I had a question after reading the two articles this week related to Moodle and other Learning Management Systems…
What’s the difference between a Learning Management System and a Content Management System? And be sure to read the comments below as my intial posting here, based on information I found online, was incorrect!!
Digging a bit deeper, it turns out that there is also a “LCMS” = a Learning Content Management System.
It seems that what sets apart the LMS from the other two is the idea of tracking members’ behaviours and interactions as well as providing a comprehensive “space” to submit and receive materials related to a course / courses.
An LMS is able to record how often members of that System are engaging and sharing content, therefore, it can be used to analyze behaviours, such as how often a student / professor posts content. Also, members can upload content to an LMS and download content from an LMS; both of these options (specifically upload) may be not available in the other two management systems.
While we haven’t explored the true costs of each managements system, I imagine that the LMS would be the most expensive in terms of finances, human resources, and time to create.
To learn more about the key differences, here is a blog site I found with a brief definition of each: LMS vs LCMS vs CMS
Another source, a blog by Justin Ferriman, reports,
“Course management systems are narrower in scope. That is, this system focuses on the management and distribution of eLearning and instructor led courses. To put it another way, course management is often the main function of an LMS – a secure place to store and launch training to a subset of users. In some respect, you can attribute metrics to a course management system, but that isn’t a requirement…To put it simply, an LMS can be as big or small as you want it to be, while a course management system will struggle to adapt to be something more than a file repository. An LMS such as WPLMS can integrate a social (human) component to learning and collaboration – tracking an individual learner’s performance, accomplishments, and connections across an entire group.”
image of “Blackboard vs Moodle” retrieved from http://flic.kr/p/dzmm99 (January 19th, 2014).
This is a discourse that gets entirely too complicated too quickly—through no fault of your own, I should add!
CMS: website content management software, a very broad category
LMS: a specific CMS that integrates purposeful teaching, learning and administrative functions.
In other words LMS is a subset of CMS. All the other terms bandied about are highly subjective and arbitrary. More often marketing speak than anything else.
In my opinion, at least 🙂
Hi,
Would you describe then our Blackboard (Connect) interface as an CMS or as an LCMS? From Wikipedia, LMS and LCMS are compared as follows, “The focus of an LMS is to deliver online courses or training to learners, while managing students and keeping track of their progress and performance across all types of training activities. An LMS is not used to create course content.”
In my mind, Blackboard is being used to create course content from the teacher’s perspective – it is delivering course materials and is often the place where knowledge is being built (ex. “Discussion Forums”), however, we are also utilizing other software (ie. WordPress) to build knowledge outside of our management system.
Is there one (or more) defining characteristic(s) that separates these concepts, or is it as Kate mentions in her post below, an LMS can be regarded as a component of the larger, encompassing CMS? And if this is the case, then it seems where we have arrived is the opposite of what I found in that blog by Justin Ferriman!
Thanks for your help to clarify,
Mel Burgess.
Concerning LMS & CMS difference, it can be confusing in the beginning, but after reading a few articles and checking characteristics and features, everything becomes clear!
For example, there are Joomla CMS and JoomlaLMS. the names are similar and a lot of people become confused first.
Joomla! is a content management system that works as a framework for a website
JoomlaLMS is a learning management system developed as a component for Joomla! CMS. CMS is broader than LMS, while LMS is concentrated in the eLearning field.