Synonyms

Course management systems; E-learning; Learning content management systems; Online learning

Introduction

There can be no doubt that technology has transformed the way education is delivered to people across the globe. We now live in an interconnected world where the traditional concept of formal learning, taking place in a single physical location, is becoming increasingly less relevant. Modern learners are becoming dissatisfied with the stand-and-deliver approach to education that dictates attendance times, learning venues, and modes of participation. The emergence of sophisticated communication technologies and mobile devices has enabled a new generation of information consumers to satisfy their demands for knowledge without the need to meet in a physical location. Software vendors, open-source developers, and educational institutions, cognizant of this development, have embraced systems that can facilitate the management of courses and engagement with students remotely. The technologies that facilitate the provision of courses over long distances are broadly termed “learning management systems” or “LMSs.” Learning management systems can be defined as web-based software platforms that provide an interactive online learning environment and automate the administration, organization, delivery, and reporting of educational content and learner outcomes.

Acronym Confusion in the Online Learning Space

There are many terms associated with online learning and the technologies that have evolved to support it. One persistent area of confusion is in the definition of the acronyms: CMS and LMS. The term CMS is often associated with two distinctly different software applications: “content management systems” and “course management systems.” Content management systems are essentially software applications designed for the creation and management of digital content in a collaborative environment. Course management systems on the other hand, according to Watson and Watson (2007, 29), are:

used primarily for online or blended learning, supporting the placement of course materials online, associating students with courses, tracking student performance, storing student submissions and mediating communication between the students as well as their instructor.

To further complicate matters, some vendors and academics prefer to use the acronym LCMS which stands for “learning content management system” when referring to content management systems. The difference between a LCMS and a LMS is that the latter is broader in scope and includes the ability to track learner progress through an online course. It is a gray area where CMSs end and LMSs begin and many vendors, users, and institutions regard the terms CMS and LMS as synonyms. In this entry, the term LMS will be the only acronym used to refer to online learning platforms.

The Inclusion of LMSs in Distance Education

The history of educational technology is a reminder that it’s not the machine that matters — it’s finding the tool that best serves your educational objective.

Thornburg (2014, 27)

The history of learning management systems has its roots in distance education. Countries such as Australia, with a geographically dispersed population, adopted measures early in their history to enable access to education for students who could not attend formal places of learning. One of the most prominent manifestations of distance education in Australia was the School of the Air (a correspondence school) which opened to the airwaves in 1951 and is still in operation today in some remote communities. The vocational education and training (VET) and university sectors in Australia also have a rich history of distance education where, prior to the advent of the Internet, communication and the dissemination of learning materials was largely conducted via regular mail services. The availability of dial-up Internet services to most Australians by mid-1995 meant that distance education needed a radical overhaul and snail mail was no longer a viable option to sustain distance education services.

Perhaps it was Sidney Pressey’s creation in the early 1920s of a “learning machine,” a device that could administer questions through a window prompting the user to select a response out of four choices, that spurred the development of the first online LMSs. Or maybe it was the work of a Canadian company, SoftArc in 1990 who built the first stand-alone learning system deployed on Macintosh personal computers, that encouraged software developers to dream of an online learning space. Whatever the inspiration, the arrival of the Internet was set to revolutionize the way people communicated and engaged with each other and education providers realized that they would have to adapt to this brave new online world. The earliest manifestations of electronic LMSs were little more than a platform for the dissemination of learning materials online. These systems could broadly be categorized as belonging to one of two camps: proprietary and open source. One of the earliest proprietary systems was WebCT, developed at the University of British Columbia in 1995. The creation of WebCT as an online learning platform was inspired by research suggesting that academic performance could be enhanced by the provision of web-based resources. At the height of its use, WebCT was the most widely used LMS globally with over 10 million users in 80 countries. WebCT was later acquired by Blackboard Corporation who phased out the WebCT name in favor of the Blackboard brand.

Open-source systems by contrast, were developed collaboratively by software specialists with a view to making the source code readily available to organizations and individuals free of charge. They were initially popular with universities and colleges who could readily download the source code, adapt it to their own circumstances, and build their own tailored LMS solutions. A prominent example of an open-source system in operation globally today is Moodle. Moodle was developed by Martin Dougiamas with the first version released in August 2002. The acronym Moodle stands for “Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.” The system was developed based on a constructivist philosophy emphasizing the role of learners as creators of content and not merely spectators. Moodle is arguably the most popular open-source LMS in use today with almost 100,000 registered sites in 229 countries.

What Are the Features of LMSs That Make Them Great?

