

Teachers should prepare their content before the classroom starts, such as presentation, Digital board, Video or even document can be used for this. 

All institutions that have implemented LMS solution can use the online teaching options available therein with other relevant features and functionality. Therefore it is very important that institutions should not rush to change/replace whatever system being used currently, just for the sake of implementing LMS. It all depends on the specific requirement of each institution, which should be the sole criteria for such a move. It might sometimes result in a matter of great regret to find oneself in a deeper crisis by such a rash move.

It’s high time for Sri Lankan schools to transform traditional teaching to a Digital platform. This will solve many issues what schools are facing today. At the same time School’s Managements should have a proper knowledge about what LMS is, and what is best suited for them. Currently different LMS products are freely available. These systems may also sometimes be offered for millions of rupees.

I wish to advise the Ministry of Education to apprise all schools about this more widely and Media should educate everyone on this. If not this LMS will be another financial headache for parents and schools.  

(The writer can be contacted at sudesh@otlcolombo.com)