22 Learning Management System

Mr. Hardik Joshi

epgp books

 

Overview

 

With the development of ICT, the education sector has seen many revolutions. Before the usage of internet and communication technologies started, education was offered either through classroom teaching or by distance education. In distance education, the content was being sent to the students through postal communications. A lot of delay used to occur due to postal communications. Moreover, it was difficult to trace whether a student is sincerely active in studies or not. Students used to submit assignments by post which got evaluated. The semester cycle of distance education took too long to complete. Later, as the computer hardware became cheaper, computer-based training (CBT) and computer assisted learning evolved. Most of the educational content was recorded in CDs and were sent to students. Although CBTs brought down the cost of printing and postal delays to some extent, it was not being accepted since very few citizens were using computers in those days. Somewhere after 1995, the Internet was becoming popular in India and many more citizens started purchasing computing hardware. With the accessibility of Internet, online learning solutions started developing where the e-content was hosted on web servers and the students/learners used to read online. This system reduced the postal delays, apart from this, the content was always available on website. So, if we lose the CD or if it gets damaged, the content was always present on the website. Although, online learning happened, the participation of learner was too less and there was hardly any activity between the teacher and the learner.

 

With the development of web-2.0, web portals were being created. Learners and instructors could interact through world wide web. Many web applications started supporting two-way dialogues (between teacher and learner). A true learning management system started evolving where the learning content was hosted on the server, but the learner could also upload his content (assignments) on server.

 

Learning Management System(LMS)

 

A learning management system is a software application that supports delivery of electronic educational technology (e-learning) courses. It also manages the tracking and reporting of content delivery, administration of facilitators and students, documentation, and reporting. LMS can be used by corporates or by schools and colleges/universities. The application of LMS can range from simple one day course to entire semester program. It can help for managing users, managing course content, managing quizzes & assignments, scheduling of course delivery, etc. Modern LMS has built-in support for new innovations taking place in educational area like support for MOOCs, support for blended learning, support for online collaboration, etc. Most of the educational organizations are deploying their own LMS to augment their on-campus courses.

 

Before the concept of LMS evolved, historically integrated learning systems(ILS) used to exist. It was a step further to the CBTs where additional functionally were added to support management and tracking of students and teachers. Personalized instructions were imparted through the system. Before LMS, there used to be learning content management system(LCMS). It was a multi-user environment where the authors, subject matter experts, instructional designers used to create, manage, store, reuse and deliver digital educational content. The content was being hosted at central object repository. Users of LCMS used to create and re-use content to avoid duplication of development efforts.

 

Learning management system facilitates anywhere, anytime, any pace learning. In classrooms, the student must learn at the speed of teacher, while in LMS, the student has his own pace of learning, known as self-paced learning. There are many LMS available, few of them are proprietary while few are open source software. Few widely used LMS are:

  • aTutor
  • Canvas
  • Chamilo
  • Claroline
  • eFront
  • ILIAS
  • LAMS
  • Moodle
  • OLAT
  • OpenOLAT
  • Sakai
  • SWAD
  • Totara LMS
  • WeBWorK

Desirable features of LMS are:

  • Does efficient course content delivery
  • It has modules for student registration and administration
  • Facilitates training and event management (i.e., scheduling, tracking)
  • There are facilities for curriculum design and certification management
  • Faculties for skills and competencies management
  • Moodle has modules to perform Skill Gap Analysis, Individual Development Plan (IDP)
  • Supports assessing, resulting, and reporting
  • Can manage resources, has facilities for training record management
  • Supports Courseware Authoring
  • We can create Virtual Organizations in Moodle
  • Support for Template-driven, Collaborative Content Development
  • Integration with Social Networking is possible
  • In built facilities for publishing, supports indexing of content

Although there are many open source software for learning management or course management, Moodle is widely accepted by many organizations. In this module, we will focus on Moodle to understand the role of LMS.

