Using our Learning Management System to enrich face-to-face courses

Context

The sponsor’s vision was to expand the use of the Learning Management System (LMS) beyond self-paced virtual courses to support and enhance in-person courses. Content for these face-to-face courses was disorganized, often scattered across personal drives, and learner progress was not tracked. Educational developers who were responsible for designing and developing these courses in collaboration with facilitators had zero prior experience with the LMS.

PuRPOSE

Thus, a blended curriculum was developed to guide educational developers in setting up effective in-person courses on the LMS. The first offering, the pre-course ‘Using our Learning Management System to enrich face-to-face courses’, served a critical purpose. Recognizing that developers were both skeptical of the LMS and comfortable with traditional teaching methods, this initial course focused on demonstrating the platform’s value in a face-to-face context before educational developers were tasked with mastering the software’s technical functions.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

The pre-course included a self-paced online component and a synchronous online session.

The self-paced part addressed the developers’ busy schedules by giving them control over when and where they learned, which aligns with adults’ internal need of self-direction. Information was logically chunked, starting with simple LMS features like resources and progressing to more complex ones like assessment. Each LMS tool was presented with a concise description and a simple example, to prevent overwhelming the learners with unnecessary technical details that were going to be covered in the main course.

The pre-course deliberately highlighted the benefits of using each LMS tool to address the education developers’ need to understand the purpose and value of what they were learning. Care was taken to not make existing methods seem “wrong,” a strategy that fostered a positive and motivating learning environment. The pre-course also provided application-oriented examples on how the tools can be used in a face-to-face setting, directly linking the learning to practical application rather than abstract concepts. This aligns with the adult learners’ preference for learning that is task or problem-oriented and has immediate relevance.

The course’s final assignment prompted educational developers to apply the LMS features to their own context and transfer the learning to their work, fostering problem-solving skills rather than rote memorization. The assignment submissions were then discussed during a synchronous session, which aimed to facilitate the sharing of ideas, discussion of implementation challenges, and offering feedback.

The self-paced component was deployed as a SCORM package on the LMS, and for the final assignment, developers were required to use the LMS for submission. This gave the educational developers a firsthand taste of the LMS. The SCORM package was developed using Articulate Rise, which creates visually appealing, web-based courses quickly. The vectors were obtained from Storyset.

Results

The pre-course successfully addressed participant skepticism and promoted practical application. Anonymous feedback surveys indicated a high level of satisfaction with the online self-paced content, which participants found both relevant to their work and easy to understand. The subsequent synchronous session then fostered active learning and collaboration as participants generated specific, actionable steps for their individual teaching contexts.