A range of learning management systems (LMS) , both commercial and open-source, are available to educators. This section will discuss the pros and cons of a few popular LMS, including LMES, the system previously used by HKUST, Canvas, a commercial learning management solution currently used by different institutions such as HKUST
Instructure, Moodle, an open-source LMS used by nearly one million users
Moodle in the world, in terms of the way how the course materials are managed and presented, and the important plug-ins that facilitate effective learning.
One of the feature most commonly used by student is the repository of course materials
Costa 2012. In LMES and Canvas, this feature is implemented as file systems where the course instructors can upload files such as presentation slides and supplementary notes to the course directory accessible to but not modifiable by students. While file systems are easy to implement, from the learner’s perspective, it may take some time to find materials that are unorganised, as Figure 1 shows. Furthermore, due to the tree-like structure of file systems, it is impossible to link up the related content except by putting them under the same directory. As a consequence, students may need to search the whole directory just to locate, for example, the prerequisite information for a particular topic.