Discovery of New Knowledge for an LMS at Jordanian Universities

Insight Into The Learning Management System (Lms)

Iskander (2008) and Whelan and Bhartu (2007) identify LMS as a macro level term that refers to facilitating and managing the online learning process for all user profiles. These user types are students, administrators or instructors. The services facilitated by the LMS include interactive strategies, and organising and monitoring control among learning groups. According to Kats (2010, p. 163), there are six tasks that are involved in an active LMS. These six tasks include:

• 1.

  Creation “refers to the production of learning and teaching materials by instructors”.

• 2.

  Organisation “refers to the arrangement of the materials for educational purpose (e.g., combining them into modules or courses)”.

• 3.

  Delivery “refers to the publication and presentation of the materials, so that they can be accessed by students”.

• 4.

  Communication “refers to the computer mediated communication between students and instructors and among students”.

• 5.

  Collaboration “refers to students jointly working on files or projects; it also includes collaboration between instructors”.

• 6.

  Assessment “refers to the formative and summative evaluation of learning process and outcomes, including feedback”.

LMSs are software that has been created to improve operations in the higher education sector. They can be used to monitor and control the learning and training conducted in any organisation (Babić, 2012). It affects societies such as Jordan especially the people that are involved in LMS and also the people around these learners attain a number of benefits in many ways such as increasing the performance and speed up data retrieval. Commonly used LMSs are Moodle, Edmodo, Blackboard, Sumtotal System and Skillsoft (Gautreau, 2011). Among these mentioned systems, Moodle is the most commonly used learning system. Moodle provides an open atmosphere for the learner to nourish and build upon their current knowledge base. Every year there is a significant increase in the number of users of these top five LMSs. The number of users continues to increase exponentially (McIntosh, 2014).