Edmodo: A Wonderful Alternative to Standard LMS Discussion Tools
February 14, 2014

Edmodo: A Wonderful Alternative to Standard LMS Discussion Tools

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Edmodo was used as an online discussion forum for students enrolled in online courses of the College of Business. It allowed for students to interact with each other in a user-friendly environment with excellent tracking features for faculty. It allowed faculty to not only filter interactions by student for grading purposes, but to also see their interactions in the context of the group conversation. The learning management system used at the university did not display the user interactions in context and this allowed for faculty to see the original posts from all students and the responses that they were promoting.

Pros

  • Great customer service! I could contact them directly and I always received a timely and detailed response or solution.
  • Very easy to navigate and understand.
  • Excellent tracking features to see discussion contributions in the context of the entire conversation.

Cons

  • In order to assign a graded discussion in Edmodo, it has to be created as an assignment. Once the students post their responses, they are turned in and not available for other students to view and are therefore unable to promote discussion. We used a grading rubric and assigned the grade in the LMS in order to avoid this hang up.
  • It is easy to train faculty, students, and fellow employees on Edmodo.
  • It helped to save time for faculty in the grading process with Discussion contributions.
The discussion feature in Blackboard has definitely improved in the past few upgrades but it is still unable to filter conversations in context by student. Edmodo on the other hand, is external to Blackboard and therefore, it requires students to exit the LMS and log in with their own account with Edmodo to participate. This could be unattractive to some.
In my current role, we are encouraged to use features within our LMS. We have a discussion board feature that is improving with every update and while it still does not allow for the filter simplicity of Edmodo, it does allow for grading that automatically populates in the grade center which saves instructors a lot of time.
This tool is free to use for educational purposes and is great for use especially when an LMS in unavailable. Additionally, the tracking features of the software give faculty the entire picture of where discussion contributions fell in the context of the entire discussion. This is most useful in a situation where students are not only be graded on their initial responses, but also on responses to classmate's contributions.

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