Copyright

This work is Copyright © 2013 Robert C. (Chris) Hare.

All Rights Reserved.

More information about the author is available from http://www.labr.net, along with other publications and resources. The author can be reached at chare@labr.net.

Introduction

The Learning Management System (LMS) is a key component in the delivery of online education in both corporate and educational settings. Since their inception, the LMS has been instrumental in changing the way online education has occurred. The LMS has different features depending upon the vendor provided solution, but they all have key capabilities. These capabilities include administration; logistics; evaluation; asynchronous interaction; and integration with HR and ERP systems within the higher education facility (Kanchanepally, 2011).

The LMS is just one of many technology components used in a higher education environment. Among their other roles, the LMS is often used for tracking student progress and reporting scores and evaluation criteria to a “gradebook” or student management system where the student’s progress to meet a defined curriculum or required area of study are monitored (Cohen, 2010). LMS systems are primarily designed for the administration and management of the learning and not the learning process.

For example, the LMS is often used to provide students with course materials that would be normally provided as handouts. Within the LMS environment, the instructor uploads the documentation and the students can download it at their leisure (White & Larusson, 2010, p. 1).

Pictorially, Figure 1 shows how the LMS can interact with a variety of systems within the institution’s network including student records systems, financial and registration systems. Each of these systems typically have their own database, and only specific information is shared between them.

The LMS can be obtained in several different manners. The higher education institution can purchase a commercial license that is either installed within their facility, or more commonly a hosted solution where the LMS provider is responsible for the web hosting, the hardware, maintenance, etc. (Brandt, n.d., p. 2). Secondly, the institution can obtain an open source software (OSS) solution such as Moodle, ATutor or ILLIAS. Using the open source solution requires the institution to provide the hardware, network infrastructure and associated personnel to install the software, configure it, integrate it into other systems and otherwise provide all of the support.

Finally, the institution could choose to develop their own LMS. While this doesn’t sound like a wise decision, there are advantages. These advantages include selecting the DBMS which best meets their needs, or for which they are already familiar or have in place. Secondly, it becomes easier to integrate the LMS with other in-house systems because they have experience with the communications protocols and database schemas to make the query development and data transfer seamless.

Learning Management Systems and the Database

As a software application, the LMS users, including faculty, administration and the students, do not interact with the database. Rather, they interact with the user interface of the LMS, commonly available in a web browser. Consequently, the success or failure of a learning management system is often determined by factors other than the database. Some of those factors include (a) the intuitiveness of the user interface; (b) the layout of the user interface elements and navigation; (c) ease of use for the various features in the LMS; and (d) how well course designers, faculty and students alike make use of the features (Beatty & Ulasewicz, 2006).

The success of a learning management system within an institution can be dependent upon its ability to interact with other systems within the same institution. The LMS relies upon its own database to store its relevant information, but the LMS is often criticized as being more about managing the course environment (Kanchanepally, 2011), and less about the actual learning process (Pugliese, 2012). Systems in many institutions are standalone, and either do not share data or do so through limited means. This means students register for courses in one system, that course registration information is often transferred manually to the LMS, and the billing system is separate from the other two, requiring students to interact with yet another system to pay for their classes. Having these disparate systems share information at the database level can provide students with the perception of a single interface, even though there is significant more complexity.

However, like many application, the operational capabilities of the application can be enhanced or degraded by the database design or the implementation of that design. Blackboard and Moodle are the two most popular commercial and open source learning management systems. Both have a similar level of complexity in their database design, as Blackboard has approximately 150 tables and Moodle has approximately 200 tables in their respective database definitions. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the Blackboard 9 and Moodle 2 entity relationship diagrams respectively. Both diagrams have been scaled to fit, and not for readability, but these images illustrate the complexity involved in the database design for a learning management system.

The complexity of the database design makes the database implementation prone to errors or mistakes during the definition process. Blackboard, as a commercial application, limits the availability of its database and the changes that can be made to the database by add-on components. The very nature of the commercial, “closed source” application requires specific controls over the database to maintain the integrity of the primary application.

The same is true for Moodle, despite it being an open source application. The Moodle development documentation advises application developers to add their own tables using an alternate prefix and use the Moodle core tables but otherwise leave the structure of the core Moodle tables intact.

The ability of the LMS to interact with and exchange information with other institutional systems is dependent upon how “open” the database is and if the commercial vendor provides a method for importing or exporting the data to and from the LMS. However, even “open” databases may not have the functionality “out of the box” to provide this data transfer method, meaning the institution is now responsible for developing the data conversion and data transfer methods between the LMS and their other systems.

The database management system itself can impact the database design. For example, with Moodle, the primary DBMS is MySQL, which has a number of issues. The most popular table structure with MySQL is myISAM, which doesn’t support foreign keys (MySQL, n.d.). This means database administrators or application developers can easily introduce inconsistencies into the database because the constraints are parsed but not processed while the DDL is executed. MySQL does support foreign keys using the InnoDB engine, however, there are varying reports about the overall performance of the InnoDB engine.

