Learning Management Systems

[clep3705]

Online courses are delivered using what is called a Learning Management System (LMS) or Course Management System (CMS). Common LMSs are:

Angel
Blackboard
Epic
Moodle
Sakai
WebCT

What some of these systems can do is provide a calendar to the student. In my experience, the calendar is per course. In Moodle, it is possible for the student to see a single calendar with due dates for all courses. However, this requires the instructor to actually make use of the calendar features. At brick and mortar schools, most instructors are too lazy to enter dates into the LMS calendar. Each student is expected to read the syllabus and create his/her own calendar. Instead of one person (instructor or instructor's graduate student) being organized, 100 people (the students) are expected to duplicate each other's efforts.

Some academicians don't feel it is their job to populate the electronic calendar. This is in contrast to the corporate world where the manager (i.e., instructor) is solely responsible for using electronic calendaring to get the meeting (i.e., test, essay due date, etc.) out in a shareable format.

Even though I've seen LMSs provide a single, consolidated calendar view, I haven't seen an LMS calendar exportable so that it can be imported into Outlook, Google, or an iPhone.

What schools do an outstanding job of using electronic calendaring? Do any of the for profit schools have a high-tech, fully electronic calendar? Do you know of any brick and mortar schools that use electronic calendaring to its fullest? Is there any LMS with a first class calendar that can be exported to other devices?

[marianne202]

I have worked with Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT and Angel. Actually, WebCT was bought out by Blackboard several years ago and I believe Angel was also purchased by Blackboard in the last year or two. That being said their platform will now mirror Blackboard. Moodle was started by some ex-Blackboard IT guys, so that is why Moodle has a Blackboard feel and look. All of the LMS's that I have worked with have a calendar feature, however, you are correct it is up to the individual instructor to input the dates into the calendar. While most instructors, myself included we already put the dates in a syllabus, on the modules and again in the gradebook with due dates. Each of these require the instructor to manually enter this info, as such I don't bother with the calendar feature. Honestly, of all my classes I have taken online, none of the three schools have offered an integrated calendar, although I believe you can sync the gradebook due date to the calendar in Blackboard and Moodle so it will display the info. I will say that I have taught online classes for 10 years and never once has a student commented that they would like to have the calendar feature used, but then again, I run my classes on a strict schedule with homework always due at the same day of the week and time as well as exams are always only open the same days each week, so I try to make it easy. I teach at a community college, so I have students with no computer at home and very little computer literacy taking my classes along with very savvy online learners so my classes have to cater to all levels. I know I get paid less to teach online classes than F2F and I usually average 32 students per online class vs 18 in a F2F class, so more students equals more work, so I have to focus my time in different areas. If any program is user friendly my guess Moodle since it adapts more frequently. I haven't worked with Epic or Sakai much except in a cursory review, so I don't know enough about non-essential features. If more instructors added due dates into the gradebook area, which has just recently reconfigured in the our latest Blackboard update a few weeks ago, it would link for more students in their calendar...if they actually use it!