Manage Students

Most content management systems are tied to the institution's student information systems if it is an academic course. These students are automatically loaded into the roster. For other course types including continuing education, though, faculty generally have to manually add students to the course.

Individual Students

When adding individuals to your course, you need to be aware of the specifications of your CMS. For example, some systems expect a username while others require a complete email address. Some will accept an individuals given name. Generally a systems administrator assigns roles to individuals you add to the course. Your tech support should be able to give you information on the role types and the permissions that are associated with each so that you can make informed decisions about permissions.

Permissions indicate to the system what the individual is allowed to do or see within the course. Most systems do not allow any one individual to wear multiple hats. Authors or teachers have full access to make changes, add content and people, review and add or change grades, and delete communications. Most CMSs have multiple roles with more restrictive access for students and visitors from that allowed to authors and faculty. Permissions restrict students from seeing one another's grades, making changes to communication (often even their own), and adding content or people.

Guests

One reason that roles and permissions become important is when you add guests to your course. If you invite a guest lecturer to participate in your course for a period of time, you want that individual to be able to post discussion forum postings, participate in chats or video conferences, or send email. In general, though, you do not want that individual to be able to make changes. In order to comply with FERPA (the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act), you do not want guests to be able to review students' grades or private communication.

Groups

Another function of managing students is that of creating groups.  There are many reasons for wanting to organize students into groups. Learning to function effectively in groups or teams is a hallmark of most organizations. Effective group functioning is a learned skill, which makes group work an ideal strategy in learning situations. Group work teaches consensus-building, responsibility, communication skills, leadership and follower-ship, and adaptation. For more information about managing student groups, review this presentation by Laura Fleet. The University of North Texas also provides ideas for managing groups in online courses.

Groups are also an effective way of managing communication in large courses. Communication among 30 students quickly becomes unwieldy, but if you create groups of 5–6 students and give them responsibility for only participating within their group, all the students have greater potential for participation and are more likely to actually read and respond to the topics.

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