The issue for the database design and implementation is that foreign key constraints must now be implemented in the application code, which could still lead to database inconsistencies, thereby negatively affecting the application’s performance and reliability of the information. This additional complexity placed on the application developers increases the application’s complexity. Choosing a DBMS which does support foreign keys such as Oracle or PostgreSQL would be a better choice. However, in the case of Moodle, even if the DBMS did support foreign keys, Moodle will not take advantage of them.

Another way the database can enhance or inhibit the LMS is through the ability to support documents and attachments which the instructor references in lessons or as downloadable course material (White & Larusson, 2010). In many web environments, even those supported by a database, images, audio and video files are often stored outside the database and linked to through the web interface. The database can easily store this information, which is one of many features present in applications like Microsoft SharePoint. Multiple file formats and media types can be stored directly in the database eliminating the need for additional repositories to store the information.

The database used by the LMS can also contribute to the success of discussion boards. If the database can handle varying information types such as images, links, and text directly inline with the text instead of as attachments, the additional freedom afforded to the students can encourage students to be more creative (Beatty & Ulasewicz, 2006). This flexibility also requires the database to be designed to handle the binary elements in the specific attributes of a relation. Ultimately each posting in the discussion board becomes an entry in one or more relations (Beatty & Ulasewicz, 2006).

The success of the LMS can be dramatically affected by the either the database design or by the queries used to interact with the data. For example, while evaluating the implementation of an in house developed LMS, the project team determined performance was significantly lower than expected (Selimi & Veliu, 2010). After careful review and performance analysis, the development team optimized specific queries which resolved the performance degradation (Selimi & Veliu, 2010).

Conclusion

The successful implementation of a learning management system is often not measured by the database, but rather by the visible interface the users interact with. However, the ease of use and functionality offered by the learning management system can be directly affected by the capabilities of the DBMS or the database design.

If the DBMS supports the capabilities of the LMS, but has specific design deficiencies in either indices, relationships or queries, the LMS can still function as expected, but the desired performance level may not, leading users to complain about the system and prefer not to use it. Commercial, open source, and in-house developed learning management systems can all suffer from database design or implementation issues. Only through careful analysis of all aspects of the database and the capabilities of the DBMS in use can those issues be identified and corrected.

References

Beatty, B., & Ulasewicz, C. (2006). Faculty Perspectives on Moving from Blackboard to the Moodle Learning Management System. TechTrends, 50(4), 36–45. doi:10.1007/s11528-006-0036-y

Brandt, J. (n.d.). Article 10 - Learning Management Systems and Accessibility. mainecite.org. Retrieved October 5, 2013, from http://mainecite.org/awd/accdocs/article10.html

Cohen, E. (2010, September 26). Is the LMS Dead? - Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity. Retrieved October 6, 2013, from http://clomedia.com/index.php?url=articles/view/is_the_lms_dead

Kanchanepally, H. (2011, July 1). Learning Management Systems: Failure and Scope for Improvement. Retrieved October 2013, from https://hareeshk.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/learning-management-systems-failure-and-scope-for-improvement/

Moodle Development Team. (n.d.). Moodle 2.x Entity Relationship Diagram. Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/dev/images_dev/5/5a/Moodle2erd.png

MySQL. (n.d.). MySQL 5.6 Reference Manual. MySQL. Retrieved from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/ansi-diff-foreign-keys.html

Pugliese, L. (2012, February 1). A Post-LMS World. Educause Review. Retrieved October 6, 2013, from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/post-lms-world

Selimi, V., & Veliu, I. (2010, June). Design and Development of Modular Learning Management Systems. lup.lub.lu.se. Retrieved January 1, 2013, from http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1764310&fileOId=1764323

White, B., & Larusson, J. A. (2010). Seeing, Thinking, Doing:Strategic Directives for Learning Management Systems, 1–20. Retrieved from http://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/23877/White_Larusson.pdf

About the Author

Chris Hare’s experience encompasses over twenty-five years in the computing industry with key positions ranging from application design, quality assurance, system administration/engineering, network analysis, and security consulting, operations and architecture. His management career, coupled with in-depth technical knowledge, provides the foundation to integrate the intricate risks of technology to the on-going survival of major corporations.

Chris periodically shares his knowledge in speaking engagements, published articles, books and other publications. He is the co-author of New Riders Publishing’s Inside Unix, Internet Firewalls and Network Security, Building an Internet Server with Linux and The Internet Security Professional Reference. His book credits also include the General Linux II Examination Guide from Coriolis and the Linux Professional Institute, The Open Source Handbook from Pike-Fisher and the Official (ISC)2 Guide to the CISSP Exam from Auerbach Press.

Chris has also written more than fifty articles and book chapters for Sys Admin magazine, Recruiting and Supervision Today magazine, and Auerbach’s Data Security Management, Handbook of Information Security Management and Data Communication Management.

Accredited with the Certified information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and the Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) designations, Chris has taught information security at Algonquin College (Ottawa, Canada) and sat on the Advisory Council for this program.

Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts and Science from Dallas Baptist University majoring in Management Information Systems and Management, a Master of Arts from Northwestern State University in Adult Education and is completing a Masters of Science in Information Technology in Education, specializing in Instructional Design.

Chris currently lives in East Texas with his wife Sandii, and is employed with Verizon as a systems engineering, information security and instructional design leader. He can be reached at chare@labr.net.