Here at UTB we are hunting for a learning management systems because our Blackboard contract will be up soon. This has created a great deal of excitement among faculty. Some have just learned how to post a syllabus on Blackboard and are not interested in learning how to do it on another LMS. Some more tech savvy faculty are unhappy with the clunkieness of Blackboard and are ready to zoom on to new and smooth.
As we investigate new LMS's what is interesting is how they have evolved to be more teacher and student friendly. Of the two we have looked at so far, Canvas and Desire2Learn, the features that faulcty like are:
- Syllabus builder that makes it easy to create an interactive syllabus.
- Calendar that reads your syllabus and due dates and populates itself even making changes automatically as you change due dates.
- Student reports that provide detail of the students behavior that can be used by faculty, advisors and counselors No more taking the student's word that they handed in ALL the assignments and the professor was unfair.
- One click functions
- Ease of using video and audio
- Conferencing
Next semester we will have faculty pilot the two LMS and then send a recommendation to the Administration. What we are interested in seeing is that faculty use the tools the LMS offer to connect better with students, if students are more comfortable in the new environment, and if we can collect more data and artifacts for our Quality Enhancement Plan, student leaning objectives and evaluations for faculty to use to improve their classes.
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