October 2004 — Web/Net

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Course Management Systems and the Reinvention of Instruction

By Craig Ullman and Mitchell Rabinowitz

There is so much to say but not enough time to say it. Many educators are attracted to teaching because they like to wax eloquently about subjects they are passionate about. The problem is that there is never enough time during a semester to cover all you want to cover. Once again, technology potentially comes to the rescue with the Course Management System (CMS). A CMS is Internet-based software that manages student enrollment, tracks student performance, and creates and distributes course content. In this way, the CMS enables teachers to extend the classroom beyond its traditional boundaries of time and space. Some common systems include:

The CMS became widely available in 1997, and its popularity and use have increased dramatically ever since. These software solutions have been widely marketed to and adopted by colleges and universities across the country. They have also been adopted by many publishers and e-learning companies that provide curriculum for the K-12 and corporate training markets. Given the increased adoption of the CMS as an instructional tool, it’s important to address how instructors are to make use of this technology. A review of extant literature shows that many articles have been written comparing the functionality of different systems (Hall 2003; Van de Pol 2001); how to incorporate this functionality into an existing course, however, rarely has been addressed.

In this article, we will argue that university teachers approach the use of the CMS with a pre-existing “mental model” of how the technology should be used and that this mental model then constrains how the teachers use it, thereby using technology to reinforce traditional teaching styles. We will further dispute that there are at least two distinct mental models to account for these approaches, each with a different goal for how to use the CMS. According to the first mental model, CMS should be used to supplement a conventional course experience. According to the second model, the CMS could be used to organize a conventional course experience. We will contend that this subtle distinction between supplement and organize has dramatic consequences on how instructors use the technology. We will also argue that the organize model is a more effective model to adopt in order to improve student instruction.

CMS Functionality

Prior to discussing the distinction between supplement and organize, let’s summarize some of the functionality of the CMS first. Although there are a variety of systems on the market, every CMS contains some implementation of the following functions:

Authoring/Publishing Tools. These tools allow the instructor to publish files to a section of the CMS for students to download, or simply publish a list of hyperlinks that students can click through to read additional materials online. Some systems also allow the students to upload files, but this functionality is frequently avoided as bandwidth and server space limitations can quickly complicate hosting the CMS.