LMS’s

I have been doing a little exploring on Moodle and the one thing that I find so great about it is how easy it is to navigate through. One of the hardest and most tedious parts of a VLE are having to navigate through all the information that is constantly being added to it without running into any glitches or annoyances. I am thinking mostly of Blackboard when I say that, but I’m sure it’s true for other VLE’s. Moodle seems to have the structure down just right. It’s not cluttered with any advertising or anything, giving it a personal feel, while at the same time keeping it open and simple to use. The drop-down tabs at the top of the page are helpful in finding the next place you want to go.

I liked the readings this week because they talked not only about benefits to learning management systems, but also the disadvantages. While online classes are great for managing time and building strong communication skills with classmates and teachers, they can also put a strain on learning. As George Siemens says in his article, there is an underlying assumption that if students are exposed to the content, then learning will take place (1). I have to agree with that completely based on experience. When I took Media Economics this past semester, I was confused pretty much throughout the whole class. I had no prior experience with economics, and being thrown into it was nerve-wracking, especially since it was my first online course. Without hearing lectures of any sort from the professor, I felt that I was way behind everyone else. We were required to read about current media economic crises, but given that I wasn’t very familiar with the terminology and the subject itself, I don’t think I got as much out of that class as I would have if I had been in a classroom, interacting with other students and falling on the same page as the teacher. On top of the stress of the subject matter, Blackboard was often frustrating to use. I suppose using a program like Moodle would have made the learning process more comfortable.

I think that learning management systems are important for educational methods used today, seeing as they are being incorporated into more and more classrooms. It’s important to keep in mind which ones we choose to use, though, and how to use them. The ease of communicating through the web has many benefits, but choosing the structure of a LMS will have a lot to do with the knowledge gained.

This entry was posted on 16 July 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.