Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A LMS addresses two specific target groups:
instructors and learners; each one needs to be
supported for different roles and actions. Learn-
ers are offered educational material and guidance
through the LMS, which provides them with tools
and services adapted to their needs. Each learner
is assigned to an instructor or a group of instruc-
tors that are responsible for: creating, delivering
and assigning educational material to the learner,
monitoring learners' activities, grading learners'
performance and providing personal guidance.
The majority of users (learners and instructors)
focus on the ease of usage and the way informa-
tion is presented to them. In short, users expect
(Keenoy et al., 2003):
•
Adaptation & Profile building
•
Learner Monitoring
•
Documentation & Help
Educational Content
The principal function of a LMS is to deliver
learning material to learners. Most LMS require
educational content to be described in a cer-
tain form, using metadata (Anido et al., 2002)
to facilitate search, definition, and finding the
content in which learners are mostly interested.
Consequently, in a context where instructional
material consists of Learning Objects, LMS could
implement new features to take advantage of the
benefits of qualitative metadata, e.g. recommend-
ing appropriate activities, or allowing learners and
instructors to perform activities such as content
analysis, information resource location, or en-
hanced searches, to name a few. While this is a
helpful service, novice instructors find it difficult
and time consuming.
Instructors are also assigned with the task of
providing help to their learners which involves:
support related to the learning content, support
related to the learning process and support related
to the learning product (Reid & Newhouse, 2004).
Learning content support refers to all instructor
activities that concern the subject matter (de Vries
et al. 2005). Process related support refers to all
tutor activities related to the learning process of
individual learners or group collaboration. Product
related support refers to all tutor activities that
pertain to the summative assessment of learner
products, such as checking the authenticity of the
product or correcting tests.
•
An easy to walk round environment with
a minimum of steps to perform a certain
action.
•
A consistent user interface providing help
and guidance at every step
•
Personalized content available for each
learner and at each stage of the learning
process.
The above features are offered by LMSs in
the form of services. Modern LMSs are built
using a service oriented architecture which is a
new paradigm that extends the object-oriented
paradigm to web-based systems. It uses services
as base elements for developing multi system
platforms. Services are autonomous platform-
independent computational elements that can be
described, published, discovered, orchestrated
and programmed for the purpose of developing
massively distributed interoperable applications
(Shen, Wang, Li & Ghenniwa, 2006).
One can derive seven categories of services
offered by LMS (Colace, De Santo & Vento, 2003):
Integrating: Wrapping Content
One must take into account that a lot of educational
material has already been developed in a form that
is not presentable by LMS (i.e. standalone applica-
tions or material created with a certain authoring
tool) and a lot of effort and expertise is required
•
Educational Content
•
Integrating-Wrapping Content
•
Evaluation & Assessment
•
Communication and Collaboration
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