Course Management System (CMS) can provide a number benefits to students, as well as teachers, administrators, parents and the community best considered under 2 criteria
- Effectiveness - Doing a better job
- Efficiency - getting things done easier, faster or cheaper
Main areas and justifications for use
- Admin <-> Staff <-> Staff communication:
- Areas of need:
- Increasing complexity of regulation/ organistaion
- Less time to meet/ need to reduce meetings
- return on notebook investment
- "natural" encouragement to staff skill development
- CMS can help
- forum better than noticeboards
- wiki better than staff manual
- courses for KLA groups of staff can specialise info sharing and decision recording
- etc
- Staff <-> Student <-> Parent communication:
- Areas of need:
- Increasing complexity of course structures
- increasing interruptions to studnet attendance (from home and other school programs)
- Increasing cost of photocopying as courses change so rapidly that texts are not available -> increased clerical managemnat demands on taechers
- Increasing desire from parents to be informed but no matching technique to allow them to take responsibility for being informed
- CMS can help
- Course structures can be maintained online by incremental and continual adjustment rather than being reprinted periodically an dtherefore always a bit confusing and out of date
- Course materials can be complete through a CMS so that they interlink resources rather than rely on all referring to resources that may or may not be available to the student
- Parents can see curricula and class sequence and actul activities as well as their on child's responses and assessments. Responsibility forcommunication can be shared rather than fall on the teacher.
- etc.
- Information is increasingly in digital format
- Most texts are prvided in digital format as well as paper with many additional resources
- Many more resources are ONLY accessible by online links
- Many activities that were previously physical can be delivered virtually allowing far faster and deeper learning. Simulations allow studnets to "play" with a rule system
(one of millions of examples e.g. Bathtime with Archimedes allow students to play with a model of a physical systems and see it described with a graph)
- Other more superficial reasons (potentially powerful in some contexts)
- Students consider digital communication to be more acceptable/ fashionable/ "cooler" and therefore react more positively to course content
- many administrators and teachers consider digital communication to be a good PR for the school and good CV material (sometimes regardless of proved curriculum benefit)
- etc
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