The Use of a Learning Management System to Facilitate Student-Driven Content Design: An Experiment

Abstract

Technology is everywhere, we only need to look around and observe the world around us. Teaching any course today cannot be done without some form of technology incorporated, if not the central point of delivering material and content to students. Everywhere we look, students are sitting on their phones, or with tablets, why not allow students to use these devices to enhance their education, and learn something from the time they spent looking at a screen? This paper explores this notion of allowing students to use a blackboard learning management system (LMS) as well as any other relevant technology and design their own "textbook chapter" based on a specific theme or topic provided to them. A hybrid approach was adopted as an experiment to see how the lecturers can use an LMS to improve their students' experience of using the LMS in an attempt to improve their own knowledge. Students felt blackboard assisted them to understand the context and in particular felt that this assignment assisted them to understand the topic "use cases" better. In the end, the main goals were to ensure that students used technology to grasp the content and this was indeed the case.

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