Keywords

1 Overview

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) have a curious relationship to writing instruction. LMSs have a nearly century-long history; however, the development of these systems is best understood by focusing attention on the “Management” aspect of them, especially if we consider the ways in which many of the LMSs currently in use focus primarily on collecting and storing data while providing a framework for organization of that data—not unlike popular Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress or Drupal. The LMSs do not, however, generally consider what type of data and in what format would be of the greatest use to writing instructors or writing program administrators. While administrators and instructors can certainly make use of such essentials as login and module/page viewing data, as well as the gradebook typically included with any LMS, that data often provides only a snapshot of student engagement via a submitted project, instructor comments, and a grade. And those textual data points (student writing, instructor feedback) are usually not stored in a way that makes them easily extracted for analysis independently of other course materials.

LMS designers, however, do not bear sole responsibility for the lack of features conducive to writing pedagogy found in their applications. Richard Fulkerson (1979, 1990, 2005) returned three times to the articulation of philosophies/theories of composition and teaching methodologies; while in 1990, Fulkerson appeared hopeful that composition in the United States was reaching a philosophical, if not pedagogical, consensus, his final article on the subject (2005) saw composition as an increasingly contentious discipline without a consensus on outcome or pedagogy. This dissensus among composition scholars, combined with the increasing trend for first-year writing courses to be taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty, may be one reason more writing researchers were not at the table when LMSs were designing or adding features. Instead, those writing researchers who believed in the potential of digital/electronic writing spaces often built software to instantiate their preferred writing pedagogies; for approximately 20 years, this work was often begun by an individual or small group of faculty, then moved to a collaboration with a textbook publisher, such as with the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment, which was built by a group of graduate students at the University of Texas and then sold to Pearson Education. All of these initiatives ultimately failed because of incompatible goals of faculty and publisher but provided glimpses into what writing-focused LMSs could be. What follows here is (1) a look back at the development of proprietary and open-source LMSs, (2) a look at development of writing software that could have been/can be integrated into an LMS or that had LMS components, and (3) an assessment of the future relationship between LMSs and writing pedagogy.

1.1 Early LMSs

Consider two contemporary definitions of Learning Management Systems:

  • Prasad (2020) defines a Learning Management System as “a software application that helps with the management of digital training content.

  • Fry (2022) explains that an LMS, in plain language, “is software that helps you create, manage, organise, and deliver online learning materials to learners.”

Even in the post-pandemic world, the language used to describe LMSs emphasizes the mode of delivery rather than the actual instructional act; this focus on scalable learning has been a part of the LMS since it was created. Sidney Pressley is credited with developing the first LMS, the Teaching Machine, in 1924. In 1956, Gordon Pask designed SAKI (Self Adaptive Keyboard Instruction) in order to train key punch operators. SAKI was able to adapt its instruction to the level of the person using the machine. PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was developed at the University of Illinois in 1960 and was the first LMS used for teaching at multiple levels and in diverse disciplines. Etherington (2017) notes that PLATO pioneered several “firsts” for eLearning: it was the first distributed system, running on over 7,000 terminals and distributing material in over 150 courses by 1980. PLATO’s developers are also credited with driving development of the first Bulletin Board and Chatroom functions. Finally, the graphical user interface of PLATO was said to inspire Xerox and later Apple to create GUIs for personal computers. The last PLATO system, used by the Federal Aviation Administration, was decommissioned in 2005. In 1983, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began Project Athena, designed to provide students with access to computers. James Paridis and Ed Barrett’s contribution was the Athena Writing Project, the first attempt at an online classroom that allowed students to “edit and annotate papers, present classwork, and turn in assignments.” While digital technologies would assume increasingly integral roles in the act and teaching of writing, LMSs themselves remained on the periphery of digital writing pedagogy.

1.2 Contemporary LMSs

Although contemporary LMSs were developed for use in online courses, LMS platforms had become increasingly a part of onsite education in the 2010s. That does not mean that the LMS was embraced by writing program administrators or instructors. Hewitt (2015) notes that “[E]very LMS has [deficiencies], albeit some worse than others,” while many others have noted that LMSs lack the flexibility for instructors to use established writing pedagogies and practices without compromise. Hutchison (2019) argues that the inherent turn toward efficiency in LMSs creates a “wicked problem” for writing instructors. And York (2021) calls for more detailed assessment of the use and effects of the digital surveillance tools baked into most LMSs.

