Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) are in effect provide a virtual campus environment for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of eLearning education courses or training programs.
LMSs range from systems for managing training and educational records to software for distributing online or blended/hybrid college courses over the Internet with features for online collaboration. There are hundreds of them in the market. Our preferred choice is Moodle because it is an open-source software. This means that the code is freely available. As a result, it is free to download, there is global support for it and it is customizable, so you can brand it the way you want it by choosing your own design, banners, organisation, layout, content, and modules.
Moodle allows you to organise a wide variety of resources and activities in one place along with learner tracking and individual learning pathways. Moodle offers hundreds of optional modules. Here are some of the core ones used in most cases:
- Assignments
- Chatroom
- Choice/Questionnaire
- Database
- Forum
- Glossary
- Lesson
- Journal
- Quiz
- Webquests
- Wiki
Some of the communication and feedback facilities within Learning Management System.
The built-in Chat module is a handy teaching tool for groups of students working with or without the teacher to discuss an issue, or answering questions set by the teacher. The chats are saved and can be reviewed by the teacher at any time.
The Forum module enables students to have virtual seminars. The teacher provides a text or audio-visual file, which the students respond to, one after another. And in so doing, they are not only reacting to the stimulus file, but they are also responding to each other.
The Journal module is an online diary – useful for keeping notes and writing reflections on activities.
The Choice module provides a simple poll, which you could use to find out students’ opinions: for example, what topics they want to study or what they think of a course. There is also a more elaborate Questionnaire module, which allows you to use a variety of question types to conduct full surveys.
Some of the ways you can assess your students.
The Quiz module offers a wide range of quizzes and tests with which teachers can create revision activities. Moodle stores questions for use in other quizzes, even with other courses. You can develop multiple choice questions, short questions, essays, and long reports where students can upload assignments for teachers to mark. Teachers get an automatic alert when a new assignment arrives. All marks can be stored in the Moodle gradebook.
The Moodle gradebook records students’ results and provides a detailed breakdown of responses to different questions. The quiz module also allows you to shuffle questions within quizzes and to shuffle distracters within test items.
Some of the ways you can put your course content together using Learning Management System.
The Database module is good for building searchable repositories. A common use of this module is for storing past exam papers, activities for students to do or print out, or collections of students’ work.
The Glossary is like the database, except you can allow users to rate each other’s contributions. Words can be hyperlinked to texts on the site. So, students can click on a difficult word in a text, and they will automatically be taken to the explanation you provide in the glossary. Glossary entries can be categorised to make searching easier.
The Lesson module allows a teacher to write a series of lesson pages, each one ending with a question. If the students answer it successfully, they may continue. Otherwise, they can be sent back to review the lesson or directed to a remedial page.
The best way to appreciate this software is to experience it yourself. Fist test it as student, next as a teacher, and finally as a course developer. If interested just contact us and we will arrange it for you.
