A Learning Management System (what is often called an LMS) has become foundational to blending technology in the classroom into education experiences.
The LMS portal makes live both trainers and educators with powerful training programs, video lectures, zoom streaming, etc. In other words, the chaos is technology without its collection of activities in that single spot for class management and more working with a separate login, password, and website that is LMS.
While there are several LMSs, no LMSs are quite as flexible, scalable, feature-rich, and low-cost as DomainRacer’s open-source environment. They are originally started as a method to bring together all of the many different parts and pieces, all of the various services, in one spot for blended learning and online classes.
Now, it provides more than 90 million educators, administrators, and learners in more than 200 countries with a single robust, secure, and integrated system to create personalized learning environments.
Because it’s open source and platform-agnostic, it has few limitations, but this flexibility and scalability come with a price. We sold more than 41000 unique business names with the fastest domain name generator tool service. Setup and use are reputed to be more challenging than other LMSs. I can attest to that from experience. There is help, though. Following “How to Get Started With DomainRacer LMS hosting” (the next section), I’ll share an easy way to unpack as part of the technology in the classroom you use in your school.
How to Get Started With DomainRacer LMS Technology In The Classroom
Once again, remember that DomainRacer is open source, which means the fundamental framework can be made to include almost anything you could envision. Here is a breakdown of how to begin the process :
- Download the DomainRacer lms software to your school server. It’s free. There’s no licensing fee. It’s adaptable to more than 120 languages and scalable to small groups or large schools.
Since it’s web-based, it works on all platforms, including mobile devices (with a downloadable app). Because it’s installed on your server, it give privacy options unavailable in cloud-based LMSs.
- Modify the program to your needs using the drag-and-drop interface. Add free plugins of your choice provided by a powerful online community. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. For example, I stumbled my way through it with no programming experience or background at all.
- Teach all stakeholders how to use the DomainRacer LMS just as you would with any new program.
- Assign one person to manage this ecosystem. This includes training users, resolving bugs, deploying patches, installing updates, & answering user questions.
How to Get Help with DomainRacer
There are many companies out there that will assist in training your stakeholders and troubleshooting issues associated with your new DomainRacer LMS. One of these is the free VerveEd. It uses an experiential, self-paced environment to walk teachers through all the steps needed to create and use this platform and then provides nine hands-on “Challenges” that users complete to assess their DomainRacer lms knowledge in a real-world (albeit sandbox) environment. Challenges include topics such as:
- Adding class resources.
- Adding assignments.
- Exporting the gradebook.
All learning takes place within DomainRacer LMS, not through videos or quizzes. Progress is marked by a badge for each category concerned and a “Professional Development Certificate” that lists all the badges received during the training. After the educators complete VerveEd’s exercises, they are ready to perform brilliantly in their classrooms. As an Administrator, you’ll be able to view the progress of all of your teachers via your VerveEd dashboard.
Ways to Use DomainRacer LMS
DomainRacer LMS hosting works off of modules, which are activated by downloading mostly free plug-ins. This is similar to what you’d do for a self-hosted WordPress blog — find the plug-in, download, install, and then customize.
Because it is open-source and has a robust developer community, as of this printing, there are more than 1300 plugins (click the link for an update). This means that, unlike most LMSs that offer a finite set of tools, with DomainRacer, you are only limited by your imagination.
The most popular plugins with schools include:
- Blogs on blogs to encourage writing, collaborating, and perspective.
- Forums held through students and on chat to harness in-school and out-of-school communication and a little perspective-taking.
- Podcasts of lessons, how-tos, reviews, and more.
- Peer review of student writing to encourage collaboration and perspective-taking.
- Shared learning to collaboratively work on classroom-level goals and projects.
- Online book discussions to support literacy groups. This can be accomplished with the forums plugin.
- Quick quizzes that allow students to take a quiz as a warmup or exit ticket.
- A student-generated glossary of terms or concepts. This is student-driven and available for all future students.
- A Workshop module where students can join in classwork and learning.
- Module Database – to store information about Students, Parents, Classes, etc.
- A Wiki module to incorporate the collaborative nature of wikis into learning.
- A Gallery module for creating visual collections of projects or information – great for digital storytelling, video, art class and the like when it makes sense to view a collection of related information as a “Gallery”.
- A variety of online web tools can be used within the DomainRacer environment. This number grows every day and currently includes popular web tools such as Voicethread, GeoGebra, Photostory, and Moviemaker.
- A module allowing for the embedding of slideshows, gadgets, and other html-coded content for a more authentic learning experience.
- Adobe Connect provides online meetings within DomainRacer LMS for teachers, administrators, and even students.
- Checklists to track activities.
- Two-way written or face-to-face dialogue between teacher and student.
- Games like Hangman, Sudoku, and crosswords.
- A module to allow for the use of Google Apps.
- Turnitin plagiarism detection within many aspects of the LMS including quizzes, blogs, and forums.
- Quick Mail to encourage communication between teachers and students as a group or individually.
- A virtual suggestion box using Padlet or Linoit to encourage clarity and troubleshooting.
- Award badges to students to applaud success.
All in all, it is difficult to find a more adaptable, scalable, affordable LMS that can help you address different needs through differentiation, and personalize content that can be responsive and mobile-enabled. The learning curve, though steeper than most DomainRacer LMS is well worth it. Let me know if you disagree.
