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In the second part of our series on Learning Management Systems (LMS), we will particularly focus on the benefits and long-term leveraging for learners and instructors. A recap of what LMS are: they are electronic learning and development platforms used by organizations/corporations, schools, and tertiary learning institutions to deliver learning materials, courses, and programmes to people. In the 21st century, LMS are cloud-based, i.e. they are managed and hosted online so they are live and dynamic.

Cost and Efficiency

LMS have been in use for decades and have been popular with companies as they have proven to be a cost-effective way to help staff develop new skills and provide training for new business needs. The efficiency of a corporate LMS is that staff can do training and courses onsite, from their desks – there is no need for staff to leave the office to attend lectures or seminars at another location, this saves time which can be used productively for work; a trainer/instructor does not need to be contracted to deliver seminars; many more users can attend training without causing disruptions to the business and attendance can be staggered without needing to consider the availability of an instructor; managers and the human resources team can access attendance records, participation information and see grades. For people upgrading their skills using an LMS, there is much greater control over when and how you study. Your timetable is not dictated by the operating times of the learning institution or when an instructor is available. There is no need to travel to a training venue which saves time, energy, and cost. Your ability to track your learning progress, record feedback, and re-do parts of courses that you struggled with or didn’t fully understand the first time all greatly improves. LMS allow the student to have greater control over their learning pace and strengths.

Design

With LMS such as the one hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) – see part 1 of our LMS series –  the smart design is geared towards helping you plan, manage and observe your learning journey to align to a career path. Previously, where you may have sought the help of a career guidance counselor or mentor, you can now work with your LMS to plot a training journey to develop the skills you require for your chosen career or vocation. With a system like AWS, which is connected to various other cloud platforms where new data and information is constantly becoming available, your options will be informed by the latest developments in the field you are interested in, in real-time. This is an exciting prospect, still relatively new in how LMS are designed, where the Internet of Things and unprecedented access to knowledge assets allow us to intelligently plot our continuous learning journeys.

No Contact

More schools and universities are utilizing LMS, catapulted by the need to have low- and no-contact learning environments as required by the global lockdowns in 2020. While many schools and institutions have long had LMS to manage course resources, there has been a major shift in how reliant they are on their LMS and the extent to which they are being used. We have seen up to 100% of classes being conducted on LMS such as Google Classroom, with all lesson presentations, learner interactions, virtual face-to-face time with the teacher, assessments, and student results conducted on the LMS. This fundamental and fast shift, driven by necessity, has been a period of rapid prototyping, provided a laboratory for understanding how artificial intelligence can be utilized in every day, for things we consider mundane.

Participation

For learners and students, and where parents and guardians are involved in the learner’s performance, there is a greater measure of control and accountability from all parties involved. Learner participation, engagement and delivery of work is managed and recorded on the LMS. Teachers’ lesson presentations are available for use even outside of the lesson time and the class session can be recorded. Assessments are conducted, marked and graded, recorded and made available on the LMS for all stakeholders to review.

Real-World Practices

One of the best benefits to students and instructors working on a LMS is that they are engaging real-world practices. More and more professional work is shifting to a cloud-based, fast-paced, virtually connected global environment where people are interacting more frequently through virtual spaces and platforms. The soft and technical skills required to perform in such an environment used to be learned at university or on the job. However, more and more we are seeing young learners mastering this way of working in the world. With suitable access to data, we will see the opening of spaces and opportunities for more people from different backgrounds to quality education and accredited and professional programmes. What we will need to see in South Africa, for this to be made a reality that is equally available to all young people, is a strong political will in the government to drive digital equality and integrity and innovation amongst tech and telecommunications companies to deliver cheap, reliable data across geographies and demographies.

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge management is a broad discipline that has many applications. Businesses have to practice some form of knowledge management in order to be efficient, though some are haphazard about it and thus experience inefficiencies and losses due to poor knowledge management. In short, it is a collection of practices – strategic and operational – that enables organizations to collect, organize, store and recall information and reflect on past and present practices and experiences in the business to plan their future actions. The last part is key for successful knowledge management because its purpose is to effect well-informed decision-making to lead to successful actions. In short knowledge management is identifying, gathering, reflecting on and telling stories. History, archaeology, publishing, libraries and the field of Information Systems are all forms of knowledge management

Personal knowledge management, as discussed in a previous post, can be a personal practice that helps you develop better planning and decision-making processes. It has four essential elements: data that is organized and information that is compiled; human reflection or artificial intelligence analytics for building knowledge; secure storage and the capacity to recall data, information and knowledge. Data is a collection of facts in their raw form – unorganized, unrefined and uncontextualized. Information is data that has been organized, refined and contextualized. Knowledge develops from the processing of information through sentient thought or artificial intelligence, to draw conclusions and forecasts to guide our decision-making. Think about military-based action movies where they’ve spoken about gathering intelligence, and then plans of action are made and executed based on that intelligence. That’s an example of data (collection), information and knowledge. Afterwards when reports are written and filed, the work reviewed and further and wider knowledge is built based on an aggregation of information, actions, knowledge and records – that is knowledge management.

