Focus Groups
In November of 2017, Academic Technologies, in conjunction with the Learning Management System Committee, held nine focus groups, inviting participation from faculty, staff, and students and from the College, the Graduate School, and the Professional Schools. Seventy seven people participated.
We used the Nominal Group Technique to conduct the focus groups and asked the following two questions:
- What are the strengths in the current LMS system, Sakai?
- What are the biggest teaching/learning challenges that you currently face, related to use of the LMS, or things you wish it could do for you, in a perfect world, that the current system doesn’t?
All answers were shared, then participants were asked to identify the ones most important to them in order to rank the answers overall. (Detailed results by focus group are available in the Focus Group Summary Sheets link below.)
It became clear that from the end user perspective, the LMS is not just the software. It is the policies surrounding its implementation, the integrations with other systems, the support and training available, accessibility of staff support, etc.available, the local staff, etc.
The following themes emerged as either highly valued in the current system or desired in any future system.
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- Automation AND Autonomy – What can be automated should be but they also wanted to be able to do as much as possible themselves without technical help, such as make guest accounts, embed media, customize the look and feel.
- Administrative Integration – Whatever system we use should be integrated tightly with course catalog and student registration systems, so as to automate site creation and automatic adjustments of student enrollment.
- Functional Integration – Voicethread, Adobe Spark, ePortfolios, and other third party software should be integrated as fully as possible, including assignments and gradebook links.
- Multimedia Tools – Streaming servers should be integrated and multimedia content creation capability, from within the LMS, should be possible, including the ability to assign meta data and organize content and
- Google Integration – The Google drive, calendar, classroom, and collaborative editing applications such as Doc, Sheets, Slides, and Forms should be integrated into the system.
- Flexibility – Faculty wanted to retain the flexibility they now have for project sites and guest access as well as new capability that would allow things such as alternative assessment strategies like specifications based grading.
- Mobile Friendly
- More Support and Training – This included offering learning opportunities in more modalities than currently available, such as rich online self service materials as well as online training.
Participants expressed a desire to have faculty more effectively and consistently adopt the LMS, resulting in more consistent and advanced use by faculty. Please review the presentation given to CIT after the focus groups for more information. The results of this exercise informed the Needs Assessment.