Because most, but not quite all college students use smartphones, the LMS needs BOTH excellent desktop functionality and app-based functionality.  

I'd like the LMS to have a "horizontal" rather than "vertical" front end interface. I find the one we use at our University is too linear. You have scroll all the way down the page as your course gets nearer to the end of the semester.

Many thanks,

Debra

Because most, but not quite all college students use smartphones, the LMS needs BOTH excellent desktop functionality and app-based functionality.  

Adam, I think your question as phrased will elicit a heap of good interface feature requests. 

I'd like to add several non-interface aspects which are emerging as criteria in an institutional selection of LMS, and are quite hard.

Good luck,

Russ

Summative assessment

The bill gets paid if the institutional goals are met. Often the most important goal for the LMS is that all stakeholders have confidence in the summative assessment. How cheaply can we prevent and discover cheating in rigorous, individual, authentic assessment?

Evidence of learning

Accrediting bodies, more than ever, are asking for evidence of learning, mapped to their own syllabus. How can we show that each student was exposed to the right content, and can perform the right skills? Can we incorporate records from external Learning Record Systems (via xAPI or LTI)? How can we credit student engagement in future independent social media or mobile platforms?

Personal guidance

Student confidence, achievement and retention issues are related to timely, actionable, personal, emotionally intelligent feedback from respected instructors. Can we make it easy and efficient for instructors to get that right? Can we provide Amazon-like situational hinting? (e.g. Other students at your level have viewed...)

Pedagogic consistency

Can the LMS nudge teachers toward pedagogical best practice? (e.g., student workload leveling, alerts about exceptional needs such as text descriptions of video/audio/graphics, schedule flexibility, offline access...)

Content licensing

As excellent teachers respond to topical events, they independently add content to the LMS before/without securing permission of the copyright owner. How can the institution's legal officer rapidly detect potential licensing and copyright issues, and identify "Fair use"?

Participant's rights

Community expectations about privacy and ownership of participant data differ around the world and are changing. Vendors and institutions often don't live as long as people. How can a participant carry away a human-readable portfolio of her entire activity in her course? Can the LMS help provide permanent access to collaborative product (such as discussions or group projects), while protecting individual privacy? 

Participant safety

In a global education market, can the LMS prevent the exposure of participants' activity to third parties such as external marketers, unsympathetic governments, and curious staff? Can the LMS satisfy data safe-harbour regulations in multiple jurisdictions? Can the LMS support tightly-constrained legal discovery processes?

Retirement

I hope my institution lasts longer than an LMS contract. A university typically has multiple VLE and SIS systems, and difficulty integrating them. How can we prepare for the transition to the future service providers? Can we carry our data - including analytics - into a product-agnostic data-warehouse? For data that only makes sense within an application, how can we ensure permanent access to the specific version of that software?

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Adam, 

Of all the products Goodio Inc had developed so far, what have you had the most success with that resembles an LMS platform?

Sue

Hello @Sue.  Our most successful product has been the social course feed. As you know, forums/wikis are commonplace in LMS platforms but they aren't intelligent, meaning that they cannot drive traffic to the most pressing matters facing students.  Our feed is unique because we inform students and teachers of when there are 'surges' in traffic around certain topics, to identify that 'teachable moment' where teachers are able to target specific issues in the moment when students are most receptive and in need.

Most LMSs allow for document sharing, but Goodio takes it to the next level by allowing social annotation of all of your posted course materials.  As teachers, we rarely are provided with feedback of our materials (what students understood, what they didn't and why). Annotation of course materials allows students to 'point' to specific elements of a document that is a cause for confusion, for example, and for others to directly address the issue. Teachers can visit these concerns to know exactly what it was about their materials that caused the issue, to either resolve the matter with students, or to revise their materials to make it more clear.  This type of insight is inherent to the Goodio platform and is a real strength to our student/teacher feedback mechanism.

There are plenty more features, including administrative privileges, student roster controls that are made to be simple yet powerful additions, but are secondary to the mission of getting your students working with each other and talking about their educational issues with you.

Adam

The aspects mentioned above are reasonable and necessary, for example security, social networking, web 3.0 applications, horizontaly, among other interesting things, but I want to emphasize the need for sufficient server capacity serving the LMS and the possibility that the instructor readily course widely manage the course. Additionally a very agile online support is needed to help the education process . Finally I suggest that the instructor has the capacity and ability to meet the needs of students.

Alfredo

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Los aspectos mencionados anteriormente son razonables y necesarios, por ejemplo seguridad, red social, web 3.0, aplicaciones, horizontalidad, entre otras interesantes sugerencias, pero quiero enfatizar la necesidad de tener suficiente capacidad de los servidores que atienden la LMS y la posibilidad de que el instructor del curso tenga facilidad de administrar ampliamente el curso. Adicionalmente se necesita un soporte técnico muy ágil para ayudar al proceso de educación en linea. Y por último sugiero que el instructor tenga capacidad y habilidad para responder a las necesidades de los estudiantes.

Alfredo

Hi Adam,

One more aspect I would add to the "ideal" LMS: accessiblity features for both students and instructors. That is, compliance with ATAG 2.0 parts B (for adding accessible learning resources for students with disabilities) and A (for being accessible for instructors with disabilities that create the courses).

http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php

Happy new year from Ecuador!

Sandra Sanchez-Gordon

http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php

Some great answers here already!  I would add that any functionality you can include that allows a student to access the content and evaluation in a non-linear way would be useful.  The more control the student has over pace and selection of course materials, the better.  I would also love a wiki format that allows students to contribute to a project across sections of a course or even across semesters.  I realize this would require a huge rethinking about the way LMSs are structured, but  possibilities to do this in a course are exciting to think about for me.

One evaluation project is taking shape in RG network, interested ones can value add.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_you_help_with_expertise_in_setting_up_an_auto-assessment_platform_for_academic_writing_exercises_for_graduate_students