CHAPTER 3

Academic LMS Features

An academic LMS is very different from a corporate LMS. An academic LMS is a system for developing, managing, and delivering learning content in the context of an online classroom that replaces or augments a physical classroom. While one or more super-administrators manage the LMS technology and grant instructor permissions to faculty, the primary administrators of an academic LMS are instructors, professors, and teachers.

Academic LMS products are used in a variety of settings, including primary, secondary, and higher education; continuous adult education; government; professional associations; and business settings. In an academic setting, courses often span a semester, during which an instructor works with a class of student cohorts through various materials, activities, assignments, and tests. In other settings, courses are more likely to be shorter but still emphasize the instructor and cohort model.

Let’s say you work at a college or university. Your institution offers continuing education programs on evenings and weekends. While your programs have many students who live close by and can attend classes on campus, you want to expand beyond your campus to offer online classes that can be attended by anyone, from anywhere. You can use an academic LMS to deliver virtual classes online. As an instructor, you can interact with students as a group or one-on-one, and students can interact with one another. You can post course materials and assignments, administer quizzes and tests, and track student progress.

As with a corporate LMS, these systems offer features for user management, course management, and administration. The key differences lie in how these features are designed by the vendors and used by customers.

User Management Features

The user management features of an academic LMS include user account creation, authentication, user profiles, and roles and permissions. While all these features are also present in a corporate LMS, they are often managed differently in an academic LMS, especially in academic environments. Table 3-1 lists the key similarities and differences between the user management features of a corporate and academic LMS.

Course Management Features

Managing courses in an academic LMS is very different from doing so in a corporate LMS. An academic LMS is focused on the way courses are taught in academic environments and includes features to:

• Manage lessons and assignments.
• Post a course syllabus, learning goals, and schedule.
• Provide interactive activities such as surveys, quizzes, and polls.
• Upload and download multimedia course materials.
• Conduct web conferences.
• Send instructor-student messages and messages among students.
• Send multimedia feedback—that is, audio, video, and text—from the instructor to each student.
• Post and reply to multimedia discussion topics.
• Establish student groups and collaborative workspaces for breakout sessions and class projects.

Lessons and Assignments

As an instructor, you can create lessons for a class. Lessons can include presentations, assignments, quizzes, and other materials and activities. You can create lessons from scratch or import a copy of a lesson or assignment from another class and then modify it. You can post instructions and a due date for any number of assignments, along with materials students need to complete each assignment. You can configure the system to send email reminders to students automatically when assignment due dates are approaching or past due. You can also view and grade the work students turn in.

Students can view assignment instructions and download the materials. After completing an assignment, students can turn in their work by uploading documents to the system.

Syllabus, Learning Goals, and Schedule

You can publish a course syllabus, the learning objectives or goals for the course, and a course schedule. Students can view this information before registering and any time after registering for the course. The course schedule is particularly useful to set students’ expectations and allocate sufficient time for assignments, study, and other coursework.

Surveys, Quizzes, and Polls

You can create a quiz or survey in the system. The LMS provides a variety of question types that may include multiple choice (select one, select all that apply); Boolean (true/false, yes/no); matching; Likert scale; short answer; and essay. Some products support question pools, random question ordering, question weights, and question groups. Tests can be configured for automatic or manual scoring; the latter is usually required for tests that include essay questions.

You can post polling questions for the class at any time. After students respond to the poll, you can view the results and have the option to share them with the students.

You can share your surveys, quizzes, and polls with other instructors, who can then make a copy and reuse or modify them for use in another class. You can run reports to view survey, quiz, and poll results for a specific course or all the courses where it is used. Item analysis reports enable you to check the reliability and validity of your quizzes and surveys.

Multimedia Course Materials

Some academic LMS products provide a way for you to manage your own searchable repository of course materials. The repository may be organized into files and folders and can include instructional materials in a wide variety of formats, such as text, images, audio, and video. You can tag your materials with descriptive information and have the option to share specific materials with other instructors.