Clearly, given the propensity of the LMS to rely on quizzes and rubrics, writing instructors have argued against the temptation to rely on drill and practice exercises such as those used for grammar instruction; another concern is that instructors who want to shorten the grading process will rely on rubrics that they have inserted into the LMS to grade student writing, without additional comments that explain *why* a student earned a certain score on their paper. Another potential problem involves the possible use of automated writing evaluation if/when such systems are integrated into LMSs. Researchers such as Nunes et al. (2022) have found such systems useful in the context of comprehensive writing instruction. The problem occurs when students are asked to submit papers for automated evaluation without sufficient instruction and context from an instructor.

Against this backdrop, the COVID-19 pandemic placed LMSs at the center of nearly every educational institution’s operations—with mixed results. TrustRadius reported results of a Digital Promise survey that found that while 98% of educational institutions moved operations online in April, 2020, over half of the students enrolled experienced connectivity, hardware, or software problems severe enough to impact their ability to complete courses. Further, statista.com predicts the global LMS industry to reach $370 billion dollars in sales by 2026. LMSs have been developed as both proprietary and open-source systems designed to provide structure for courses in many disciplines. But some contain more features conducive to teaching the writing integrated course than others, as described in the following section.

2 Core Idea of the Technology and Functional Specifications

LMSs are first and foremost management systems for various educational processes. They were not and are not designed for any type of iterative, process-based writing instruction. Most are administered and initially configured for use at a particular institution by an institutional-level office in collaboration with the LMS vendor. At this level, the LMS is set up to provide an educational workflow that can be used for different environments including in-person, online (both synchronous and asynchronous environments), and hybrid courses. Once configured for an institution, the LMS allows the end users—usually instructors of and students enrolled in course—to do the following:

  • Collaborate and communicate within the system—both instructor with students and students with students

  • Import SCORM-compliant content from educational content producers

  • Create, administer, and score assignments and tests

  • Generate reports for students, teachers, and administrators

  • Integrate with common classroom tools such as Google Apps; and

  • Enable mobile access as well as desktop/laptop computer access

LMSs also allow instructors to create and import educational content within/into the LMS. Often, instructors and/or students can set individual goals and then track progress to those goals. In the last year, many LMSs have also integrated plug-ins for integrated video conferencing in Zoom, WebEx, or other applications. The current market leaders in the LMS field are Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace by D2L, and Moodle. Though Moodle was among the earliest to do so, many LMS have included wiki-like features for individual or collaborative writing allowing students to produce hypertexts with some form of versioning assignments (e.g. Moodle wiki, Canvas pages). Main products Standard LMS systems, which contain functions that allow writing but do not explicitly support writing, while continuing to fine-tune analytics and other features, can be considered more mature technologies in terms of the management of student learning. In the United States, Google Classroom, Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, and Brightspace by D2L are the most commonly used in higher education. Blackboard advertises itself as LMS+ ; that is, while the features discussed above are part of the Blackboard Learn LMS application, the company provides companion pieces: Blackboard Collaborate, a virtual classroom/conferencing tool; a mobile application for instructors and students; Blackboard Analytics, a comprehensive data analytics tool; and Blackboard Ally, to assist institutions in constructing more inclusive learning environments.

2.1 Writing Software Developed By Writing Researchers and Instructors

As noted previously, lthough the dominant LMSs do not overtly cater to writing pedagogy, a robust series of writing software was developed by educators in the United States over the past 30 years in part to address the shortcomings of the conventional LMS. First generation writing software that focused on aspects of the writing process included Hugh Burns’s TOPOI, Bill Wresch’s Writer’s Helper, and Von Blum, Cohen and Gerard’s WANDAH (later HBJ Writer). One of the first-generation style analysis programs was Writer’s Workbench, first sold by AT&T as a part of UNIX 7. And the Daedalus group (a group of University of Texas graduate students) created the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (DIWE) for use in locally networked computer classrooms. In 2001, veterans of the US computer and writing community met during the annual Computers and Writing Conference to discuss tools of the present and recent past, as well as the role of the writing instructor in using these tools; Consensus of this panel was that while these pieces of software were developed by educators for educators and students and were grounded in good pedagogical theories, the likelihood of these tools being overwhelmed by LMS and other commercial applications, such as then, WordStar or WordPerfect, and later, Microsoft Word, was high; this would be unfortunate, as pedagogical need should drive innovation.

