Implementation of Sharepoint LMS at Skive Business College – from a teacher’s perspective

Introduction

In the autumn of 2007, Skive Business College decided to phase out its year-long Learning Management System, Blackboard. One reason was the high operating costs, another one the system’s limited pedagogical scope and a third one its limited teacher user-friendliness.The Management Team of the Business College soon formed a committee of which I, as a representative of all the teachers, became a member. This committee wrote down a number of important criteria for a new IT platform. For limited space reasons, I will not focus on all the criteria, but only on the most important one, meaning one entry to all the Business College’s various IT systems. This criterion prompted us to contact Microsoft to explore their SharePoint facility and, as a natural consequence and a logical extension of this software, our attention was attracted to SharePoint LMS.

Implementation phase

SharePoint LMS has been quite easy to implement among the teachers at this Business College as both the tool and the structure are identical with those in SharePoint. In practice, this means that my colleagues have learned to use most of the tools they will be using later in SharePoint LMS. These tools are file and document management, calendar events, announcements, quizzes etc. Besides, all the software used for the file management is the same as the one they know from MS Office – which means they were confident using the system right from the beginning. Besides, SharePoint LMS is in essential aspects similar to Blackboard whose inconveniences have been weeded out in SharePoint LMS. From the school IT department we have only good news: fast and efficient support when ever needed and they really like the preconfigured Web Parts for MySite templates and the Blackboard course converter.

Introduction of the Business College’s pedagogical staff – the teachers

At Skive Business College we offered all the teachers two separate courses, a total of five 45-minute lessons with hands-on instruction. This was sufficient to motivate them to start working with SharePoint LMS. On the basis of the SharePoint LMS manual, which comes with the system, we made our own instruction manual targeted at the teachers. This turned out to be an excellent idea and paved the way for the teachers’ immediate acceptance.

Sharepoint LMS functions

SharePoint LMS has all the functions that one can dream of in a modern LMS system. These include designing learning paths, saving documents in databases and linking to courses in SharePoint LMS. In short, it offers a fantastic communication options, ranging from chat and forum to virtual communication with the students. Also, Sharepoint LMS offers handing in of student assignments, using the digital Dropbox with immediate plagiarism control. It also offers homework management, management of calendar events etc. At the same time, the system offers excellent statistics on student performances, ranging from test results to the use of the various LMS tools. This is super because you only have to log in once to access all the functions in SharePoint – including your own documents, Outlook mail account, blogs, pictures and information from the institution you work for. It is also the first time both teachers and students at the Business College can use the system every day, and I have even seen that our students are reading their emails when they are checking their list of homework and individual assignment deadlines in SharePoint LMS…

Because of my above experience I would not hesitate to recommend SharePoint LMS as a highly useful LMS system featuring all the latest functions which will benefit not only teachers and students, but all users of this system and enhance learning!

Henrik BundgaardSecondary School Teacher at Skive Business College(Subjects: Sales & International economics)