Learning Management Systems

What is a Learning Management System?

A learning management system (LMS) is a software service that brings together a number of key instructional practices: the collaborative development of curriculum and units of instruction, the collection and sharing of resources, management of day-to-day interaction with students, and delivery of assessments--including formative, summative, and benchmark--with provision for analysis of student performance. It's a one-stop shop that makes these functions accessible under one single login on one platform. It also facilitates sharing best practices across the organization.

What can an LMS do?

  • Collects all student work in a single view with common calendar.
  • Often through a separate add-on, can support delivery of benchmark assessments with analysis at school and district level with ability to disaggregate results. Depending on the platform, an LMS can support selection of test-bank items by standard.
  • Support selection of instructional resources (including Open Education Resources) by standards. Can be of special value to grades subjects for which we might not have provided commercial resources.
  • Enables instructional frameworks to be developed by master teachers and shared across the district. Likewise units can be developed and shared within schools and across the district.
  • Depending on the LMS platform, can support grade writeback to the Infinite Campus gradebook.
  • Many platforms track student progress with a data dashboard that shows student progress on standards
  • Supports access from a wide variety of devices.
  • Provides a view by instructional leaders into student performance in any and all classes.
  • Supports the intake of instructional resources through a standard called Common Cartridge I.E. a complete set of digital resources, such as the Illustrative Math OER curriculum, could be easily imported in to an LMS and then be available as a resource to be assigned in whole or part to students.
  • Through another standard called LTI, enables direct linking to resources to which the school system has rights so that students never have to leave the LMS. LTI exists for such resources as GALE Resources (media center resources) and Edmentum/Study Island

How are other LMS different from Google Classroom?

This might be a tiny bit dated, but here is a presentation on LMS vs Google Classroom that might be helpful.

Team Other LMS

  • One drawback of Google Classroom is that teachers operate in separate silos without access to common resources.
  • Google Classroom also lacks analytics on student performance.
  • Most LMS provide an administrative overview that shows student progress and analytics on usage of the platform.
  • With Google's new support for LTI, Google Drive and the familiar Google tools can be brought into other LMS.
  • Mirrors the LMS students are likely to use in post-secondary education.


One teacher's take on Canvas vs Google Classroom can be found here:

“5 Reasons I Started Using Canvas Instead of Google Classroom .” The Rhetor's Toolbox, 1 July 2017, rhetorstoolbox.com/2017/06/24/5-reasons-i-started-using-canvas-instead-of-google-classroom/.

Team Google

  • Included in our free G Suite for Education.
  • Integrates well with Google tools because, duh.
  • Several sites support the Share to Google Classroom api to easily bring other content into Classroom.
  • Google Classroom continues to improve.