Learning and Teaching in Practice/Designing blended learning/Blended learning tools

Learning management systems
With the move to blended learning, it's useful to have a central online 'home' for every course. This will provide a single point of access to all the online communication, resources and activities. Most educational organisations have one or more such systems that they support. Although there are benefits from using a variety of systems, a major advantage of a single standardised system is that staff and students don't need to learn how to use different systems.

A Learning management system (LMS) is an online system specifically designed to provide centralised 'homes' for courses, and typically have a wide range of tools for learning methods and approaches.

Many online publishing platforms such as blogs and wikis can be used as an 'alternative' LMS. They typically have fewer tools specifically designed for learning and teaching online, but may have other advantages depending on the context.

You might like to review the earlier section on online and distance learning for more information about learning management systems and their alternatives.

Communication, interaction and collaboration
An LMS such as Moodle will normally provide a range of tools for communication, interaction and collaboration. Typically these are primarily asynchronous with limited provision for synchronous interaction.

More powerful synchronous tools may be provided as an add-in to the LMS or as a separate platform. For example, Otago Polytechnic uses Adobe Connect (a virtual classroom) to provide the synchronous interaction not supported by Moodle.