A learning management system (LMS) is the software where each course of a school or college lives online. Teachers post notes, recorded lectures and assignments there. Students submit their work, take quizzes and see their marks. The LMS marks multiple-choice quizzes automatically. It is also called a course site or a virtual learning environment (VLE). Many Indian colleges run Moodle, an open-source LMS, or use Google Classroom.
Consider a lecturer who teaches Financial Accounting to 180 B.Com. students at a college in Indore. On Monday, she uploads her notes and a 25-minute recorded lecture to the course page. She sets an assignment due on Friday, and a quiz of 20 multiple-choice questions, with one mark for each question. The LMS picks the 20 questions at random from a question bank of 60, so students sitting next to each other see different questions. By Friday night, 172 students have taken the quiz. The LMS has already marked every attempt. It shows her that 64% of the students got the question on depreciation wrong. So she spends the first ten minutes of Monday's class explaining depreciation again.
The assignment works differently. Students upload a PDF file, and the LMS records the time of each upload. A file uploaded after the deadline is marked late. The lecturer writes comments and a mark on each file inside the LMS. Many LMSs also compare each file with other students' files and with pages on the web, to find copied text.
The LMS does not decide who is in the course. The student information system (SIS) sends it the list of students enrolled in each course. At the end of the term, the LMS sends the internal marks back to the SIS, which records them officially.
Course material often comes from outside the college. A publisher may build a complete course on a digital content platform for education, and colleges add it to their own LMS. For tests that count towards the final grade, an LMS can work with online proctoring, which uses the webcam to check that the person taking the test is the registered student.
An LMS for a college is different from an LMS for companies. A college LMS is built around terms, classes and marks. A company LMS assigns compulsory training to employees, such as a course on data privacy, and tracks who has finished it.
The newest change is AI. Some LMSs now add an AI tutor, which answers a student's questions about the course at any hour, using the lecturer's own notes.