Web Conferencing

While corporate LMS products may provide out-of-the-box integration with a third-party web-conferencing platform, many academic LMS products have built-in web-conferencing capabilities. Web conferencing allows an instructor and the students to access a common URL, sign in, and participate in an online group session. As an instructor, you can share your screen with students or allow a student to share their screen with the rest of the class. Typically, mouse and keyboard control resides with the person whose screen is being shared, but you have the option to establish remote control of another person’s screen. Audio communication for the web conference can occur over the phone, the Internet, or both.

In addition to screen sharing, web conferences include features for private and public chats, polling questions, posting web links, and more. You can view icons that indicate who is speaking, who has a hand raised, or who likes, doesn’t like, or is confused about what is being presented. Some systems also provide a cue indicating whether the web-conferencing window is behind other windows on a student’s desktop, which may mean that the student is not paying attention.

Many systems allow you to record the entire web conference, including what is viewed and what is said. The instructor can make the recordings available as a video for later access by students who may have missed the session, or for later review by the class.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging features enable you, the instructor, to communicate online with students, or students to communicate with one another. You can message a single student, a group of students, or the entire class. Classmates can message one another individually or in groups. These communications can be valuable in Q&A sessions, group study, and collaborative projects.

Multimedia Feedback

You, the instructor, can provide feedback to students in a variety of ways using different media. Many academic LMS products enable instructors to use any combination of text, audio, and video to communicate their feedback. Some products provide optional video capture and editing equipment and tools, making it easy to use video in course materials, messaging, and feedback to students.

Discussion Boards

Some academic LMS products offer discussion boards where you and your students can create topics, post and reply to one another, like one another’s posts and replies, and follow a discussion or another user. You can configure a discussion board to be accessible to all participants in a single class or to a broader set of students who are actively using the LMS.

Student Groups and Collaborative Workspaces

Some LMS products enable you to create student groups for class projects and breakout sessions. You can establish collaborative workspaces, or virtual breakout rooms, where each student group “meets” to share materials, message one another, give one another feedback, post and reply to discussions, and conduct web conferences.

Administration Features

In any type of LMS, administration features are those that require special permission and, generally, are not accessible to students. In an academic LMS, you may have one or a small group of super-administrators who manage the LMS technology and assign permissions to instructors, but the primary, and most active, administrators of an academic LMS are instructors, professors, and teachers.

Academic LMS administration features include class rosters and gradebooks, reports, analytics and statistics, and tools for developing courses and lessons in the system.

Online Classroom

You can create any number of online classrooms for the classes you offer. Each online classroom contains your lessons, materials, and other resources for the class.

Roster and Gradebook

A student roster is a list of all the people in your class. When students log in to the system, they are able to access a list of online classes in which they’re enrolled. As the instructor, you can use a gradebook to track attendance, assignment completion, quiz scores, and other information for each student in the roster.

Reports, Analytics, and Statistics

Academic LMS products provide reports on areas that help you manage your classes, such as:

• the last time each of your students accessed your online classroom
• how much time each student spent in the online classroom
• each student’s status for an assignment, such as on time or late, and graded or ungraded
• each student’s progress in the course
• each student’s access to your course materials
• quiz and survey results and statistics
• a listing of all the courses and course materials you’ve created in the system.

Key Takeaways

This chapter described the features that are available in academic LMS products and how they differ from those of a corporate LMS. The key takeaways are:

• An academic LMS is used as a virtual classroom environment to replace or augment a physical classroom.
• Academic LMS products are used in a wide variety of settings, including higher education, continuous adult education, government, and professional associations. Businesses sometimes use an academic LMS in combination with a corporate LMS.
• A snapshot of academic LMS features is shown in Table 3-2.

The next chapter explores the features of the third type of LMS product: an LCMS-LMS.