What does an LMS do?

In simple terms, LMS can be defined as a package which can be used to design and manage online courses. These systems also allow evaluating the course taker’s performance. The course may be designed according to the designer and the course content may include presentations, webinars and other multimedia content along with the supporting material provided by the course designer. The course taker can access these courses and take the assessment as prescribed by the course designer and complete the course. The LMS is responsible for evaluating and grading the performance of the course taker.

Apart from these tasks of course design and evaluation there a set of other administrative tasks also which are carried out by the LMS. It is a multi user system where there are a set of course designers who host their courses and there are a number of course takers who take courses appropriate to their requirements.The LMS manages the users and also their access to respective courses.There should be an appropriate permission granting system in place, to ensure security of the courses and allow access to the information to appropriate users only.

The LMS should be able to manage ‘n’ number of users taking up ‘n’ different courses simultaneously and their independent learning paths, performance reports etc.

Collaborative learning should be possible through forums, also it should be interoperable in order to collaborate.There are a set of standards in place which the LMS should be complying with in order to ensure interoperability and scalability. Most of the LMS are expected to be SCORM compliant.

Discovering Learning Management Systems

I was in constant search for some solution which would provide resources to learners with some automation involved. When I was teaching in college, I saw a good mix of students.In a class of 60 there were students who are quick learners and can learn things on their own, another set of students who learn at a moderate speed with appropriate guidance and another set who are slow learners and need to work very hard and as a lecturer I had to repeat things multiple times. As I was responsible for the entire class I used to keep an average speed to ensure every one gets the concept.

The first set of students were quick and self learners, I somehow used to feel that I am unable to do the sufficient to sharpen their skills.After I came out of college I was thinking of a solution for thoseand was searching through the net if I can develop something appropriate for self learners or if there is anything already in place for such needs. I came across learning managment systems.

In my view LMS is a variant of DBMS where the data and operations are the difference. We have a repository of information in the form of courses, which are accessed by people in different roles.The roles are course designers and students. Now in the context of courses we have new operations involved to carry out the courses. Some of these operations are assessment of the student and evaluation of the test taken.Let us have a closer look at each step of the learning process.We have two perspectives of viewing the learning process.

• Course Designer perspective.
• Course taker perspective.

Course Designer perspective : The designer aims at developing a course which is understandable to a huge audience, aims at having high technical standards included in the course ultimately adding a huge value to the course taker. This involves a lot of creativity and the skill of using technology to present the essential skills.

Course Taker perspective : The course taker when takes up an online course has certain requirements in mind. The obvious requirement in any course irrespective of online or classroom course is simplicity. The course should never sound like Greek and Latin to the course taker.However the simplicity of the course to a great extent depends on the course designer’s expression.

In further discussions we will have a look at what an LMS can offer for course design. There are a host of LMS’s available few of them are open source and few others are not.What I am trying to figure out is the basic components of LMS and its architecture.