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Manage student activity


How does a Learning Management System (LMS) benefit your students?

This section will introduce you to The University of Auckland's LMS which is called Canvas. You may use it to:

  • Manage a fully online course

  • Provide on-campus students with access to learning materials and resources

  • Use discussion boards

  • Make class announcements

  • Create quizzes for formative and summative assessment

  • View and comment on reflective writing

  • Receive, mark and return assignments

 


Checks and tips: Using a learning management system   [view/annotate inline]


Example

Sanya Ram has been using Cecil (the University's previous LMS) to support her teaching on a number of courses in the School of Pharmacy.

Pharmacy Practice 409 is a course for around 90 fourth year students and is taught by several lecturers. Although the course is not fully online,  Sanya found that using Cecil helped her to manage student contributions to the course and assignments. It also helped with the management of a large teaching group.

The features of the LMS that Sanya found most helpful are listed below:

Announcements - being able to communicate changes or updates with students regularly

Assignment dropbox  - students are able to submit assignments to a centralized area and receive an immediate email message confirming its reception (infact Sanya takes this a step further and includes a reminder about the next task also).

Activities and marking - all marking is recorded and stored in the LMS. Sanya likes to use the comments feature here also as it means each student gets feedback with their grade and that is kept within the system. Grades and feedback can then be collated and exported to Excel for discussion at team meetings and for final grading submission.

Discussion - with a class of 90 students the ability to stream students into groups makes discussions more meaningful and manageable. Sanya also likes the ability to collate discussion posts by student so she can easily see what a particular student has contributed. They have used the ability to 'force subscription' by emailing all posts to the site and liked the momentum in discussion it seemed to create. But they found the volume of traffic rather overwhelming, so they have also run a course without it (and found there was not as much 'talk' but it was more manageable).

Linking to web resources (such as CourseBuilder sites) - on this course, each lecturer has their own website to support the module they teach. This means they are completely independent with how they want to structure their module.

Overall, Sanya has found that using the LMS to support a course creates a 'safe' environment in which students contribute a high standard of discussion and work generally. She feels students are more connected and communicate more about their learning than without it.  

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