A learning management system (LMS) is a useful tool for many educators to disseminate course projects, house student grades and act as a communication tool between professors and students. But with the recent shift to online learning as a result of COVID school closures, the limitations of many popular LMS systems became highlighted. Professors aren’t just looking for a tool to post student grades and assignments, professors need tools that help bolster student engagement outside of the classroom.
Kritik can easily integrate with major LMS providers, so we’re going to run-down how Kritik can enhance your LMS to benefit your students’ learning experience both inside and outside of the classroom.
Increasing student engagement
One of the key issues that has arisen as a result of online learning has been the learning gap incurred as a result of demotivated students. With many educators opting for asynchronous learning as an approach to online learning, students are often left on their own to navigate course materials. Without proper instruction & feedback on assignments submitted, students have felt disengaged with course materials. In a recent study we undertook, we found that over 80% of students want more personalized feedback on their assignments, and nearly 83% of them would be inclined to continue with online learning if their schools invested in technology that gave them the feedback they needed.
Unfortunately, engagement approaches such as personalized feedback is not something an LMS can offer. Let's look at how Kritik can integrate personalized feedback into your LMS effectively.
Personalized feedback with your LMS
One of the best options for increased personalized feedback that does not incur more time grading and assessing for professors is peer assessment. Kritik allows students to evaluate each other's work & provide feedback so each student can learn how to improve or gain new perspectives from unique viewpoints. While some LMS platforms offer peer assessment, Kritik’s anonymous peer review & ‘feedback on feedback’ are two features that are unique and help drive student engagement.
Krik’s anonymous peer feedback tool enables them to offer personalized feedback. This in-turn, reduces bias and ensures overall legitimacy of the feedback. Alongside anonymous feedback, Kritik’s ‘feedback on feedback’ feature ensures students are able to provide comments on the evaluations that they have received. This ensures that students are developing a skill-set in learning how to properly evaluate new ideas which helps increase their critical thinking skills.
Team-based learning
In an effort to save time, many instructors may move to summative forms of assessment such as multiple choice tests or quizzes, however, students do not benefit from memorization tasks. When applied to Bloom’s Taxonomy, the need to move beyond simply memorizing facts is implicit. Students need to harness their understanding of course concepts and apply them to real-world problems to find unique solutions. One way to do this is through team-based learning, which groups students together to solve complex problems. Unfortunately, many LMS platforms do not offer the ability to integrate teams effectively. Not only can Kritik allow teams to submit assessments, it can even group the students together so professors don’t need to allocate time to creating teams.
Motivating students to produce better work
LMS platforms are simply repositories of information, the need to help guide students to create better work is something that technology has a role to play. With Kritik, students are motivated to produce high quality work as each student is presented with an evaluation score, which is a score relative to how accurate that student’s evaluation is. Kritik ensures students are grading fairly and accurately, so professors can devote less time to student assessment and more time for one-on-one’s with students to address their learning needs directly.
As the fall term begins, many educators will be using an LMS – some for the first time – take this opportunity to create unique and lasting learning experiences that go beyond just standard technology. Online learning is tough for both students & educators, but introducing technology that has the ability to enhance student learning is an addition that would make your students online learning more enjoyable and impactful.
