Learning Management Systems | News

Helix Education Makes LMS Platform More User-Friendly for Instructors

• By Michael Hart
• 08/12/14

Helix Education has released several new enhancements to its Helix Learning Management System (LMS) designed to allow instructors to spend less time worrying about the "back-end" technology and more working with students.

Helix LMS is a learning management system for higher education that focuses on competency-based formats both on-campus and online. The new functionalities are intended to create efficiencies involving communication between instructors and students, grading and course development.

The latest version of Helix LMS is designed to allow instructors to communicate more efficiently with students.

Recent improvements to the Helix platform include:

• Automated communication functionality that helps the instructor create his or her own to-do list that readily adapts to the student's pace, letting faculty know exactly when to reach out to them with reminders. For example, a student who is moving through a course quickly and is close to finishing might receive a reminder if the student hasn't logged in for three days. On the other hand, a student who may be working on the course over a longer time period might not receive a reminder for up to seven days;
• Enhanced grading options allow the instructor to make notes and grade uploaded documents from the student — like Word files, PowerPoint presentations or PDFs — on the documents themselves. This is designed to both make the grading process less laborious and time-consuming for the instructor and offer the students the opportunity for more feedback on their work;
• Content repurposing will allow multiple versions of rubrics in the system so that instructors can link them to different assessments if they want, or to a single assessment if that's their choice. The added flexibility is designed to allow faculty to reuse the best and most appropriate rubrics without starting from scratch each time; and
• Finally, a complete preview mode allows instructors and curriculum developers to view and navigate a course exactly as a student would, allowing them to better gauge the flow of content through the course from the student's perspective.

"Our goal is for both students and instructors to have a meaningful experience," said Helix Education Senior Vice President Steve Pappageorge. "They can't be bogged down by technology, but rather need to be able to concentrate fully on learning materials, activities and interaction."