Providing a tour of the LMS

Hi, I'm Professor Shanton Chang and I teach information Systems in the School of Computing and Information Systems, and I do research in information behaviour.

Something that I often think about is that we design our physical campuses thoughtfully, using architects and urban designers to curate the space. But we also have to curate our digital campus, which is the sum total of the online systems in which students interact with each other and with us and build community.

In my research, I look at the ways in which digital ecologies and digital competencies can vary from culture to culture among different age groups and different ability groups.

In my teaching, I see the same variety reflected. For example, international students come from a variety of digital ecologies. They may use very different websites and software, and they're used to going to different sources for information. Once international students develop skills in the Australian ecosystem, their background becomes a strength. They become digitally bilingual, so to speak. But for the first year or two, using our LMS and our digital sources and websites might be quite unintuitive for many of them, more so than for our domestic students.

I want to be sure that all my students can navigate the LMS. For example, I deliberately avoid creating complicated pages, and in the first lecture, I spent time taking all my students through my LMS site and how to use it, and this benefits all students. I also use that time to point out subject and faculty policies that might miss because there's so many of them.

The obvious challenge here is that I have to spend class time explaining the LMS. Sure, I have to stop and spend my own time preparing an LMS tour, and all academics are time poor, but every bit of class time is precious. I don't want to waste it when we also have so much else to get through, right, but in practice, I see the payoff. I can see that students are engaged and paying attention for that part, and I get fewer admin questions through the semester now than before I did this. When I do get admin questions, it's also easier to remind students where to look for information on the LMS as well.

As we talk about international students having to learn new digital ecology and digital behaviours that domestic students are already used to, this inherently puts one group of students behind. Talking everyone through the LMS subject and thinking carefully about which digital tools I use put these students on a more even footing.

Like many equity practices, though, it benefits other students as well. It helps them get used to different ways of navigating digital spaces, and it reduces extraneous cognitive load for everyone. And this benefits all students.

We have to remember that as lecturers and professors, we also have different ways of approaching and communicating with students, and it's not consistent across all professors. That's why it's good to manage those expectations from the beginning.