LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Higher Education Institutions and Learning Management Systems: Adoption and Standardization

Rosalina Babo
Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto, Portugal
Ana Azevedo
Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto, Portugal

“Learning Management Systems (LMS) are now ubiquitous in institutions of higher education. This hasoccurred very rapidly with adoption being widespread but with little standardization. LMS’s were firstused to support delivery with some communication between teachers and learners, but use has now beenextended to support learning activities in innovative and diverse ways. They are also being used to in-crease student engagement and to track student progress – a vastly different approach to the early yearsof pushing resources to students.Adoption of LMS’s started with experimentation by a few with small systems. Familiarization fa-cilitated wider adoption until eventually the “institution-wide” adoption of large commercial systems became common. Recent developments have extended the range of options from a few large commercialsystems to a wider selection of open source, adaptable and specialized systems. In the intervening yearsfrom early adoption to now, higher education institutions have also gained valuable expertise in select-ing, implementing, using and evaluating technologies to support learning and teaching some of whichhas been gathered in the chapters of this book.The authors have focused on a number of areas including: implementation strategies; use of learningmanagement systems and other eLearning technologies; technical developments; evaluation; adoptionand acceptance; and supporting skills.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/70938822/Education