A robust, high-quality LMS is a vital tool to the success of any online course and can make or break an institution’s reputation in the highly competitive education market. LMSs not only need to provide content to learners, but they must also facilitate timely and accurate communication between learners, course facilitators, and other institutional stakeholders. Yildirim et al. (2004, 125) emphasize that in addition:

an LMS should be dynamic; that is, it should be active, flexible, customizable and adaptable.

Whether a LMS is proprietary or open source, it will need to be capable of executing a variety of functions that work together to provide a seamless experience for the user. These functions include the capability to disseminate knowledge, assessment of learner competency, the recording of learner attainment, support for online social communities, communication tools, and system security. Figure 1 illustrates the categories of features that are expected to be present in most high-quality LMSs.

Learning Management Systems, An Overview, Fig. 1
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LMS feature categories

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Course Management

Course management features encompass a LMS’s capacity to deliver timely relevant course material to enrolled learners. It would include such features as content management and control, class scheduling, and content-audit capabilities. The capacity for users to contribute to content creation in their own personal space could also come under this domain.

Assessment

Assessment is a critical function of LMSs. A LMS must be able to support the collection and storage of assessable tasks, along with the assignment of grades and feedback for each learner. Assessable tasks can include assignments, tests, projects, and portfolio evidence provided by the learner. For institutions in the VET space, the capability to automatically generate compliance reports is particularly valuable as it facilitates compliance with quality standards. LMSs should also be capable for providing learners with real-time information on their progress in a course along with relevant feedback generated by the instructor.

Tracking Progress

Attrition of learners is an issue that concerns many institutions. In an online environment, the experience has been that learners are at a greater risk of withdrawing from programs because of the lack of face-to-face contact. The ability to track user engagement in a course is therefore considered an important feature. User tracking analytics can include log-on frequency, time spent in different sections of a course, communication interactions, and the number of resources downloaded. With appropriate reporting functions, course facilitators are able to detect possible student performance deficits and intervene before course withdrawal or termination becomes likely.

Gradebook

Gradebook functions include all LMS capabilities that facilitate the dissemination of assessment information to learners. Such functions include individual scores of assessments, instructor feedback, and student attendance. The ability to generate aggregate reporting information such as class grades, item score analysis, and at-risk student information is included in this category.

Communication Tools

Communication tools within LMSs can be broadly classified as synchronous or asynchronous. Asynchronous tools support one-way communications such as e-mail, discussion boards, or Wikis. They are often preferred by course facilitators because they can be initiated in an ad hoc manner. Synchronous tools, on the other hand, are two-way communication tools supporting real-time information interchange. Examples include instructor-led videoconferences and interactive message boards. This latter class of communication tools is often seen as important to replicating traditional classroom-based communications, thereby fostering a sense of community among online learners.

Social Connectivity

One of the great criticisms of LMSs is the lack of inherent community in online learning. Features that try to replicate a social environment online include discussion forums, live chats, and videoconference tools as discussed in the previous section. Some LMSs even have features that monitor learner interactions with communication tools and are considered invaluable for courses that mandate class participation as an assessable component of a course.

Security and Privacy

Security and privacy are of paramount importance to the success of an online course. Important security features in LMSs include user authentication, access verification, password integrity controls, and intruder detection. Privacy controls are also important to ensure that sensitive information is made available to the intended recipient only.

Ubiquitous Access

People are increasingly dependent on their mobile phones to connect to the Internet. It therefore stands to reason that online course participants need to interact with LMS course environments using their mobiles devices. Most LMS providers design course content as responsive HTML pages and are therefore accessible by most smartphones and other mobile computing devices, thus providing ubiquity.

Proprietary or Open-Source Systems: Which Way to Go?

One of the major considerations that an organization has in choosing a LMS is whether to opt for a proprietary or an open-source system. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches, and the choice will largely depend on the resources and expertise the organization maintains in-house and the degree of control they wish to exercise over the administration and future development of the system. Proprietary systems come with the advantage of being developed by a company that specializes in the design and deployment of online learning solutions. The acquisition of a proprietary system usually includes installation and end-user training and does not require any configuration on the part of the client. However, the client institution has limited control over the features provided in the proprietary system and certainly would be unlikely to have access to system source code.

The alternative approach is for an organization to develop its own LMS based on readily available open-source code. Moodle, for example, has a popular following and maintains a system of version control and technical specifications for each version.

Krouska et al. (2017, 2) described Moodle as follows:

Moodle is a LMS designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single, robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments. It has a wide range of standard and innovative features for supporting teaching and learning process. Moreover, it allows for extending system functionality using community sourced plugins.

