Critical Review of a CMS

I will be reviewing the CMS that I use for my work since I am most familiar with it, it is called Connexus. Here is a picture of what my homepage looks like and also the menu bar.

There are many different features offered in Connexus, and I have chosen the ones that I use most often to review: Enrollments, Announcements, Webmail, People, Student Activity Tracker, Gradebook and Assessments. I will explain more about each of these features below.

Enrollments: The Enrollments page gives information about my students. It tells me who my students are, when they began the course, if they have a special status (IEP, 504 plan etc.), and it shares data about students’ progress and pace. I use this page to see when I have new students who have started so I can send them the appropriate welcome information, to view students IEPS, and also which students are failing, at risk of failing or are behind which helps me with who to contact each day. One of the affordances of this page is that along with listing which students are failing, etc., I can click a button right there to send the student a webmail. I can’t think of any constraints from this page, or anything missing that I wish was there, it is well designed and very useful. The most valuable feature for assessing my students is being able to get an overview of student’s grades and their progress in my course.

Announcements: Announcements is a feature that can be used to share announcements with students, for example if I will be out of the office, an update about an assignment or a reminder about a Live Lesson session to review for a test. I can send announcements to all of my sections or select to certain sections to send them to.  Announcements are nice because there is a box on students home page (see picture here) that tells students when they have an announcement to view, so they are easy to see. One constraint is that there is nothing requiring students to view them. Although they are very easy to see, it is a student’s choice whether to click on it or not. This feature can’t necessarily be used for assessment, there is no two-way communication back from students, it is mostly just a means of sharing information with students.

Webmail: Webmail is a tool that students and teachers can use to contact each other. I use this feature daily to let students know about opportunities for making improvements to an assignment, to share resources, to reach out about their progress or to schedule meetings to practice math problems together and to discuss strategies for success. Our CMS is only a couple of years old, and there are a few constraints with webmail. The first is that there is not a webmail button on the home page that notifies students when they have something in their inbox (like the announcements does). Students must remember to go to the menu bar and open their webmail every day to see our messages. Also, at this time parents do not have accounts or access to Connexus, so they are unable to send teachers webmails, aside from through their students account. I was not able to find any information on terms of service or privacy policy for Connexus, however this issue seems to fall in that category and this is a concern for parents who wish to be able to contact their children’s teachers by email without their students viewing the message.

People: This page lists all of my students in alphabetical order, and it shows their score and progress in my course along with page and performance indicators (see picture here, I did not include student names). The flag indicates if the student has an IEP or some other special status. I can also click on each student’s name to access their gradebook for my course to view all of their assignments and scores. I probably use my People page more than any other feature in Connexus because it best helps me to stay organized and track information about my student’s grades and progress, and it allows me to get to their gradebooks. One missed opportunity that I see from this feature is that we can only view a student’s gradebook in our course, we cannot view their gradebooks for other courses to get a picture about how students are doing overall. This would be really helpful to learn about why my students are struggling in my course; if they are struggling in all of their courses or if they are just struggling in math.

Student Activity Tracker: Each contact that students have with a teacher, including phone calls, webmails, Live Lesson attendance, etc. is tracked in the Student Activity Tracker. Students can also add comments in the activity tracker to note any changes that have been made to the course for that student, to note an academic integrity issues and anything else that is important to track about the student. One affordance of this feature is that all of a student’s teachers can view the activity tracker. Whenever I am trying to gather information about a student, along with checking their gradebook I also check the activity tracker to see how often they communicate with their other teachers or attend lessons. This is useful for assessing students because it shows me if there might be a lack of engagement issue with students if teachers have been making attempts to reach them and the student has not been responding. It also allows me to determine if a student is on the right track and communicates frequently with their teachers.

The activity tracker also gives a student’s phone number and location. This is useful information to know what time zone the student is in and also how to contact them. There are some missed opportunities on the activity tracker regarding information that isn’t included that would be useful for teachers. This doesn’t necessarily involve assessment, however it be helpful for teachers to know gender of the student, the parents’ names, and what type of phone number is listed, for example student cell, parent cell, etc. This information is not included and it would be nice to have this information when preparing to call a student.

Gradebook: A students gradebook is probably one of the best features (aside from actual assessments), that allows me to assess my students’ progress. The gradebook shows the students overall score, and also the score they earn on each assessment, the target due date for each assessment and the date each assessment is submitted. There are two views for the gradebook: Syllabus Order lists the assignments in order, and Grading Categories sorts each assignment by type. I can also excuse assignments from the gradebook if I wish to drop an assignment for a student for any reason. One constraint of the gradebook which I mentioned under the People Page feature is that I can only view a student’s gradebook in my course. Connexus should allow teachers to view the gradebook for all of a student’s courses to help us better serve students and also to be able to more easily collaborate with other teachers who share a student.

Assessments: Connexus uses the following type of assessments: Discussions (including a discussion board), Portfolio Items and Sample Work (includes a drop box), Quick Checks and Practice assignments (short 5 problem multiple choice assessments), Quizzes and Tests (multiple choice, short answer and work pad problems which allow students to show their work), and lastly Reflection assignments (multiple choice and short answer problems). Connexus does a good job of using a variety of different assessment types throughout a course in order to assess students. I truly feel that as a teacher I am able to look at a student’s assessment and get a really good idea about their understanding on each concept. Of course it is important to also communicate with a student synchronously, but these assessments are a very good indicator of student understanding.

There are however a couple of constraints in terms of assessment that come to mind. First, it would be really useful if an assessment would track how long it took a student to complete, and have this information available for teachers when students view an assessment after it has been completed. This would be helpful for me to see how long my students are spending on each of their assignments, because in many cases in an online setting students tend to click through assessments very fast. Also, a lot of students like to write out their work on paper. On quizzes and tests students are required to show their work on work pad problems, and there are functions aside from typing such as equations and symbols that aid students in doing this, however I would like to see a place where students can upload their work if they prefer to submit the work they did on paper instead of typing it out also.