In this era of technological advancement, there has been many arguments on which among the above three types of platform; LMS (Learning Management System), Blog or Facebook, serves as a the best way to deliver information to the students. Hence to investigate further into the issue, the lecturer of this course, ICT for Science Education, introduced a three-way debate forum and divided the class into three main groups.
Photo courtesy of http://www.diversityuniversity.com/images/chart_lms.jpg
In each of the groups are members of which favors any of the three information platform above. The debate forum was conducted smoothly with each group giving a magnificent and justifiable arguments. After the forum, each of the members were given fifteen minutes to write on a sheet of paper their own views and arguments based on the debate forum presented earlier.
This is what I wrote for it, nothing has been edited:
- For education, reports of progress in learning is the most important matter for all the users of blogs, Facebook and LMS. LMS can be used to track down and report the academic performance of the user and the privacy of the user is secured as he/she can only view it. Parents too can track their children’s results. Compared to blogs and Facebook, those results can be viewed by the whole class. It could also be judge/discriminate by others as in blog and Facebook, the content/academic results is not send personally.
- Feedback via Facebook and blog is also public although in Facebook you can give private feedback, still the administrator have to go through the hassle of tagging/privacy setting and then scrolling and choosing one student out of a class of 40 students. With LMS, the system itself generates a direct immediate feedback of which is send or can only be viewed by the student/user.
- The third point is that the learning environment of the student. In Facebook, there are too many distractions such as online games, other people’s notifications of their social life which has no academic value. With blogs, it may be attractive but limitation to organisation leads to poorly structured template and widgets of which may or may not have anything to do with the given assignments. For LMS, this system compared to blogs and Facebook, users are only focus on what they should be doing, academic related work. And the student is not distracted with advertisements or chats by other users.
Photo courtesy of http://cdn4.aweber-static.com/images/features-pages/bbc-blogs.jpg
- In LMS, users/ students can interact when they choose to through comments, emails, discussion forum and not have their Facebook wall or blog’s board drowned with feedback/comments.
- Between LMS, Facebook and blog, only LMS can run a fully organised course, for example cooking. The argument here is that LMS tracks down performance and generate immediate capabilities evaluation without any hassle/work/prompting from its administrator. The course can start any time and ends any time, progressing at any pace and at the end of the course, the certificate of achievement is sent to the student and the student can print it and its official. All the above cannot be achieve/done by blog and Facebook. Most LMS is legally registered so the certificates produced are legal and official.
- LMS also has offline mode of which users/administrators can do their work without connection and later update their LMS through online server when there’s connection. Compared to Facebook and blog, connection is needed all the time.
Which platform will you support? Please leave your comment below.
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