Wk2 Blog Post Comments on Tamara Collins’ Blog

With all of these systems, I think it is very important that the school clearly assess what they plan on using the technology for. An LCMS gives you the best of both worlds with learning and course management, which would allow expandability for future development as well as the benefits of reusable modules. However, cost may prohibit a smaller institution from implementing this technology. They also may not intend to utilize all of the features that the management system contains at first, but perhaps would be able to introduce a LMS specific to their needs and then later upgrade to an LCMS. PowerSchool seems like a fantastic resource to have available to you, it is important that instructors are comfortable with the tools before they use them in the classroom.

On Wednesday, August 11th Tamara Collins wrote:

Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) are fast becoming a way for training individuals within corporations as well as some educational institutions. It allows for authoring, publishing, and managing learning content (Nichani, 2001). The LCMS can create instant Reusable Leaning Objects or RLO’s to satisfy the needs of the learner. For example companies can foresee the needs of what the employee (learner) will need and create a new course required to train them on a new product, which may launch in the near future (Nichani, 2001).

LCMS can also be customized to fit what the learner may need. Rather than attending an all day training session the LCMS is designed to allow the learner what is necessary or what they need. Along with catering to the needs of the learner they are also able to customize their learning experience through the LCMS (Nichani, 2001).

According to the article LCMS Round Up it is crucial to understand the differences between the Learning Management System (LMS), the Content Management System (CMS) and the LCMS. The article described the LCMS as combining the learner administration capabilities of an LMS with the content creation and storage capabilities of a CMS (Ellis, 2001). LCMS can be considered a very powerful system because it deals with the learning content (Perry, 2009).

After reading the articles on LCMS I immediately thought about a system my school has been using called PowerSchool. It not only allows the teachers to view tutorials on how to accomplish specific things, but it allows the administrators to input what they feel the teacher needs. For example if the administrator foresees that the teacher needs additional support in setting up their grade books they can then tailor the database to include more tutorials on grade books.