Comprehensive Guide to Learning Management Systems: Canvas, Blackboard, and Schoolology (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Educating about learning management systems by Jacob Shaw. What is a learning management system? It is a software application that provides the framework that handles all aspects of the learning process. It is where you house, deliver, and track the learning content. It is designed to make life easier for those in charge of student learning. The common features among learning management systems are a homepage with courses for easy access, folders to store content and curriculum, modules for organizing the course, content creation that includes making assignments, pages, quizzes, and tests, and a grade and analysis feature to inform the instructor of student success and failures. The first learning management system I will discuss is the one my school uses and I'm most familiar with which is Canvas. This is my homepage of all of my classes that includes advanced physics, regular physics, and ELL physics. It also includes the physics materials repository where the entire physics teams builds and shares their learning materials. It was helpful to also gain access to the chemistry teams materials when I had to teach an overload of advanced chemistry. Here is an example of two separate unit materials found in the physics team repository. Learning materials includes pages, assignment, quizzes, and tests. Adding content requires just pressing the plus sign and then selecting which content you want to add. Quiz features include making a question and either organizing them into a question bank and selecting the number of questions that students will answer from the bank which makes randomizing the quiz to improve academic integrity or can create multiple choice, true false, fill in the blanks, multiple answers, multiple drop-downs, matching, numeric answer, formulate question, and essay questions. Here is an example of individual question grade analysis. In this multiple choice question it informs how many students selected the correct answer and what was selected incorrectly from the distractors. Convenience of transferring classes of students grades by just going into the grades, selecting actions, and sync to a student information system. You can select which assignments to sync and see when they were last synced. You can also run grade reports to a spreadsheet. The next learning management system to discuss is Blackboard. Again there is the home page of courses being managed for easy access. There is a way to add content to the course and select if it is visible or hidden from students. You can select what grading category the assignment goes in as, select the number of attempts students have, and then select how it is going to be graded. You can look at individual grades and list their assignments for ease of viewing for both teacher and students. Grade analysis allows each question to be examined and graded on a difficulty percentage that is based around the average score. It includes a breakdown of the percentage answered correctly. The last learning management system to look at is Schoolology and the features it has. The home page is set up with each course and section for easy access and reminders for assignments that need to be graded and resubmitted assignments to look at. Course folders are created to organize and store the materials for the courses. This can make it easier to locate when importing into each course. Adding content is found under the add materials and can include assignments, tests and quizzes, assessments, files, link, external tools, discussion, page, media album, and the ability to import from resources. Building quiz and tests and assessments allows the teacher to create questions that are true, false, multiple choice, ordering, short answer, essay, fill in the blank, and matching. Question banks can be created and placed into the assessment as well. Grade analysis shows the final grade, the submission attempts, and provides statistics on highest, lowest, average, medium, and mode grades as well as the standard deviation on the assignment. I only touched on some of the features that Canvas Blackboard and Schoolology have. For additional information and guides to use in any of these learning management systems, use the links from this page. And that's my presentation. Thank you.