 

Overview of Moodle

 

Moodle is an alternative to various proprietary and commercial online learning solutions. Moodle is distributed free of cost as an open source software. Moodle’s modular design makes it hassle free to create new courses and addition of content that will engage learners. The acronym for Moodle is “modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment”. Few features of Moodle are:

  • Moodle is a free and open-source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.
  • It is written in PHP, so it can be deployed on LAMP
  • Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other e-learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces and other sectors
  • Moodle is highly extensive, we can add many plugins and extend the features of Moodle.

Users supported by Moodle are:

  • Teachers / Instructors
  • Students / Learners
  • Teaching Assistants
  • Scorer
  • Administrator
  • Parent

Moodle installation and configuration

 

A single Moodle installation is sufficient for an organization. Suppose there is a college with 5 departments and around 20 courses. There are 8 teachers teaching a student strength of 500, then there is no need to install different Moodle setup for each department, rather a single installation will help in creating 20 courses and registering as many students we want. Installation of Moodle is generally managed by site administrator. Steps for installing Moodle are:

  • Install LAMP before installing Moodle
  • Download the source from website: www.Moodle.org
  • Extract in a folder and make necessary changes to the files by modifying permissions with chmod
  • Configure the database to create users for Moodle
  • Create a directory to store uploaded files and temporary files
  • Modify the permissions of the directory created earlier to write permissions for all
  • Install Moodle (through CLI or Web based), the installation will create root user
  • Make final configuration to Moodle

A detailed description of installation steps for Moodle is given on the website: www.Moodle.org. It is advisable to read each step and perform the installation if the knowledge of open source is limited.

 

Facilities in Moodle

 

Since Moodle supports different types of users, each user has his own set of tasks that can be accomplished. For example, a student user can view course content, time table, upload assignments, take quizzes, etc while the teacher can upload content, register students, upload assignments & timetable, create quizzes, etc. Each Moodle user is provided with a set of functionalities. Let us bifurcate the facilities under three categories and discuss the provisions in each of them.

 

Learner Experience

 

A learner usually receives enrollment key from the teacher. Unless he does not have an enrollment key, he won’t be able to login to the system. Moodle allows two types of configuration, either the course can be public or it can be private, restricted to a class. In case or private course, the learner receives a key from the instructor. When a learner logs in and sees a dashboard as shown in figure 1. The learner can view all courses he has enrolled in Moodle. Apart from the course content, learner also receives email notifications about various updates of the courses like release of assignments, submission deadlines, etc.

Figure 1: Student login screen of Moodle

 

Learner Management Features

 

Each learner creates a personal profile. All other users of the system can view these profiles. Learners can be assigned to individual groups. By grouping the learners, it is easy to manage the learners and schedule group activities like quizzes, assignments on them.

 

Figure 2: Learns of a particular course as viewed by Teacher Login

 

Calendars are helpful to create events. Global events through out the organization can be created by administrator, various events related to courses, groups can be set by an instructor. The learner can set his own events like due dates, personal deadlines etc.

 

The administrator or managers control panel has all important functionalities like adding teachers and students, configuration of back and restore of the data The Administration control panel puts all important learner management functions a single click away. Users can be created in bulk – by uploading an excel file with various usernames is also possible. Assigning roles to the users can be done by Manager.

 

Instructors are the actual users who will conduct the courses, instructors can submit content, assignments they can grade the students. Grading can be done in various ways, standard scales are available for grading (1-100%) for each submission. There are options to either grade submissions or do not grade the submissions. Users can see the grades provided by the instructors in a cumulative fashion. If configured, the parents can also see grades of their children.

 

Moodle helps in monitoring the learner activities. Logs are created to provide the detailed learner activity. Logs files help to get a detailed learner activity report. Moodle provides help to each type of user. An extensive help file is available for each type of user.

Figure 3: Site Administration provided to Mangers / administrators

 

Course Management Features

 

Moodle provides separate modules to manage the course efficiently. There are modules to manage e-content (resources) that allows to upload files in different formats, it also includes a rich text editor so that the teacher can type notes using that editor.. A teacher can upload course content and make it public as and when desired. The module corresponding to assignment is used to assign online and offline tasks. Instructors can upload files in various formats like pdf, word document etc. Chat feature allows one to one synchronous and real time communication while the dialogue feature allows asynchronous communications among the users of the system. The choice module helps in creating quizzes with various choices available in designing question paper. It can also be used to create quick surveys. Figure 4 illustrates the quiz created in Moodle.

