A Modular Open Architecture to Increase Collaboration in Learning Management Systems Victor H. Menendez Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, México Manuel E. Prieto Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, España

Introduction - LMS • The Learning Management Systems (LMS) allow teachers to create and control web sites of a course. Too, the LMS offers to interact and interchange information between students • The LMS offer numerous tools that allow do scholar activities like to send document, realize test, publishing documents, links, news, etc. • Educational Institutions initiating in e-Learning, use LMS as a fundamental base of their technological platforms

Introduction - Communication • An important feature of any LMS is its capability of communication – Represented by the set of tools that increase the exchange of information among different users (Teachers, students, coordinators, managers) and diverse forms (synchronous, asynchronous and mixed)

• One of the goals of LMS is motivate collaboration among students, mainly to enrich theirs learning experiences

Objective • The main aim of this work is to evaluate some mechanics of collaboration in a specific LMS: – Detect how the system’s workspace allows their users to communicate and collaborate by means of visual elements – Detect situations that can be improved, incorporating additional communication tools for selecting other web-based learning resources.

Context – UADY • The Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY) is one of the most important universities of the south and south-east of Mexico • Since some years ago, the UADY is in a process of expanding its educational modalities, especially to online education

Context - UADY • Has an academic group composed by more than 1,300 teachers who attend undergraduate and graduate studies • UADY has a population of more than 14,000 students distributed in its 85 programs of study

The LMS - Dokeos • Dokeos is the LMS more used in the UADY • The LMS have been explored in new educational modalities as well as to support traditional ways

The LMS - Dokeos • The mechanics of collaboration in the LMS must be evaluated in order to know how much they can help the new programs.

The LMS - tools • This LMS support collaborative learning thanks to the basic set of communication and collaboration tools: – Conferences, includes listening audio, watching presentations, using electronic boards and asking to presenter, all online – Forums, which can be public or private to motivate asynchronous discussions – Chat, for synchronous communication between members of a group

The LMS - tools – Agenda, where the events close to happen are placed – Announcements, for publication and sending news’s mails to all users – Dropbox, where the students can send and receive documents for review, to do commentaries and to see a record of changes – User groups to organize teamworks within their own space for the asynchronous communication and the exchange of documents

The LMS – Control Panel

Method for the LMS evaluation • Heuristic evaluation is a method frequently used for the evaluation of user's interfaces • Heuristics focus the evaluator’s attention on aspects of the interface, which generally are the source of usability problems in the application’s interfaces

Heuristic evaluation • For the evaluation of LMS, we used the heuristics developed by (Kevin et al. 2001) • These heuristics are an adjustment of a heuristic evaluation method to groupware proposed by (Nielsen 1994) • They are focused to identify problems of usability that are specific for the work between distance-separated groups and by the use of shared visual workspaces

The Heuristics • The eight heuristics allow evaluate how the tools offered by the shared visual spaces, support the communication and the collaboration between its members

The Heuristics 1. Provide the means for intentional and appropriate verbal communication 2. Provide the means for intentional and appropriate gesture communication 3. Provide consequential communication of an individual’s embodiment 4. Provide consequential communication of shared artifacts 5. Provide Protection 6. Management of tightly and loosely-coupled collaboration 7. Allows people to coordinate their actions 8. Facilitate finding collaborators and establishing the contact

Process •

Though the heuristics have been proposed originally for use in Groupware Systems, after an analysis we adapt it be used for the evaluation of the LMS´s collaborative capabilities

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Many of the instructional activities realized in a LMS imply group works developed with the LMS´s provided tools

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For the evaluation, we test each heuristic trying to apply it into the appropriate functionality of the LMS – User observation – Field studies – Inspection Methods

Heuristic 1 •

Provide the means for intentional and appropriate verbal communication – Participants may describe what they are doing in any moment as part of the collaborative synchronous activity

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The Chat is a public tool for all registered students in a given course. Any other participant connected to the tool at same time, will obtain information about the conversation of others

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This tool can generate records with all conversation texts but a disadvantage of the Chat is to be not available from other tools

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The Forums tool provides all functionality required for a collaborative work asynchronous

Mensajero • We defined and implement a solution to improve the communication: an Instantaneous Messaging service component called Mensajero • This component is available every time and everywhere as a link at top web page • It allows sending short messages to any connected user, without worry where they are into the LMS • Combining it with others tools is a way to get a verbal meaningful and appropriate communication

Mensajero Interface

Heuristic 2 •

Provide the means for intentional and appropriate gesture communication – Because people are distance-separated, gestures are invisible unless they are directly supported by the system

