What is a Course Management System? Benefits of Course Management for Higher Education

The implementation of NEP 2020 is creating opportunities for new methods of teaching such as OBE, CBE, and others in the institutes. These new ways are majorly focused on building students’ skills, encouraging research, and making students ready for the future. They also ensure improvements in students’ cognitive skills.

Further, the implementation of the Academic Bank of Credits to operate and encourage the credit-based system is also creating a need for a systematic method to manage the course syllabus for every student. The credit-based system allows every student to choose subjects and courses of their choice from different institutes and get certified for the same.

Handling a large number of students studying different subjects, and attempting different exams is quite a task for the institutes. Further, it becomes difficult for the students to reach out to every teacher for syllabus, assignments, and exam curriculum.

However, managing the courses and syllabus can be made easier with a Course Management System.

Purpose of Course Management System

• Automate the process of management in institutes
• Manage student performance and progress data
• Enable collaboration among students virtually
• Help the institute to implement E-Learning
• Plan and deliver educational content to students

Benefits of Course Management System in Higher Education

1. Monitoring Students Progress and Performance

A large number of students are handled by the teachers. The teacher can keep track of students’ performance, attendance, grades, and extracurricular activities, and give them the required feedback. Handling such a large database of students and tracking their records as well as teaching them well is a tedious task for the teacher.

However, the implementation of a course management system is likely to make their job easier. The online course management system keeps track of all the student activities, performance with respect to the subjects and exams, questions, and others.

Every student can access statistics of their weak subjects and the teacher can guide the students by referring to the same information.

2. Enables E-learning

The course management system has been proving to be a savior for the institutes in managing distance learning. Distance learning involves managing several students by the institutes remotely.

The course management system helps the faculty members to upload all the important information such as exam dates, course syllabus, and others. The data is fed in a dedicated space on the software. It saves them from emailing and messaging every student and conveying the message later than required.

Further, it helps the students to download all the notes, syllabus, and documents. The students can also upload their assignments, papers, and personal documents which can be accessed by the faculty members. Hence, it makes all the processes and operations of the institute smoother and easier.

3. Automation of Tasks

The course management software helps the institute to automate all the monotonous tasks and reduces the workload of the employees. It carries out all the work that requires rigorous efforts from the teachers and faculty members. This helps the teachers to focus completely on the teaching methods and help students improve their learning outcomes.

Further, the task of conducting exams, evaluating the students, and giving them performance feedback has also been reduced. It just requires minimal effort from the faculty members. Further, the system makes sure that all the data is stored and made easily accessible to the users whenever required.

4. Integration with Other Software

The course management system can be integrated with other software such as an online exam system, learning management system, student information system to fetch data and carry out other activities online. The system helps the institute in generating reports for various departments according to their needs.

These systems all together smoothen the functioning of the institute. They make faculty’s jobs easier, reduce the requirement of manpower and eliminate the need for paperwork.

5. Technologically Advanced Operations

The course management system is integrated with the latest technologies such as AI for detailed analysis of the data collected on a daily basis. It involves student data, subject performance, reports, teacher’s performance, institute’s outcomes, and software performance as well.

This helps the institutes to improve their functioning and make sound decisions based on the data reports. The statistical and analytical view of the data graphically gives exact information for easy understanding. This helps the stakeholders to make investment decisions as well.

The smart functioning of the system helps every aspect of the institute beginning from student attendance to exam reports. It helps the teachers to make necessary changes in their ways of teaching by understanding the problems faced by students.

Features of Course Management System

Integration with Other Software

The software can be integrated with other systems for better workflow

24/7 Support

The system offers 24/7 access and support to the users even on the days off

Regular Updates

The software enables the admin to give regular updates and notices on the portal

Mobile/Laptop Access

The system can be accessed using mobile and laptop as per user’s convenience

High Security

The software is based on cloud platform offering high security and safe backup

Enables E-learning

The system enables the institute to implement e-learning activities

Course Management System Vs Learning Management System

Course management system is majorly focused on delivering the educational content and courses to the students whereas learning management software helps to manage the exams, courses, classes and several other aspects.

Course management system is the main function of a learning management system, but an LMS conducts all operations of the institute.

Course management can be used by the institute just with current operations whereas learning management software helps the institute to offer e-learning courses as well.

CMS is a smaller part of an ERP system, whereas LMS operates the entire system in an institute

Conclusion

The course management system is an extremely useful tool to handle a large number of students in a multidisciplinary approach to education. The new education system encourages ICT implementation to upgrade the methods of teaching and administration in the institutes. CMS plays an important role to digitize the basic operations of the institute and help them create an optimal management system.