Enhanced LMS platform is intended to personalize, improve user experience
ISTE 2016 attendees interested in the Digital Age Teaching and Learning focus area can stop by the itslearning booth (#1541) to see how the company’s brand new personalized learning management platform aims to change how educators and students work in a learning platform. The new platform will be live July 1.
“Our main focus with this new platform is enhancing the user experience,” said Arne Bergby, itslearning CEO. “So we’ve done a great deal of research to understand what our users are really trying to do when they use our platform. And we’ve tested and rebuilt the platform so that educators can more easily carry out their core tasks and get support from a system that is truly intuitive and doesn’t complicate their work but rather puts the focus on student learning outcomes.”
The main benefits educators will of the new platform include the following:
· Simplification and modernization of the interface and navigation
· Making the platform feel like an extension of the physical classroom
· Empowering teachers to follow best practices
· Increased compatibility with mobile devices
Simplification and Modernization
The main menu of the new platform has streamlined navigational features that allow educators to easily find and focus on their most important tasks: courses, current groups, students (if the educator is a teacher), a calendar and access to the platform’s library of resources. The groups menu places users’ communities, joint projects and associated dashboards all in one place. New system wizards help users understand how each new feature works.
Extension of the Physical Classroom
When users log in, a personalized start screen helps them immediately get organized and up to date by showing them upcoming events on their calendar, a sidebar list of follow-up tasks, and a stream of updates from courses and groups. Additionally, the bulletin system for course communications has become a simplified, stream-based system that allows teachers to easily embed links and content for students’ review. Students can then comment on that content from their own home pages.
The new instant messaging system better facilitates communication among students and between students and teachers. In addition to enabling live discussions, the new system allows users to share resources and collaborate. Messages sent before the launch of the new itslearning platform will be available to users in an archive.
Empowering Teachers to Follow Best Practices
In the previous platform, teachers had to go to different course pages in order to see relevant student profiles, now they have one-click access to information on all their students. The new Students page, accessible from the main menu, provides a quick overview of students and all their recent activities. Additionally, the page generates profile cards that present more details on each student and allow the teacher to start a conversation directly with the student without having to navigate to another part of the platform.
Teachers now have a larger itslearning library of teacher-created and third-party resources with which to support and enrich instruction including a repository of over more than 20 million objects and over 5 million in open education resource. These have been revamped to make it easier for educators to access it as well as find and share resources.
Increased Compatibility with Mobile Devices
To accommodate educators accessing the platform via smartphones, the new navigational layout translates elegantly to mobile screens to create a seamless experience on the web. The updated app us optimize for educators’ most common tasks and includes the stream feature.
To smooth the transition to the new platform for all existing customers, the previous itslearning platform will continue to be available for the foreseeable future. That version will keep its existing functionality but will also include the live messaging system, the upgraded library with easy access to learning resources and student profile cards.
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