The LMS - CMS shake-up
Are you all shook up by the edX announcement recently? If you didn’t know, over 150 universities helped to fund and build this not-for-profit learning platform for the public good and as an alternative to for-profit ventures such as Coursera. It offers free courses from many well-known institutions and has several payment options to encourage democratic access to education. But now it has been sold to 2U…
This series of blog posts looks at the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and compares these to Content Management Systems (CMS). This post looks at the current state of these systems and investigates weaknesses and problems.
It is clear from the breadth of research encountered that every industry in some way can connect with their clients or end users through a content platform. LMS’s focus on the educational industry, which results in competent and adequate methods of scaffolding and presenting information, while CMS’s offer a much wider range of options for the course creator. Let’s look at them separately.
LMS: Blackboard, Moodle, edX, Degreed, 2U
LMS have certain capabilities and limited configuration options as they are specifically designed for learning, while CMS have a huge amount of modules and so instructors can choose what works for them. Many researchers found benefits of classroom blogs, especially when looking at the discussions and forums available. However, blog design and development have stagnated and are now posing limitations and weaknesses in terms of a student-centred learning environment.
Differentiated contexts can give us a clearer idea of possibilities and limitations of giving learning content to the end-user. This is a structure that is designed and built by the LMS provider, so you really need to choose a provider that has this built in.
For the learner:
Unsurprisingly, students preferred forums to other tools and assessment-related activities got higher participation rates than other tasks. However several distinctions can be seen; low participation in on-task discussions, large gaps between viewings and contributions, and large differences in individual engagement mean that the human connection aspects need to be carefully thought out and worked towards.
This was also seen as a cause of varying levels of e-literacy among learners, leading to a low priority given to the online activities by some students. It does not help that LMS have certain capabilities and limited configuration options.
For the company using the LMS:
Knowledge sharing platforms were free at the beginning, but changes over time have resulted in low quality of content offerings and poor screening of information. If you’re looking at using an LMS, you should strengthen your content quality control from the very beginning. Consider scaffolding for different e-literacy levels. Another item to keep you linked to your KPI’s are testing and tracking tools that adequately answer your reporting needs.
CMS: Wordpress
A CMS has a wider range of diverse modules but with this extra choice, the course designer needs to ensure the right choices are made to fulfill learning objectives and ensure communication and interaction.
It is not only the learners who have issues with the technical complexities of CMSs. The configuration options and coding requirements can be detrimental to the course creator, depending on their comfort level of using plugins or modules, on the CMS Wordpress. Many ‘How-to’ guides have been created but these are not grounded in useful, tangible theoretical framing. There is also a big difference between goals, assumptions, and learning contexts compared to those based on learning from direct instruction or from an institution.
For the learner:
An innovative e-learning system can be developed through a user-friendly interface, using more options and modules. This gives the learner a wider variety and range of choices.
For the company using the CMS:
As it is a ‘bigger beast’ there is a need to regularly assess user satisfaction, and to attach sufficient importance to user opinions and suggestions. CMS’s do a better job of analysis and segmentation as they have to provide an ‘out of the box’ environment for many industries. So tools such as marketing/engagement segmentation, while not specifically created for learning, can still give impacts and measurement of activity tracking.
There is a need to regularly assess student satisfaction and change approaches in order to increase student motivation, something brought up by many researchers. Areas to improve include communication and interaction possibilities, as these are not well represented currently, neither is the UX experience. We need to remember that there is a big difference between the learning context online, and direct instruction, and that differentiation of context can provide us with working models for analysis.
In this post, CMS’s are shown to be incredibly versatile and can be used in all industries to develop, present and curate online content. However, they present some problems and issues, which is the discussion of the next topic…
Reference and Website list can be accessed here.
