What is a good Learning Management System for people to teach in real-time?

This is my answer to the above question in Quora.

Ideally, real-time Learning Management is a role of a tutor in one-on-one interaction with a student without annoying delays. In classroom practice, teachers working with a class of students cannot do that.

Traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) are not designed for tutoring students in real-time. They are designed for teachers to enroll the students in their courses (at one time) and get back reports/update grade book (at another time). They are rather Learning Administration Systems.

Real-time Learning Management Systems have to simulate tutors working with an individual student within a course. They are computer applications where each course is (1) manually programmed or (2) automatically generated.

The first case (1) is the most common. Most of the known courses represent sequences of learning and assessment items branching in accordance with student performance. Manual programming of even simple courses requires high qualification and is labor-consuming. That is why practical courses are often oversimplified linear page-turners, which cannot be effective for all so different students.

The second case (2) is not yet common but getting much and growing attention nowadays. It represents Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). The early ITSs have been able to automatically solve well-formalized tasks, monitor a student solving the same task, comparing ITS’s performance against the student’s one, and providing remedial feedback in real-time. The later ITS (a.k.a. Adaptive Learning Systems) are able to automatically plan and personally recommend a learner each next learning or testing item/page, track learner’s performance, provide immediate feedback, evaluate current achievement of learning objectives, target not yet achieved objectives, and do so until each particular learner achieves all the learning objectives in her/his own pace. Such ITS can be very effective for all so different students. The best thing is that teachers do not need to reinvent and program any sequencing anymore. It is all done yet can be tuned. An example of such ITS is iTutorSoft. It is available on the website “adaptive deep learning/authoring platform for personalized education”.

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