What do university students expect from teachers using an LMS?

Abstract

In October 2006, a survey was conducted at an Australian university that was aimed at gaining student feedback on future and current IT services. Two questions were specifically targeted at finding out about students’ use of the university’s central Learning Management System (LMS). The LMS being used at that time was Blackboard (Bb) version 6.3. While one question asked whether or not students used the system (N=6,724), the second question invited them to comment on what they liked and disliked about the LMS (N=4,538). The latter question elicited rich qualitative data that was analysed using two methods. Initial themes were noted through a manual analysis and then data was run through a software program called Leximancer. This program analysed the conceptual structure of the data. While some themes related to student preferences around the LMS itself, a great deal of the data was linked to the ways the system was being used by university teachers. Student expectations around teacher use of the LMS form the focus of this paper and consequential challenges and future directions for staff development are considered.