October 2004 — Web/Net
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Course Management Systems and the Reinvention of Instruction
CMS as Organizing the Course
The assumption we make in proposing this perspective is, once again, that teachers have committed a lot of time and effort to prepare their classroom activities. They have taught the course many times and have a good sense of what information needs to be covered. Given their understanding of the content, the first step would be to review all the functionality of the CMS and determine how to distribute the content and student-teacher interactions across the CMS and classroom experience. What d'es this mean in terms of making use of the CMS?
Rather than thinking of the CMS as a collection of individual functionalities, the teacher should consider the CMS and classroom as a complete seamless experience. From the organizing perspective, the instructor uses the CMS to outline the course as if it were a table of contents, except it actually directs the student to the different aspects of the course. All course material and activities, including listing the classroom sessions, would be presented in their proper sequence. Hyperlinks giving students access to the content itself or to the areas within the CMS would be provided. There might also be text, PowerPoint, audio or video created by the instructor to provide a context for the readings and activities.
Using the CMS in this way enables students to have a richer experience with the material. For instance, the CMS can direct students to read the first part of a PDF and then go to a different section of the CMS that provides a hyperlink to a simulation available on the Web illustrating what they just read. Students then can be directed to a different text, provided by the teacher, which explains the relation between the PDF and the simulation, and provides a transition back to the original PDF.
The data capture of student input now can be used, or not used, more creatively than an ordinary summative assessment. The course table of contents also can include open-ended questions for student reflection on the CMS online notepad.
The notepad also would track the student’s own learning process throughout the semester. Although conceivably the notes could be printed at the end of the course and turned in as part of the student’s grade, it might be more effective to keep the notes private, thereby encouraging students to take more responsibility for their own learning. In addition, students could be asked questions as they progress from one reading selection to another in the CMS, or be told to go back to the CMS to answer a question before finishing a reading assignment. The value of these questions would once again be to provoke thought; perhaps more interestingly, the instructor could distribute some of the students’ responses to the rest of the class in order to begin a discussion or student activity. Because it is the students’ opinions that are being discussed rather than the teacher’s, using the students’ responses for questions in the CMS would be an effective technique for getting the students to participate more actively in the discussion.
Since students would have much more participation in the actual class, the threaded discussion and chat would be used to enable students to review concepts from previous classes and prepare for future class discussions.
