Flying blind in turbulent times: Is a Teaching Management System the way forward?

Dr Daniel Czech, (edited by Dr Daniel Andrews) School of BioSciences, The University of Melbourne

In a world where we’re increasingly reliant on digital tools in higher education, is the one we rely on most fit for purpose?

Perhaps it’s time to supplement the student-facing learning management system (LMS) with an equivalent teacher-facing system, to enhance the quality of the student experience.

Digital tools in higher education are here to stay

As universities begin to emerge from the storm clouds of the coronavirus pandemic, we should reflect on a period where we were nearly exclusively relied on digital tools to deliver higher education.

Much like an airline pilot with minimal visibility during a storm, educators relied heavily on digital tools to navigate through the turbulence of the pandemic. While greater certainty appears to be approaching, we may not be in the clear just yet.

Global ambiguity, driven both by catastrophe and innovation, in conjunction with the increasing diversity and discernment of university learners, has resulted in greater challenges for teachers in understanding students’ individual learning needs.

It is abundantly clear that business as usual no longer exists and we are firmly entrenched in a transitionary phase. While it is not yet clear how best to support students and teachers in managing this transition, there may be solutions closer to home than we might realise.

What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a central digital application directed at learners that provides the framework for handling many aspects of the learning process, such as access of learning materials, curation of curriculum, and assessment submission.

Whether or not we intended it, today the LMS has become the touchpoint of higher education and arguably the predominant interface through which learners, their peers and their teachers interact. Indeed, the LMS has become so ubiquitous in higher education that its presence is often taken for granted and its utility is often overlooked.

Our growing reliance on the LMS in higher education is perhaps completely ignoring learning’s equally important partner: teaching.

Is a Teaching Management System (TMS) the way forward?

A Teaching Management System (TMS) is a central digital application directed at teachers that provides the framework for handling many aspects of the teaching process, such as monitoring student engagement, analysing cohort performance, and differentiating the curriculum.

Whilst the concept of a TMS is not entirely new, it is often used to describe university-level administration software (e.g. managing course progression, fee payments, GPAs, tutor wages etc.) and not teaching at the subject level. For example, the new TMS at the University of Oxford (https://academic.admin.ox.ac.uk/teaching-management-system) might best be described as teaching admin software, rather than a purposeful, teaching facing management system.

There are endless useful functions and tools that a TMS can provide educators, including:

• Real-time reporting of cohort engagement (e.g. lecture views, e-lesson completion, in-class attendance, learner survey responses, forum activity)
• Managing assessment workflows (e.g. marker allocations, marking consistency, monitoring marking completion, feedback quantity and quality)
• Real-time monitoring, ranking, sorting and visualization of grades and learners across the cohort (e.g. Who are the ‘top’ learners? Which students are finding the subject very challenging or at risk of failing? Are there ‘edu-metrics’ that can predict future performance or inform how we differentiate our teaching?)
• Monitoring of plagiarism and collusion at scale (e.g. ranking student assessments based on similarity report metrics, red flags for subsequent breaches or breaches across subjects)
• Group formation (e.g. drawing on student profile data, self-reported capabilities and deficits, geographic location etc. to design diverse and equitable student project/study groups)
• Automated submission of final grades to the central university repository (e.g. end-of-semester results overview, grade distribution, yearly change)
• Track individual learner problems (e.g. special consideration applications and decisions, storage of evidence, tracking and application of assessment extensions)

Arguably, a sophisticated LMS could incorporate the teaching-related features listed above without the need for a reciprocal TMS. However, fundamentally these tools and their relevant management system are designed for different audiences. While an LMS may currently include teaching tools, such as assessment marking functionality, they are often designed with the learner rather than the teacher in mind.

For example, there is often no function to apply policy-mandated late penalties within the LMS.

To be truly effective, the TMS must talk to the teacher, whilst the LMS must speak to the learner. Ensuring that both systems communicate with each other will be the critical challenge.

Would a Teaching Management System (TMS) be successful?

The success of a TMS depends on many factors. For a TMS to be broadly adopted by educators, it needs to be functional, user friendly and secure. It should maintain or improve teaching quality, and most importantly it must improve educator oversight whilst reducing their workload.

Beyond the practical measures a TMS enables, the digital information stored within the system offers a phenomenal opportunity to more deeply understand our learners.

The concept of the TMS poses the question of how much information about our students we may ignore simply because we do not have the time-efficient tools to view it.

A dynamic, real-time TMS that enables teachers to be involved in each student’s progress, every step of their learning journey, could be the solution to problems we are not yet aware of. While this system may take time to develop, considering many subject offerings comprise 300 or more students (over 2,000 in some disciplines!), it is surely time to give educators the right tools to support their learners.

Integrated digital tools such as the TMS will likely play a big role in achieving this support, but in the same way as we feel most comfortable flying with a pilot at the controls, we will always need teachers in our classrooms at the forefront of education.

 

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