Improving the Virtual Learning Space for Students and Staff
Upgrading the University Learning Management System
A University Strategic Learning and Teaching Project
Over the next two years, the University’s Learning Management System (LMS) will be upgraded to current international standards for virtual learning space. For our students, it will mean a more familiar online learning experience, comparable to their social virtual environments. For staff, it will mean a more lecturer-friendly set of affordances that will make it easier to design degree programs more coherently. This is a jointly sponsored project between Sydney eLearning in the Education Portfolio and University ICT.
The upgrade involves moving from the current WebCT CE8 platform to Blackboard 9. The new University LMS comprises of two integrated systems that will become available for students and staff: Learn and Organisations.
- Learn will be the primary system for all curricula material and will attract a suitable quality assurance framework to manage student and faculty requests for backups, student and staff helpdesk support, as well as quality management appropriate for assessment, appeals and archiving for accreditation processes.
- Organisations is a second system, with the same tool set as Learn, but will be provided to students and faculties for all eCommunity needs such as graduate attribute mapping, student societies, pastoral care strategies and the like: typically almost any unit of study related community which is not about curricula materials. This system will have an appropriate quality assurance process of its own.
The upgrade to the new University LMS will be a staged process to ensure that students and lecturers have time to become comfortable with the changes. There will be an extended period where both the current University LMS and the new will run in parallel while we migrate units of study from one system to the other. Staff and students will continue to log into one system to access sites from either system.
Why are we upgrading?
We are upgrading to improve the student experience of learning. The new LMS makes use of new technologies, including some features of Web 2.0, to make the learning experience more effective. In addition, support and maintenance of WebCT will be discontinued in the next two years.
Although most existing Unit of Study websites will not be fundamentally changed by the migration to the new system, the software will add new features for lecturers:
These include
- an improved user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop capabilities
- new teaching tools such as a wiki, grading rubrics and new quiz question types
- better features for unit of study administration
- improved accessibility for students and staff with disabilities
These features will be available to the more than 4000 unit of study websites the University publishes each year.
When are we upgrading?
Sydney eLearning staff are facilitating a limited pilot with faculty volunteers during semester 1 2010, and will plan a limited rollout in semester 2 of 2010. Migration of sites to the new LMS will start during semester 2 2010.
What will I have to do?
During the changeover period, Sydney eLearning staff will migrate sites that have been requested for migration from CE8 to the new University LMS, and will check to ensure that site has successfully migrated before it is released for use.
We will be conducting regular orientation and focused faculty-based workshops throughout the migration period. We will work closely with the academic and general staff who will be using the new LMS with their students to ensure a smooth migration. Training will be made available to each staff member before their CE sites are migrated.
Further information
- Look at the Sydney eLearning website for regular updates
- Faculty level strategic requests should be made to the Director of eLearning
- Operational queries during the migration process should be made to the