The source code for Moodle is freely downloadable, and each specific iteration has its own set of installation instructions. Once the source code for a LMS has been downloaded, organizations are free to adapt the code to suit their particular circumstances. Universities and colleges are among the most prolific users of open-source LMSs. This can be attributed to the availability of in-house IT expertise in most universities and colleges and the professional curiosity among IT system decision-makers to develop an understanding of LMS technology through its implementation.

In-House Housing of Data or Cloud Based

Cloud-based LMS solutions are rapidly developing as a viable alternative to on-site installation for client organizations. The choice of adopting a cloud-based LMS largely depends on the degree of confidence an organization has with sensitive data being housed in an environment outside the organization’s direct control and whether or not the organization has the infrastructure and expertise to maintain the physical infrastructure necessary to run an on-site LMS. Cloud-based LMSs are usually proprietary systems where the vendor packages the system functionality with the online hosting of the client’s data and then charges a fee for the service based on the number of users accessing the LMS site.

The Future of LMSs

As technology evolves and teaching methods become more student-focussed, the LMS of the future will become more than a helpful administrative tool. As improvements in bandwidth, storage, and mobile device computing capacity expand, the capabilities of LMSs will adapt to fill emerging client demands. LMSs should also be supported by an institutional structure that promotes an equitable learning environment (Chugh et al. 2017). The general trend of LMS systems is to expand learner interactions with course content by including the capability for users to use mobile devices such as smartphones and wearables such as smart watches and smart glasses. Future developments in LMS technology are also likely to include more sophisticated tools to enable genuine synchronous communication, such as videoconferencing apps and peer-to-peer messaging. Below is a list of enhancements to watch out for in future versions of LMSs.

Cloud-Like Functionality

There is already a trend toward cloud-hosted proprietary LMSs as vendors target their offerings to client organizations that do not have the infrastructure or personnel to manage in-house hosting. However, open-source systems such as Moodle are also evolving to accommodate the possibility of their systems existing solely in web hosting environments. For example, a service such as Softaculous can be used to install and configure open-source apps such as Moodle, directly into the client web hosting account.

Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning technologies permit course designers to tailor learning tasks and materials to individual learner requirements. Examples of the use of these technologies could include the release of learning content based on prior learner assessment, tailored knowledge tests that focus on learning gaps of each individual student, and the incorporation of learner-created content into each learner’s portfolio.

Microlearning with LMSs Connected Devices

Microlearning is an approach to education that delivers content to learners in small, very specific pieces. The learners are given control of when and what they will learn. By creating bite-sized training modules within LMS systems accessible to learners on demand, it will be possible for clients to create their own curriculum tailored to their specific requirements. According to Tauber and Wang-Audia (2014, 10):

1% of a typical workweek is all employees typically to focus on training and development.

The microlearning approach to training delivery is therefore likely to prove popular for workers operating under tight time constraints.

Analytical Tools

Reporting functions which have a descriptive purpose such as enrolment reports, assignment submissions, and user access frequency are already standard features of many LMSs. The challenge for future systems is to tap into the rich and diverse data collected by LMSs and use this information to predict problems and opportunities that may arise. For example, most institutions are concerned about attrition and would appreciate being alerted to circumstances that may lead to a student’s failure or voluntary withdrawal.

Social Capabilities

The attraction to formal learning for most students in classroom-based environments is not only the knowledge and skills to be acquired but also the social dimension of study that participation in higher learning provides. LMSs have often been criticized for not adequately accommodating this innate learner need. The inclusion of more synchronous communication tools such as live videoconferencing and real-time social media apps is likely to strengthen the appeal of online learning as a social activity. LMS vendors are already tapping into existing social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp along with videoconferencing tools such as Skype to provide a social framework for online learners.

Gamification

Learning games, if structured correctly, can provide a fun and stimulating way to engage learners by rewarding their progress. Future gaming features of LMSs could assign certificates or badges to learners based on their mastery of course content and could even be used to assign a rank or status to individual learners that could be shared within the user community.

Conclusion

Learning management systems (LMSs) have evolved in response to the demand for innovative educational products that leverage advances in information technology and telecommunications. LMSs can be either proprietary, where the client pays for the installation, maintenance, and end-user licensing, or open source, where the source code is freely available but the installation and maintenance is handled in-house. LMSs have many features that support online learning including course management, assessment, learner progress tracking, gradebook, communications, security, and smartphone access. LMSs continue to evolve, and future versions are likely to include tools and features that facilitate more tailored content to individual learners, enhance social interactions between online learners, and provide more timely and relevant analytics to institutional decision-makers.

Cross-References