If you teach, you've probably heard for years about the revolution the Internet would bring to teaching and learning. As with so many promises of revolution, the changes haven't materialized. Instead, a new suite of tools, called course management systems (CMSs), can be used to enhance your teaching by taking advantage of the Internet without replacing the need for a teacher.
What Is a Course Management System?
CMSs are web applications, meaning they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser. The server is usually located in your university or department, but it can be anywhere in the world. You and your students can access the system from anywhere with an Internet connection. At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. Aside from access control, CMSs offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes

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and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. Let's take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful: Uploading and sharing materials
Most CMSs provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTML editor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want. Forums and chats
Online forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats, on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for everything from course announcements to entire lectures. I know one professor who, unable to speak due to throat surgery, held his entire class using online chats and readings. Student workgroups can use online discussions for class projects. Quizzes and surveys
Online quizzes and surveys can be graded instantaneously. They are a great tool for giving students rapid feedback on their performance and for gauging their comprehension of materials. Many publishers now provide banks of test questions tied to book chapters. A professor teaching a marketing class at San Francisco State uses weekly mini-tests to keep students engaged with the lectures and reading. He then uses proctored online testing to give the final exam using the same question banks.
Gathering and reviewing assignments
Tracking student assignments is an annoying and bulky task. Online assignment submissions are an easy way to track and grade student assignments. Also, research indicates that using an online environment for anonymous student peer reviews of each other's work increases student motivation and performance. One of my colleagues teaches a course where students review each other's written work at every stage of the writing process. Recording grades
An online grade book can give your students up-to-date information about their performance in your course. Online grades can also help you comply with new privacy rules that prohibit posting grades with personal identifiers in public places. CMS grade books allow students to see only their own grades, never another student's. You can also download the grades into Excel for advanced calculations. While you could find or write programs to do all of these things on your own site, a CMS combines all of these features into one integrated package. Once you've learned how to use a CMS, you'll be free to concentrate on teaching and learning instead of writing and maintaining your own software.
Over the past five years, CMS systems have matured rapidly and are now considered critical software for many colleges and universities. The CMS market is now a multi-