What is an LMS?

Key takeaways:

• An LMS is software that helps educational institutions organize their learning in one place.
• Common LMS features include tools for course management, assessments, assignments, progression reports, and file sharing.
• An LMS is not the same as a virtual classroom. LMSs manage courses, whereas virtual classrooms are where educators deliver their teaching.
• Tutors usually use both an LMS and a virtual classroom together for the smoothest possible teaching experience.

What is an LMS?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a platform educators use to organize and manage learning. Instead of managing multiple spreadsheets, email chains, and assessment tools at once, an LMS brings all these separate tools together in one place. 

When they first started gaining popularity, LMSs were primarily used by larger educational institutions like schools and universities. Today, however, they prove just as valuable for smaller organizations like tutoring businesses, online academies, and coaching companies. 

For tutors, especially, an LMS is a boon for reducing the large amount of administrative work required to keep things running. When lesson materials, assignments, grades, and communication all live in one place, tutors spend less time managing logistics and more time helping students learn.

LMS features

If you’ve ever taken an online course through Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, or Google Classroom, then you’ve already used an LMS before. 

In most cases, one LMS will likely differ slightly from the next. Overall, however, platforms usually share a core set of LMS features, all of which facilitate easier teaching and student support for educational institutions. 

Across major platforms, the most common features that tutoring organizations prioritize are:

Course management

LMSs help tutors to build more structured courses. Lessons can be categorized into different modules, topics, or units, which makes it significantly easier for students to follow a clear learning path.

Assignment and assessment tools

The majority of LMS platforms have tools that facilitate the creation of quizzes, homework, assignments, and assessments that students can complete online, directly inside the LMS. Depending on the tutors’ needs, these assignments can either be graded automatically or by hand.

Progress tracking

One of the primary reasons tutoring organizations seek out LMSs is for monitoring student progress. Educators will use their LMS to see students’ completed lessons, test scores, attendance, and overall course completion rates from a simple dashboard.

Resource library

Rather than manually sending out worksheets or revision notes to students by email, tutors can simply upload all the necessary learning resources directly to the LMS. This way, students will always know where they can find lesson recordings, study guides, practice exercises, and additional reading.

Communication tools

Many learning management systems include means to deliver announcements, messages, or notifications to students. This helps tutors maintain communication with their students between lessons.

Reporting and analytics

Keeping an eye on dozens or even hundreds of students becomes increasingly difficult as tutoring organizations scale over time. This makes reporting tools especially valuable in terms of the insights they offer regarding learners’ engagement, course completion, assessment performance, and attendance. With them, tutors can quickly spot the students that need extra support.

It’s important to note that not every tutor will need every single one of these features. An independent tutor that only deals with a handful of students will likely only need a simple course structure and a place to upload resources. A large tutoring organisation, on the other hand, would likely need to rely much more heavily on features like analytics, reporting, automated enrolment, and integrations with other educational tools.

With this in mind, the best LMS is the one that can support your unique teaching load without making it more complicated than it needs to be.

What’s the difference between an LMS and a virtual classroom?

Although you’ll often hear virtual classrooms and LMSs referred to together or in similar contexts, they aren’t the same thing.

An LMS helps you manage everything that happens before, during, and after a course. It’s where your students will enrol, access their learning materials, submit and/or complete their assignments, and track their progress over time.

A virtual classroom, by contrast, is where actual teaching happens. It’s built for live classes: tutors and students communicate through video and audio, while simultaneously using digital educational tools for everyday classroom activities.

Feature-by-feature, virtual classroom software will differ quite drastically from LMS software.

Despite the slight overlap in some features, overarchingly, the two cover two completely different facets of education: course management and course delivery. As such, many tutoring organizations will use both an LMS and a virtual classroom together, rather than choose one over the other.

Pencil Spaces is built specifically for live online teaching, and it integrates with a range of popular LMSs. Built-in features like the infinite whiteboard, breakout rooms, collaborative apps, lesson recordings, and engagement analytics perfectly complement the organizational tools that LMSs provide. 

By using your preferred LMS in tandem with Pencil Spaces, you can offer the most complete, professional online teaching workflow to both your students and your tutors.

Frequently asked questions

Can an LMS host live classes?

Some learning management systems include built-in video conferencing, whereas others integrate with dedicated virtual classroom platforms. Although these features are becoming more common, many educators still prefer to use a specialist virtual classroom. This is because they tend to offer teaching-focused tools (e.g., interactive whiteboards, collaborative activities, breakout rooms, lesson recordings, etc.) that LMSs don’t.

Do I need an LMS and a virtual classroom?

If you’re an independent tutor that only teaches a small number of students, a virtual classroom may provide everything you need to run your business. As your tutoring business grows, however, an LMS will make it easier to manage common administrative tasks. This is why many tutoring organizations combine an LMS with a virtual classroom to get the best of both worlds.

What LMS features matter most for tutors?

Most tutors benefit from a learning management system that includes course and lesson organization, assignment and assessment tools, and progress tracking. 

If you regularly teach live online lessons, then it’d also be worthwhile choosing an LMS that integrates seamlessly with your preferred virtual classroom software. Pencil Spaces integrates with multiple LMSs, allowing tutors to manage their courses while delivering interactive lessons through software designed specifically for online teaching.

Bring your LMS to life with Pencil Spaces. With seamless integrations for multiple LMS platforms, plus interactive teaching tools, Pencil Spaces gives tutors and tutoring organizations everything they need to deliver exceptional online learning. Try Pencil Spaces for free today, or book a free demo to see how it works alongside your existing LMS.