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July 06, 2003
Making Your Course Management System Work
The title of this article, "Better Off With or Without Your CMS?" (from Syllabus), is a bit misleading, because the authors (Steve Ehrmann and Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group, both of whom I worked with on an Annenberg grant project back in the mid-90's) don't ever raise that question. The questions they do raise are much more valuable: "Do you have any way of knowing how much educational value your college or university currently derives from its use of a CMS? Do you have a strategy for increasing its value in a course or across the curriculum?" They provide a set of five general assessments an institution can undertake to answer those questions.
The assessments and examples that the Steves provide reinforce what has always been my mantra regarding education & technology: It's not about the technology, it's about what you do with it. Maybe I picked that up from the Steves years ago. :-)
Every school with a course management system should be conducting regular evaluations on its use, and feeding the results of those evaluation back into faculty development programs.
Posted July 6, 2003 09:57 AM