Which LMS? Choosing between Canvas, Haiku, Edmodo, et al.

Canvas has really nice feedback features. Haiku offers the most powerful way to lay out and organize your online content.

Learning Management Solutions (LMSes –  or Virtual Learning Environments,  VLEs,  if you’re in the commonwealth) are a category of software that serve a variety of functions at schools,  from simplifying content distribution and assignment collection to flipping classroom workflows to delivering instruction completely online. The International schools I’ve been at have broadly agreed that teachers should use some kind of LMS.  They diverge in two key areas,  though:

1. Whether the LMS should be centrally mandated managed by the school or whether teachers should feel free to pick and choose the platform they use
2. If the LMS is centrally managed,  which system it should be

Centrally managed LMSes offer enough advantages over individually-managed ones that schools should provide them if financially able (pricing is in the range of 8-10USD per student annually for most commercial products). This runs counter to what some ed tech leaders recommend; they see such implementations as “walled gardens” having “limited control and customizability.1Continue reading Which LMS? Choosing between Canvas, Haiku, Edmodo, et al.