WAYS TO DO PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

There are several tools and techniques one can utilize to do personal knowledge management. Journaling, keeping notebooks, creating digital notes and files, and personal online channels are a few of the options.  A system called the bullet journal method was created by Ryder Carroll.

He designed it over time as a tool to help him be more productive because he had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). He found that when he was a child and university student, there were not enough resources available to help people with ADD to organize their thoughts and actions and block out distractions. It has become a widely popular phenomenon used by millions of people around the world. With the bullet journal technique, you focus your thoughts and actions on one quiet, uninterrupted analog space – your journal – to work on focusing on those things that are the most important to you. Carroll says the idea of the bullet journal “is to track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future.” A brief overview of how the method works: create index system at the start of your notebook so that you can write down the page and topic references; set out a section called “future log” and number the pages – write the page numbers and section name into the index;  set up a monthly log, followed by daily logs and number the pages and note those pages in the index section. Write in the journal every day to track your activities and make future plans. Read through past entries and notes to reflect on what you planned on doing, what you accomplished, and what future plans still need to be actioned. You can watch a detailed tutorial below, that Carrol gives, to get step by step instructions.

Subject or priority specific notebooks or digital files are a tried and tested method for keeping a record of things of interest or importance. The benefit is that you can keep all information regarding a particular area of interest in one place and have extensive details on it. For example, if you are interested in management information systems (MIS) all the articles that you read and download and notes you make can be saved in a single MIS folder. When you need to access information on this subject, you know where to find your resources and you can easily search them. If you are keeping digital files on a personal device or the cloud, you can save different formats such as text, images, video, and audio resources in one location. You can tag websites and pages of interest by bookmarking them so that you can access the information as you need it. For your digital filing system make sure you use a good naming convention so that they are easy to remember and search. If you like to do things old-school, having various notebooks for subject-specific notes is very useful. Numerous studies have shown that the act of handwriting improves our ability to recall information we’ve recorded. Label your notebooks according to the subject you are writing about, e.g. Sustainable Urban Development notebook, and then every time you read on the subject and attend events and seminars or travel to different urban locales you can make notes in that specific book. Over time, as you collect notes, pictures, names of resources, etc. you will build expert-level information in addition to building your own levels of experience and knowledge.

One can use short-term or temporary tools such as white boards, bulletin boards, concept boards and vision boards for more highly specific activities. All of these boards can be rendered digitally or produced as analogue, tactile resources that you physically add notes, pictures and samples to. Such boards help you (and your team if it is a shared resource) to see the future goal, track the current situation and the past activities you have delivered.

There are great social media tools that can act as repositories for knowledge assets. Consider YouTube, you can build up an amazing portfolio of work if you do videos on your area of interest. Someone who loves cooking and eating different kinds of food can create a channel where they post videos about their own recipes, amazing meals they’ve had at friends, family, and restaurants. If they travel they can create food vlogs of the new dishes they’ve had and the ingredients they’ve discovered. Their channel will contain a wealth of information for themselves and their viewers as well as track the progression of their expertise in food and travel.

WHY IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SIGNIFICANT?

Personal knowledge management helps one to be intentional, informed, and equipped to make well-informed decisions. By building a solid foundation of assets and resources related to your personal, academic, and professional interests you are equipping yourself to become an expert in those areas. By organizing and cataloging a record of your activities and achievements in these fields along with having a library (digital and/or physical) of related resources, you will have a bank of knowledge and evidence of your expertise. This of course takes time to build up, knowledge management is not static. Like learning it is ongoing and ever-changing, you accumulate knowledge artifacts and systems on the foundations of what you did before. We leave you with three core benefits of practicing personal knowledge management: it helps you to get into and build the habit of regular reflection; you will be able to clearly identify the things that interest you and the things you are passionate about, eventually being intentional about what you prioritize for learning, action and growth will lead to expert levels of knowledge and skills.