And pedagogical need, as well as lack of LMS development informed by writing professionals, did result in several applications that approached the idea of a writing-specific LMS. Emma and Marca, both developed as open-source applications in Georgia, responded to what Ron Balthazor saw as the trend in LMSs, to simply push content rather than focus on active writing pedagogy. Fred Kemp of the Daedalus Group, following an unsuccessful attempt to partner with Pearson Publishing on widespread distribution of the DIWE software, began coding the Texas Tech Online Print-Integrated Curriculum (TTOPIC) application. In 2006, recoding of TTOPIC and expansion into a writing program management software (WPMS), known as RaiderWriter, was started by Susan Lang and Robert Hudson. Joe Moxley at University of South Florida worked with a team of programmers to develop My Reviewers. While all of these applications incorporated common LMS features, such as grade books, syllabi and assignment modules, they included pedagogical or administrative features particular to writing instruction and writing programs. For example, while most LMSs contain mechanisms by which students submit final drafts of writing projects, writing-focused LMSs housed prompts, workspaces, and storage areas where students could work through all parts of their writing process, from brainstorming to intermediate to final drafts. Some systems doubled as electronic portfolios for writing courses; students could maintain copies of all of their work for a course within the LMS. Others focused on specific aspects of the writing process, such as peer review. University of South Florida’s My Reviewers and Michigan State University’s Eli Review, focused on aspects of peer and instructor review. As Eli Review notes, applications like these “became necessary because no technologies existed to support the feedback and revision cycles that lead to better learning and more effective writers.” For example, RaiderWriter evolved into both an LMS and a WPMS to meet the needs of all of its users—writing program administrators, instructors, and students—by providing evidence-based insight into all phases of writing instruction. In addition to the standard syllabus, assignment submission and evaluation, and gradebook features, RaiderWriter contained features that enabled administrators to view and comment on instructor commentary for training purposes; instructors and administrators could view trends in numeric scores given by instructors to students across all sections of a given course. They could also see trends in student activity—whether assignments were turned in late or on time, or if student absence patterns or lack of engagement with assignments were reflected in grades on particular assignments. And this information was available throughout the current academic term, which meant that opportunities existed to add instruction in particular areas in which students were struggling.

Unfortunately, except for Eli Review, none of these are still currently in development or use. In part, the inability of these, and other, projects to sustain came from either English departments’ inability or refusal to provide professional credit for software development, or to support faculty who developed software in other ways, or the inability for such projects to become the centrepiece of publisher/faculty partnerships. Too often, these applications were considered by publishers as “too unique” to their institutions to be commercialized for more general use—not always an accurate assessment. In the case of Eli Review, its developers maintained from the outset that the application would not “include features like a gradebook, a communications system, a mind-mapping tool, a plagiarism detector, or peer editing software”—features that we usually associate with LMSs. Perhaps Eli Review’s success has happened because it has never been marketed as an LMS.

Thesis Writer is a bilingual (German, English) writing software developed by an interdisciplinary team at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. A main reason for creating TW was that that at the faculty (Management and Law) of one of the founders had roughly 800 students per year enrolled in an introductory course on academic writing and a roughly equal amount of BA thesis to supervise. This created management problems (Rapp & Kauf, 2018) and a way was sought to unburden supervisors and instructors from routine tasks to leave more time for e. g. giving feedback, discussing research designs, etc. Therefore, certain standard LMS features were integrated in TW: (1) authentication was implemented via the university LDAP, i.e., students, instructors could login with their university credentials; (2) collaboration on texts was integrated (several students can edit a document and give feedback); (3) a supervision workflow (student, supervisor) was integrated where supervisors can give feedback, have an overview of status of supervised projects through a dashboard; (4) one-to-many instruction (tutorials, videos) was integrated. Missing and potentially unachievable is a seamless integration of TW and the university LMS (Moodle) that would allow TW-based writing assignments for students enrolled in a Moodle course that could be included in, for example, Moodle grade books.

