Security Evaluation Criteria for LMS

32 Learning Management System

C. Problems and Trends with LMS

There are some problems involving the reserching and selecting LMS. Beshears 1999 quoted Bates 2000 from his “Managing Technology Change” several problems, such as: 1. Free Style Course Websites vs. Learning Management Systems • Some instructors or lecturers always want to use their own personal home page to interface their courses instead of using LMS provided by university. • The campus may select a favored LMS, but lecturers should not be forced to use the favored LMS. This problem may result in integration problem if university wants to integrate the e- learning system with their academic system, such as student database, administration database, and so on. 2. Make vs. Buy • Some institutions may favor incrementally developing an in-house Learning Man- agement System e.g. by expanding the on-line class schedule. • Why not both? The contra is that it would be cheaper to support one enterprise level LMS. However the pro argument is that if the campus decides to link one or more commercial packages to the registration system etc., this doesnt preclude the option of also incrementally developing a LMS in-house. The option of doing both may avoid conflict. It also gives lecturers more options. 3. Use one LMS or use different LMSs together? The pro reason for campus using a single Enterprise Level Learning Management Sys- tem is that students could have a unified portal view of all their course websites on the system. However, the contra side is that instructors would have a limited set of op- tions to choose from. The compromise solution is having a favored LMS, but also of- fers a select number of other systems that can also be connected to backend registra- tion databases. Of course, more than one LMS could be integrated with the registrars databases, but probably not hundreds of separate LMS e.g. one for each department. Although easy to use and widely installed, LMSs pose a few challenges for their users. Some other issues regarding the use of LMS are see e.g. Curliner, 2005; Wikipedia, 2006: 1. Course Design Flexibility Problems Challenges in customization Each training organization manages its operations in a particular way — and most LMSs are designed to manage operations in a different way. For example, most LMSs provide instructors with a limited flexibility in designing course. LMSs typically come with standard sections that instructors must provide, and the section names are not easily altered. However some open-source LMSs support multilingual interface that enabling course designers to use sections or menu in their own language. Although LMSs can be customized and this has become easier with time, many cannot handle every unique need of a training organization. Organizations may have to do commission custom programming to achieve their goals. 2. Transferring course content problems Learning Management System 33 Often there no easy way of transferring a course site from one LMS to another, so that the considerable investment in time required to fit a course to one LMS package is likely to be wasted if an institution changes its LMS, if an instructor moves from one institution to another that uses a different LMS, or if institutions using different LMSs wish to collaborate. Some organizations have addressed this issue by defining stan- dards for learning objects, such as the Shareable Content Object Reference Model SCORM used by the US Department of Defense and the IMS Global Content Pack- aging specification. The ability to exchange course data will be increased as systems start to publish their course metadata in a metadata registry. This allows Vocabulary-based transformation. Some institutions have attempted to combat this problem by agreeing in collaborative to share common platforms. Use of open source LMSs such as Moodle has more re- cently enabled institutions to share content more easily. Because LMSs are supposed to provide a one-stop shop to learners as well as track all learning activities, these systems should easily provide links to all online learning programs and easily share tracking information, test results, and similar material with courses. Although e-learning standards assist in these efforts, making sure that materials conform to e-learning standards requires a fair amount of work by the technical staff. Also, while LMSs are primarily designed to manage e-learning, they can also be used to manage all of a training organization’s learning programs, including traditional classroom learning or blended learning. 3. Limited capability to provide interactive e-learning To add more imaginative and interactive e-learning via authoring tools like Flash and Dreamweaver, instructors must link to separately created materials. That is, the lesson cannot be created and uploaded in the LMS. The material must be created with differ- ent tools and stored elsewhere. Some LMS provide solution to this issue by separate modules that support contents from third-party authoring tools, like Flash, Java app- let, and so forth. 4. Limited testing and record keeping abilities Although LMSs let instructors test students online, the tests must usually conform to templates and e-learning primarily consists of reading transcripts. Also, some lack the security measures to verify that students are really who they say they are and some have lost tests that students completed before transmitting them to the instructor for grading. In addition, although most LMSs have added capabilities to automatically transfer grades from the gradebook to other systems used to track student progress, this capability is not available in all LMSs and often increases the cost significantly. Similarly, because most universities use other systems to enroll students and manage payments, most LMSs cannot check that students have prerequisite courses. Or, to be blunter, academic institutions need a means of making sure that graduating students have paid their library fines before awarding a diploma, and LMSs do not provide such capabilities because universities have already made large investments in other systems to do that. The system that is most widely used in universities to manage