What would you do if your students had to stay at home for weeks? Are you prepared for remote learning? Would you be able to facilitate learning without your students having to go to a physical classroom? A good LMS is the place to start and they must have these features!
With the spread of #CoronaVirus, many schools & districts in the world are taking bold decisions to close schools at least for some time, some 1 week, others 2 weeks and some indefinitely!
In Northshore California for example, all schools in the district are closed for 2 weeks. All schools have been mandated to go ahead with remote learning. This means while the buildings will be closed, learning will continue ultimately. The good part is that the teachers were trained to support the remote learning in those 2 weeks.
Implication on Education
Then it got me thinking. While we pray that the virus or any other thing won’t keep us all indoors for days & weeks, how many schools are prepared to run a remote learning experience? How many teachers are equipped to teach in a remote environment? What are we doing to improve the situation and learning experience for our students?
What if #covid19 were to keep us all indoors and especially our students, how many Nigerian schools are prepared for #remotelearning?
We need to start thinking about the opportunities this kind of learning can afford us. There are many tools and educational systems that support remote learning.
LMS Vs SMS
It all begins from a good Learning Management System (LMS). Now, what is more popular is the School Management System (SMS). The SMS manages school operations – admission, results, payment, bio-data, employment, transport, food, hostel etc; it helps simplify and make school processes efficient.
Basic Features of a great LMS
On the other hand, a Learning Management System manages not school processes but actual learning. An LMS handles things like classes, activities & tasks, submissions, school learning subgroups. A good LMS should be able to put students into groups or classes and facilitate learning. They give the teacher the opportunity to upload content in all formats – text, audio, video, and even links and students can access those resources anytime, anywhere. Teachers can give quizzes, polls, assignments etc. and students can take them and submit it all right inside the LMS.
A good #LMS is critical for remote learning. An LMS, unlike an SMS manages class learning activities. #COVID19 #remotelearning Click To TweetA good LMS integrates with popular Edu products like Google-for-Edu, Microsoft-for-Edu and the likes. So you can be given an activity with Google docs for example and right from inside the LMS, you take the activity and turn it in for the teacher to see and evaluate.
Groups and Sub-groups
Another great feature of any good LMS is the ability for students to work in groups. Apart from the larger classes which can be created, you can create sub-groups for specific tasks. It encourages collaboration which is a major 21st-century skill. Students can learn to work in groups as they perform tasks.
Social Interactivity
Another feature is what I call Social interactivity. Whereas learning must be personalized, it must also encourage conversations. This is one thing a good LMS has, learning is usually in the great conversions that take place around content. What makes people always go back over & over to Facebook, is because of the social features like comments, likes & shares. Even our students love to talk around the content. They love to hold conversations and share with the world what they’re learning. So embedded in a good LMS are features such as comment, share & like. Students can provide helpful feedback to peer work and others can learn from it.
Gamification Principles
An additional feature that can make an LMS stand out from the group – Gamification principles. Without trying to be too detailed, gamification is making use of game principles for the purpose of learning. It is not necessarily about playing games but about adopting the principles of games, what make games fun & engaging, in learning. These principles include things like levels, leaderboards, points & extra points, Easter eggs, working against time etc. In actual fact, these are what makes us addictive about playing games. This is why we always want to go back to them and we can also benefit from that in learning as well.
Mobile Responsive
A great LMS is also mobile-friendly. With this, students don’t have to sit in front of their computers before they interact with the learning. They can quickly take a quiz while waiting in line or waiting for something. While in commute, students can pull out their phones and listen to a podcast (content) and post a comment almost immediately. The learning can happen whether at home, on the bus or even at the beach.
This isn’t an exhaustive list as great LMS’s have features like the capacity to take and attend live classes and hold synchronous conversations.
So while we battle and protect ourselves from the COVID-19 virus, we must begin to think differently about how we teach and maximize Technology for an improved learning experience.
Do you agree with these features of a Learning Management System? Do you use one in your school? What features do you like about it?
This is a good writeup. Great content, simple presentation and a focused compelling reason to consider the subject matter. Quite useful.
Wow!
Thanks for your comment here sir. Times like this help us evaluate our present Educational practices and then we can gradually introduce technology to improve our teaching & learning experience. Thanks once again sir.
@Danno4krist
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