Digital Tool 6: Learning Management Systems

Learning Management Systems are an interactive forum which enables users to management their assessment, derive content, have discussions with fellow students and contact their Learning Manager if any difficulties were to arise. This Learning Management Systems are generally only available to the students within the course or lesson studied therefore need a password to be accessed. It fives students in a learning environment to access information and other students from across the world, creating an opportunity to link schools from anywhere in the world. This linkage could promote cross culture sharing of information and discussion and opinion forums broadening a students' horizon.

There are two main types of Learning Management Systems; Proprietary and Open Source.

Proprietary: are generally expensive and lack flexibility, but they do come with good documentation and back up support. An example of this could be Blackboard.

Open Source: are much cheaper and more flexible with many functions available to users, but can sometimes be insufficient with documentation and buck up support. An example of this is Moodle.

Blackboard is promoted by Education Queensland enabling students to take part in content, discussions, quizzes, and assessment by a click of a button.

Ellis (2009) states that Learning Management Systems should be able to function as follows:

• Centralize and automate administration
• Use self-service and self guided services
• Assemble and deliver learning content rapidly
• Consolidate training initiatives on a scalable web-based platform
• Support portability and standard
• Personalise content and enable knowledge reuse.

Learning Management Systems can be very beneficial to learning environments as they create a functioning forum for students to communicate and access relevant information with ease. There may be issues however, if students have difficulty access computers and the internet or initial costs in starting up one of these systems.