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This heuristic is supported by gestural icons that represent happiness, sadness, worry, etc

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Almost tools allowing to introduce HTML text, provide an option to insert these predefined icons or custom images. Students may define also their own avatar at the moment they wish to represent their emotions

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The Chat and the Conference tools do not support HTML text and, for that reason, it is not possible to express emotions by images (you must use emoticons) for the synchronous communication

HTML Editor

Heuristic 3 •

Provide consequential communication of an individual’s embodiment – Capture and transmit both the explicit and subtle dynamics that occur between collaborating participants

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This aspect is not normally supported in the LMS for a collaborative synchronous work. Students only may know what actions others students did when they update the page to see changes, or sending messages

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The Conferences tool allows online video and audio transmission, and the participants can see actions realized by the lecturer even those realized of not intentional way

Heuristic 4 •

Provide consequential communication of shared artifacts – The workspace must display the local user’s feedback to all remote users about shared elements like documents

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This Heuristic is partially supported in the Forums tool, since the students can upload documents and the LMS registers who has placed them, but the changes must be indicated explicitly

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The Dropbox tool allows to safe copies of the same document, making logs of the realized changes by every participant

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The Statistics tool offers information about the tool used by each student as well as the documents or tasks that they have sent or modified

Wiki component • A way of improving this heuristic is with a Wiki or Blog component • These tools allow do a better follow-up of the documents or shared pages that have been modified • The components can be available for all the registered students or only for the members of a workgroup

Wiki Interface

Blog Interface

Heuristic 5 • Provide Protection – Technical measures such as access control, concurrency control, undo, version control, and turn-taking must to be implemented

• This is supported in the Forums and Dropbox tools. Both tools allow place information at same time without losses. Students may place several times the same document, and the system generates versions, which allows do a follow-up of the realized changes • Some areas of the LMS are protected, and only the owners or group members can go in

Forum Interface

Heuristic 6 • Management of tightly and loosely-coupled collaboration – Knowing what others are doing, where are, it allow people to recognize when could be appropriate do collaboration • This one is not supported by the LMS. The students can move freely inside the tools and realize their work without knowing if others students keep on inside the system to continue collaborating • The Chat and Conference tools allow a strongly connected collaboration. The LMS reports of immediate when a user enters or goes out of the tool. In the Conference, the viewers only can see what the lecturer presents. They cannot explore by independent way the material

Chat Interface

Heuristic 7 • Allows people to coordinate their actions – It should facilitate the participants’ own abilities to coordinate their communication and collaboration

• The Agenda and Announcements tools can be used to coordinate asynchronous actions. Nevertheless, only teachers may edit them. The next version of LMS resolves that • The Forum tool is a solution to this situation because it is editable by the students and members of the workgroup • For a synchronous coordination, the Chat tool and especially our Mensajero are the solution

Announcements Interface

Heuristic 8 •

Facilitate finding collaborators and establishing the contact – Information on potential collaborators must be provided so that they can be easily found and their availability for group work can be determined

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This is supported by the way of the “Users online” tool which is available all time. The student can see a list of connected users to the LMS and send them mails (asynchronous form)

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If the instantaneous Messenger component is available, then is possible establish a more direct and immediate contact (synchronous form)

User Online Interface

Conclusion • With the results of the heuristic evaluation we can conclude, in general, that the LMS used by the UADY allows realize a synchronous and asynchronous collaborative work thanks to the base set of collaboration - communication, conference and management tools offers

Conclusion… • Some Heuristic were not supported (3 and 6) or only partially. For that reason it was necessary to realize improvements, in some cases in a significant way • These improvements can do to the tools that the LMS offers or incorporate new components developed by others in order to supports fully all the heuristic ones raised (Wikki, Messenger, reporting, etc) • If all tools offers by LMS can be integrated to design of activities for a collaborative learning, the weaknesses of ones can be complemented by the strengths of others

Conclusion… • A fundamental element to support the tested heuristics is that the evaluated LMS has been developed with a modular and open architecture, which allows extending their functionalities developing new tools and components • In the case of Dokeos, it has an API that allows the access to the system’s core and has a structure for the development of plugins and modules at easy way • it supports the development of components that can be integrated in a transparent form to the interface, allowing to create new tools and even to improve the existing ones

Conclusion… • If we consider that most of LMS’s offer at least the same tools that we studied, then we can deduce that very similar results will be obtained when evaluating other LMS´s

Thank you A Modular Open Architecture to Increase Collaboration in Learning Management Systems • Victor H. Menendez Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, México [email protected] • Manuel E. Prieto Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, España [email protected]