Information Technology Reference
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ers, assignments and other entities in the system.
Coordination in a LMS is necessary since instruc-
tors have to be assigned with a certain number
of groups-classes, learners must be enrolled in
the right group or class and assignments must be
given to the right groups.
Like classrooms, many LMSs provide limited
opportunity for flexibility here. Just as a 1 hour
lesson in a lecture theatre encourages coordination
by sitting still and being quiet so that the class can
all learn together, many LMSs encourage a method
that can be caricatured as “read this material, check
the forum and do the test”. It takes some effort on
the part of the instructor to overcome these, but
they do - and are supported to some extent by the
design of the system. If you can move the chairs,
you have more choice in a classroom; if you can
adapt the workflow of a LMS, you can provide
more flexibility in your learning opportunities
(Britain & Liber, 1999).
Almost all of the LMSs available in the edu-
cation community give the ability to their users
to be divided into classes and groups. Some of
them allow the customization of what a group of
learners has access to do and view. Moodle is one
of them. Moodle offers its users the potential to
assign more than one instructor to a course for
better coordination
Blackboard is a LMS which incorporates a
wide range of teaching and learning tools into a
web-based interface (Taha, 2007). The Blackboard
LMS offers a suite of coordination features to fa-
cilitate some key administrative processes as group
discussion, chat room for promoting exchange of
ideas between classmates, virtual classroom, and
course calendar.
Milani, 2004). Monitoring is usually a core ser-
vice of most LMSs and is implemented both as
a user actions tracking service and as an assess-
ment and evaluation service, each of which has
its own benefits.
To be able to track down the actions of learners
is a major advantage in asynchronous e-learning
systems. Instructors can cope with their learners
by checking what resources have been viewed
during a course session. Furthermore instructors
can follow up with conversations between learners
by tracking the logs of each chat.
Moodle keeps track of user's actions by using
the logs reporting service. Administrators have
access to detailed logs which can be filtered per
user, date, action and course. An enhancement to
this service is the statistics module which enables
administrators to have a supervisory view of what
is going on the platform by visualizing recorded
data and presenting it as graphs.
Another way to monitor learners' progress is
via the assessment and evaluation service. Learners
are subjected to test and quizzes and according to
how well they perform an overall picture can be
drawn about their learning progress. Assessment
methods should be used to measure what learners
can do with what they know, rather than what they
know (Struyven, Dochy, Janssens, Schelfhou &
Gielen, 2006, pp. 203
)
. The standard method of
assessment and evaluation in almost all LMSs
are quizzes or multiple choice questions. Another
method available is assignments. Instructors as-
sign small projects to their learners and grade
them according to what they submitted back in
the platform.
An instructor using the Moodle platform can
add a quiz in a course by selecting questions
from the question bank and publish it. Instruc-
tors can choose how many questions show up in
each page, as well as timing, penalties and grade
options. Moodle also provides tools for project
assignments. Learners can submit their projects
to the platform both as draft and final. Instructors
Monitoring Learners' Achievements
and Progress During a Course
The effective use of LMS requires that instructors
are provided with appropriate means to diagnose
problems so that they can take immediate actions
to prevent or overcome that problem (Mazza &
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