2.2 Research

Much current research into LMS use in writing instruction focuses on the various analytics contained within the system. Duin and Tham (2020) remind program administrators and instructors that they must increase their understanding of the information gathered by LMSs as well as how that information is used in decision making. Greer and Harris (2018) examine the simultaneously difficult issue of dealing with out of the box, mandated LMS systems (more common than ever post-COVID) and internal department cultural resistance to moving online. In an earlier article (2017) they discuss how institutionally-mandated LMSs can constrain the process of designing an environment for writing instruction vs content delivery since most LMSs focus on functional users of the technology vs informed or critical users. Hutchison (2019) summarizes the range of issues surrounding LMS use in writing courses, finding that the general design of most of the LMS systems optimize information storage and retrieval rather than the “communicative, recursive interaction that writing theory and pedagogy values” (p. 5). She recommends examining what efficiencies current LMSs allow for online writing instruction, as well as what would be considered sufficient for such instruction. The global COVID-19 pandemic has made Hutchison’s call even more critical as much of writing instruction since March 2020 migrated to online environments. Post-secondary writing faculty who pivoted their courses online used the available features of their LMSs and worked outside them as well—using email, cloud services for storage, and conferencing and presentation capabilities of Zoom, WebEx, and other communication software to conduct instruction. While some LMSs, including Canvas and Moodle, have started incorporating more tools to facilitate response cycles and collaborative writing, instructors who incorporate these pedagogies into their courses may find that such generic tools aren’t particularly useful—especially if one is teaching a course on writing in a specific discipline. An interesting intersection for research would be to study the software used by professionals to write collaboratively, conduct peer reviews, and then see how such tools could be mirrored or adapted in LMSs used in post-secondary education. Other research can be conducted on data sets of texts—those produced by students and responded to by instructors outside of LMS environments to understand how and when the feedback process is used in writing instruction—and how much of that is lost if instructors and students are constrained by the LMS environment—i.e., if they only have access to features provided for annotating texts in a particular LMS. Additionally, since texts in most disciplines now integrate visuals and add audio or video components, understanding how feedback is given on those modalities would be useful to LMS developers. Finally, since much writing instruction in post-secondary institutions in the United States is taught by graduate students and term faculty, incorporating WPMS features such as those discussed in the RaiderWriter software could prove beneficial to students, faculty, and administrators.

3 Conclusion

The consensus of research is that LMS applications developed for full-on institutional use are not sufficient for online writing instruction. Most features are far more consistent with content management systems than e- or hybrid learning. Numerous attempts to have writing faculty create software have not resulted in sustainable work, either because of technology obsolescence or because no comprehensive system existed to distribute the software and reward or acknowledge faculty developers. While LMS applications are a part of instruction going forward at most institutions, much work remains to make them more applicable and supportive of writing pedagogy. It is also uncertain at this point whether or not more specialized LMSs for use in writing programs have a future, given the prior inability to market these to wider audiences.

4 Tools

Tool

Type

Reference

Google Classroom

LMS (available free with limited features and for purchase)

https://edu.google.com/workspace-for-education/classroom/

Blackboard

Proprietary LMS

https://www.blackboard.com/

Canvas

LMS (available free with limited features and for purchase)

https://www.instructure.com/

Moodle

Open Source LMS

https://moodle.org/

Brightspace by D2L

Proprietary LMS

https://www.d2l.com/

Emma/Marca

Proprietary Writing Software and LMS

No longer available

RaiderWriter

Proprietary Writing Software and LMS

No longer available

MyReviewers (now USFWrites)

Proprietary Writing Software with LMS Components

https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/departments/english/writing-programs/writing.aspx

Eli Review

Proprietary Writing Software

https://elireview.com/

Thesis Writer

Proprietary Writing Software

https://thesiswriter.zhaw.ch/