Imagine if there were no chairs in this classroom. What would this space even mean anymore?

Imagine you are a student again. You have been assigned a classroom to attend your first class session of a new semester or quarter. You walk into the classroom for the first time and when you open the door, you are a bit surprised by what you see: an empty room with no chairs, no tables, no whiteboards, nothing.

The instructor hasn’t arrived yet either. You double-check the room number, confirm that you’re in the right place, and wonder what to do next. Do you sit on the floor and wait for someone with authority to arrive? Do you try to bring in a chair from another room next door? Do you just leave and say, “Well, I think I’m going to drop this class. That was a weird experience.”

This may sound like an entirely hypothetical situation, but it’s the one that a lot of our students face when they enter a new learning management system (LMS; think of websites like Canvas, D2L, or Blackboard) or class website for the first time. While not all college instructors use class websites or learning management systems, many incoming college students are used to at least looking to see if their particular instructor uses one. After all, an increasing majority of young college students will have used class websites or web resources robustly in their high school experiences (it is estimated that nearly half of the U.S.’s primary and secondary school students use the Google Suite for Education as a space for managing class documents and activities).

With these expectations and experiences in place, students may start looking for the digital “chairs” in their digital classrooms, wondering where they should settle, what they should look at, and where they should go. If a course website within a learning management system is not clear, not organized, or nonexistent, students may feel a bit like you did in the hypothetical situation: what should I be doing here? Should I even stay here?

For an instructor new to teaching – or simply new to the concept of organizing course materials online – this feeling of disorientation may seem unusual. After all, why privilege the class’s online space? Why not simply conduct the activities in class and have students use out-of-class time simply to read, write, and respond? Why complicate that process with the extra layer of something like a learning management system or website?

When I tackle this question with new instructors as a technology specialist, my answer is often as follows:

• A learning management system makes course materials accessible. Sure, you can give students paper course readers or handouts in class. You can also expect students to take copious personal notes on class discussions and take charge of their learning in those ways. However, we cannot assume that all students will always feel comfortable managing their learning experiences in those particular ways. Paper can easily get lost or damaged along with those copious, hand-written notes. Some students may find it useful to augment their reading experiences with digital PDF readers and editors, through online highlighting or annotating. I know that when I read dense, new, academic material, I rely heavily on the “ctrl+f” tool to search for particular keywords and how those keywords get used in new contexts. In other words, giving students the option to access content digitally and navigate materials in their own way is an incredible source of empowerment, not to mention that it is inclusive of students who may have disabilities, learning or otherwise. Further, a learning management system or course website gives you and your students a shared space to post notes together and work collectively on building an archive of class notes or resource that everyone can access at once.
• A learning management system makes assessment practices transparent. Many instructors are used to keeping their grading and assessment practices to themselves. They can worry that if they show students how their grades are progressing throughout the quarter, the students might get hung up on the minutiae of the grading scheme or obsessed about tracking their progress. However, concealing or keeping grading practices opaque may have entirely the same effect: students can obsess over their grades if they don’t know how they’re progressing through the quarter or they just don’t know what your grading criteria are. While a learning management system is not the only way to be transparent about how, you as an instructor, will assess student performance throughout the quarter, it is an easy way to either show students how they are doing on particular assignments and it can be a way to give you, as a new instructor, some ideas about how you may want to assess student work. I’m scratching the very surface of a much longer, and much discussed, conversation about assessment, but using an LMS to display grades and help students track progress is one way to start this conversation for yourself.
• A learning management system can organize a course and its content. A syllabus is a great document for organizing a course’s major themes and activities. But as even new instructors might suspect, the best-laid plans in a syllabus often change. A learning management system can be a quick and nimble way to keep students updated on what they can expect in class each day and how that day is going to be organized, roughly speaking. While students often want to co-create the class experience and have a say in how their time is spent, the expectation remains that the instructor will at least provide some structure for the class experience and guide the students through some goals or outcomes expected of the particular course. There are a lot of tools in an LMS that can help you accomplish this clearly and quickly.

Now, let me be clear: I do not think using a learning management system is right for every instructor. An awful lot of very good thinkers have argued for how learning management systems in particular can very well constrain student independence and collaboration (Estee Beck has written extensively on how learning management systems can track student data and performance in pernicious ways, Jesse Stommel has explored how students should create their own domains to reclaim their own learning spaces, and Anastasia Salter has explored how websites outside of learning management systems can help students develop public communication and digital literacy skills).

With all of that said, I think a learning management system remains a very useful way to start a conversation about a web space can mean for the student learning experience. It is the additional room where resources can be accessed, materials can be shared, and learning can be co-created. No learning management system is perfect, but is an institutionally-supported place for students and instructors to come together and communicate without having to register for third-party services. As instructors develop more technological savvy and experience, I think they can then begin to explore resources from people like Beck, Stommel, and Salter to continue re-thinking what their online spaces can do. But for starters, just beginning with some space is better than having no space at all or feeling overwhelmed by options for online learning spaces.

To help instructors get started with thinking about how they want to build the metaphorical chairs, desks, and whiteboards of their online spaces for their students, I created a First-Time Canvas User Checklist. It has some Stanford-specific resources, but I invite others interested in this resource to copy it, modify it, and help instructors they’re supporting build their digital rooms.

Click this button to check out (and comment upon!) a new Canvas user checklist.

If you have suggestions for other ways we can help first-time instructors feel oriented to new learning spaces, let me know!