Student managed learning management systems: Teachers as designers

The use of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) has become almost mandatory for a significant number of higher education institutions around the world, with the use in schools and colleges also growing. In teacher education a challenge exists about how to give pre-service undergraduate and postgraduate teachers an authentic learning experience to enable them to use an LMS in their future teaching. This paper describes the initial investigations, observations and experiences of pre-service teachers when each student was provided with the full authoring rights to an LMS in order to develop design experience for their future teaching roles. A low cost solution was necessary. The LMS Moodle is an open source, multilingual system that is easily installed on Windows XP, Linux and Macintosh OS X. It has the majority of functions of the more expensive corporate LMSs with the added advantages of being free and designed from a social constructivist perspective. Copyright © 2005 The Association for Advancement of Computing in Education.