The Course Management System

The course management system is far and away the most important technology piece in an online course. It is absolutely imperative that you understand how to use its foundational components and are sure those components are functionally rich enough to support your course objectives.

Online learning success triad illustration: content, assessment, communicationThe triad for success in an online course is:

  • Communication
  • Content
  • Assessment

Everything that you do in an online course can fit into one of these areas, and the course, in its entirety, is only as good as the intersection of these three components. The technology is how those three triad legs are implemented.

You need to develop your course without consideration of the course environment—the learning objectives, the strategies you use to teach the concepts, and the assessments you use to evaluate student learning are your foci. A good online course is a good online course. It can be plugged into any learning or content management system, but having a robust tool set is definitely a positive for the online educator.

Once you have a good course developed, you should learn how your course management system allows you to meet those teaching and learning goals. This is not to say that you must learn every detail of every component; but once you decide the technology components that you will use to meet your teaching and learning goals, you should learn the foundational functionality of the tools.

Activity

Contact your technology unit and learn which course management system your institution uses then locate the resources for getting started in that system. Most technology units prepare "getting started" guides for faculty who want to learn the functionality of the CMS. Read through the getting started information then find out how to create a practice course. Don't worry about developing your online course at first.

Illustration of a sandboxMy practice course is always named "Sally's Sandbox." This helps me focus on the idea that it is a place to play, experiment, invite friends, make mistakes without penalty, and learn. Try different tools, see how that act, react, and iteract.

In the next section, we'll introduce video conferencing classrooms.