 Figure 4: Demonstration of Quizzes in Moodle

 

Forums help to create threaded discussions to help asynchronous messages between the learners. There are modules to create glossary of topics, lessons allow the instructor to create linked pages where each page has a question at bottom, there are navigation links through which the students can move forward and backwards. Workshops are activities for peer assessment among the learners. The quiz module is very helpful to conduct online exams.

Moodle provides different types of questions that can go in a single quiz. Survey module helps the instructor to create surveys and collect data from students. Labels are used to add description to images.

 

Usage of Moodle

 

Moodle is a course management system that can be used by Schools, Colleges, Universities, Govt. agencies, business (to impart training to employees), trade associations, hospitals, libraries, employment agencies and many more such organizations. As we have seen earlier, Moodle can be used to perform variety of tasks, for instance:

  • Upload resources (e-content)
  • Create Quizzes
  • Create Surveys
  • Create schedules using Calendars
  • Communications (Real time synchronous or asynchronous)
  • Discussion forums

Deployment of Moodle solution

 

Although installation and configuration of Moodle is tricky, it is a one-time process. Once the Moodle is installed and configured properly, it can work for years together. There are several options to use Moodle for an organization. The following are the options that can be selected by the administrator:

  • Single Installation for entire organization – Moodle can be installed on departmental serve
  • Online web based Moodle solution (paid) – Proprietary services for web-based hosting
  • Online web based Moodle solution (free) – Limited usage free services (eg. www.Moodlecloud.com)

Let us summarize the key concepts covered in this module

  • We understood what LMS signifies
  • Overview of Moodle
  • Features available in Moodle
you can view video on Learning Management System

References

  • Ian. Wild. 2008. Moodle course conversion : beginner’s guide, Packt Pub.
  • William (Software trainer) Rice, Mark. Bailye, Gurudutt. Talgery, and Derrin. Kent. 2007. Moodle teaching techniques : creative ways to use Moodle for constructing online learning solutions, Packt Pub.
  • William (Software trainer) Rice. Moodle E-Learning course development : a complete guide to create and develop engaging e-learning courses with Moodle,
  • Nicholas. Freear. 2011. Moodle 2 for teaching 4-9 year olds : beginner’s guide : using Moodle to create quizzes, puzzles, and games to enhance the learning ability of your students, Packt Pub.
  • Mary. Cooch. 2012. Moodle 2 for teaching 7-14 year olds beginner’s guide, Packt Pub.
  • Moodle security : learn how to install and configure Moodle in the most secure way possible, Packt Pub.
  • William (Software trainer) Rice. Moodle E-Learning course development : a complete guide to create and develop engaging e-learning courses with Moodle,
  • Moodle security : learn how to install and configure Moodle in the most secure way possible, Packt Pub.
  • Ian. Wild. 2011. Moodle 2.0 course conversion : beginner’s guide : a complete guide to successful learning using Moodle 2.0, Packt Publishing.
  • William (Software trainer) Rice. Moodle E-Learning course development : a complete guide to create and develop engaging e-learning courses with Moodle,
  • Jason. Hollowell. 2011. Moodle as a curriculum and information management system : beginner’s guide, Packt Pub.
  • Silvina P. Hillar. Moodle theme development : build customized themes to make your Moodle courses engaging and interactive,
  • Natalie. Denmeade. 2015. Gamification with Moodle : use game elements in Moodle courses to build learner resilience and motivation, Packt Publishing.
  • Radana Dvorak. 2011. Moodle for dummies, Wiley Publishing, Inc.
  • Moodle 3 administration : an administrator’s guide to configuring, securing, customizing, and extending Moodle
  • Moodle Website: www.moodle.org
  • Moodle Cloud : www.moodlecloud.com