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).