Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication

Byline: Matthew Perkins and Jay Pfaffman Introducing the internet to schools and spending vast resources to wire almost all of our classrooms have both inspired and frustrated science teachers who struggle to take advantage of its many promises. Time and time again educators have been promised great advances from new technologies. Radio, moving pictures, and the teaching machine, to name a few, have been ballyhooed at their introduction, but ultimately have done little to change how we teach and learn (Cuban 1986). This paper demonstrates one internet technology that can help teachers, parents, and administrators communicate better and requires little money or training. Course management systems Most schools now have a website, but few teachers actively maintain their own web pages or make their courses available online. Creating HTML documents is not that complex, but getting those files uploaded to a server in the right place is considerably more difficult. High-end web development tools simplify uploading files to a web server, but they can be expensive and difficult to configure correctly, often making them unavailable for teachers to use at home. Add to those difficulties the complexities of giving a school's site a consistent look and feel, usable navigation, and interactive features like forums and calendars, and the job seems intractable for all but the most tech-savvy teachers. Figure 1 Sample screenshots from a Moodle science course. Web-based applications are a solution to many of these problems. For example, many teachers and students use free web-based e-mail programs, which are desirable because they work from virtually any computer. For better or worse, web-based applications like Blogger.com, myspace.com, and facebook.com are incredibly popular because they allow tens of millions of people to publish visually appealing content on the web without any training. Web pages created on such platforms have a consistent look and good navigation between pages and usually provide a search function. Course Management Systems (CMS) like Blackboard, WebCT, Jenzabar, Desire-2-Learn, and Moodle are familiar to anyone who has taken a college course in the past five years. [Editor's note: For another view of using course management systems, see "A Platform to Stand On" , another article from The Science Teacher on this topic. ] Like the other web-based applications described previously, these tools generally require no special software, just a web browser. CMSs enable teachers to easily post assignments, lesson plans, announcements, and course documents (see the example screenshots on the left). They also allow students to participate in online discussions and chats and turn in assignments online. Unfortunately, commercial systems are often expensive to purchase and maintain, removing them from the reach of many K-12 schools. An alternative is Moodle (Figure 1, shown above), a free, open-source software program that not only provides a set of features similar to those of its proprietary competitors but is often easier to use. (For more information on "Open Source Software," see box below.) Open Source Software An interesting development in software development has been the Open Source Software (OSS) movement. OSS such as Moodle is free in the sense that people are free not only to use OSS but also to study, change, and redistribute it. There are now numerous OSS solutions that can be used in place of many applications that schools use. OpenOffice.org, for example, is a complete productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. OSS uses a model similar to that of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The expectation is that collaboration among users will improve and expand the content over time. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 200 language editions. Moodle now has over 4 million users and more than 400,000 courses; it is downloaded at a rate of 45,000 downloads per month. …