Pull up a random sample of course sites on almost any campus and most of them lean on the same handful of features: the syllabus, a spot for readings, an assignment dropbox, the gradebook. The discussion board, the rubric tool, adaptive release, the analytics dashboard. Provisioned, licensed, and sitting quiet.
I want to say up front that this is usually fine. A seminar taught well with four tools does not need forty, and faculty using the platform this way are using exactly as much of it as it has earned in their teaching. The question worth asking is not why everyone is not using everything the LMS offers. It is where using more of it would genuinely help, and what closing that gap would take. That is what this piece is about.
The 6 pieces in this guide
Each one takes a single question and works it through. Start anywhere.
Feature Adoption Is a Design Question, Not a Willingness Question
When most courses use the same handful of LMS features, that is usually a fact about how the rollout was designed rather than how faculty feel. What the research says, and what a rollout that works looks like.
Charlie Wrightmann — Consultant, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsLearning PlatformsWhat a Faculty Development Cohort That Works Looks Like
A cohort is the format most likely to change how faculty teach, but the design decisions are what make the difference. The five that separate a cohort that moves practice from one that produces goodwill.
Charlie Wrightmann — Consultant, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsLearning PlatformsThe Accessible Course Template: Giving Faculty a Running Start
A well-built LMS course template makes the accessible, well-organized version of a course the starting point rather than a retrofit. What goes into a good one, and how teaching centers roll them out.
Emily Connelly — Instructional Multimedia Technologist, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsLearning PlatformsEarly Signals: Using Course Analytics to Reach a Student in Week Three
LMS and early-alert data can flag a student who is drifting while a short conversation can still change the trajectory, which signals are worth acting on, how institutions route them to a person, and how to keep the practice supportive.
Charlie Wrightmann — Consultant, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsLearning PlatformsThe Collegial Course Review: Quality Frameworks That Do not Feel Like an Audit
Quality Matters, OSCQR, and peer-review models give course design a shared vocabulary. How institutions run them as a supportive, faculty-owned practice rather than a compliance exercise.
Charlie Wrightmann — Consultant, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsLearning PlatformsUniversal Design for Learning in an Online Course: A Practical Starting Point
UDL is often introduced as a large framework. In an online course, a handful of concrete moves deliver most of the benefit, and each one also tends to cut support requests and accommodation friction. Where to begin.
Charlie Wrightmann — Consultant, Wrightmann Education TechnologistsWhere the gap is worth closing
A few situations are worth acting on. Everything else is worth leaving alone.
One: the capability was part of why you bought or renewed in the first place. If the analytics layer or the accessibility checker was written into the business case and nobody is touching it, that case has not been delivered, and it is worth another look.
Two: the capability supports an obligation the institution has already taken on. Accessibility conformance, a defensible academic-integrity process, feedback that reaches students while it still matters in a large course. A feature sitting unused there means the underlying commitment is going unmet.
Three: the fully asynchronous course, where the quiet features are doing the connecting. A student whose whole experience of a course is a folder of documents and a column of grades is getting something thinner than what the catalog promised. Structured discussion, quick feedback, low-stakes practice, a reason to interact with classmates. That is what closes the gap, and those are exactly the features a default rollout tends to leave switched off.
Everywhere else, the honest move is to stop treating unused capability as lost value.
Why faculty use the platform the way they do
This pattern is well documented and has held for well over a decade. EDUCAUSE’s research keeps finding the same thing: the most common faculty uses of the LMS are operational, posting materials, handling assignments and grades, while the interactive features go comparatively unused (Dahlstrom, Brooks & Bichsel, 2014; EDUCAUSE ECAR Study of Faculty and Information Technology, 2017). Faculty in these studies also report being satisfied with the platform as they use it.
There is a reason the operational features get adopted and the rest do not, and it is not reluctance. Two well-tested ideas explain most of it.
Peggy Ertmer’s distinction between first-order barriers (external) and second-order barriers (internal) is the first (Ertmer, 1999). First-order barriers are access, time, equipment, a training session. The kind most rollout budgets get spent solving. Second-order barriers are what an instructor believes about good teaching in their field, how confident they feel with a specific tool, and whether reworking a course that already works seems worth it. Those are what decide whether a feature becomes part of how someone teaches.
The second is decades of technology-adoption research finding that use depends less on what a tool can do than on whether someone believes it will help them, and believes it will not cost much to learn (Davis, 1989). A feature an instructor has never seen work, dropped into a course they have taught well for years, fails both tests. A colleague showing them a working version in a similar course passes both.
Put together, the unused features are the ones that are hard to try in a small way, hard to watch someone else succeed with, and a step removed from how the instructor already runs their room. That is a design problem, and design problems have design answers.
Treating onboarding as a design problem
When a gap is genuinely worth closing, what closes it is faculty development built around teaching, not around features. Three things separate the version that changes practice from the version that does not.
Lead with the problem, not the feature. A session titled “the new rubric tool” reaches fewer people than one titled “grading eighty papers consistently, faster, in a way that holds up on appeal, using the rubric tool.” The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework makes the underlying point: technology use works at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and tool, and training that addresses only the tool tends not to carry over into practice (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).
Do the work inside the instructor’s own course. Development that produces one real improvement in the section someone is teaching right now builds momentum a feature tour never will. The most durable motivator for demanding work is visible progress on something the person genuinely cares about (Amabile & Kramer, 2011).
Run it across a term, with peers. A cohort is a group of faculty spending a semester or two each on their own course and a problem they picked, watching a colleague teach and being watched in turn, with real time set aside for redesign. It moves the needle on practice at a rate short workshops never reach, because it satisfies the conditions people need to sustain new behavior. Real choice in how they get there, competence built gradually, and other people doing the same work alongside them (Ryan & Deci, 2000).
A cohort costs more than a webinar. It is also the version that lasts, and it makes good on a commitment the institution has already made by buying the license.
The platform is one piece of a bigger stack
“The LMS” is, in practice, a hub with a dozen other products hanging off it. The video platform, web conferencing, lecture capture, publisher courseware, homework and adaptive tools, the accessibility checker, the analytics layer, the e-portfolio, the reading-list tool. Each one arrived on its own schedule. Each connects through an integration that is either clean, because the product supports the sector’s interoperability standards, or something someone has to keep watching by hand.
A strategy that only looks at the core LMS is looking at part of what students touch. Worth asking on a regular schedule:
- Where is the same capability licensed more than once?
- Which integrations move rosters and grades over open standards, and which depend on someone running a manual export?
- Which of these products has a current, checkable accessibility conformance report?
- What does a student’s actual path through all of it look like in an ordinary week?
Keeping the stack coherent as it grows is its own separate piece of work. Mostly a matter of looking at the additions together instead of one at a time as each one arrives.
A composite: a migration that carried its faculty with it
A regional university moving to a new LMS treated the migration and the faculty development as one project instead of two. Alongside the technical work, it ran a two-semester cohort. About a dozen faculty from the programs with the highest online enrollment, each rebuilding one unit of a course around a problem they chose themselves. Most of those problems came down to some version of “my online students do not seem to know each other” or “my feedback is not landing.” Every participant watched a colleague’s course. Every participant had real time budgeted for the redesign.
The technical migration went about the way these go. What mattered came after. A year later, the participating courses were using discussion, peer review, and low-stakes practice at a measurably higher rate. And it held into the year after that, because the change had happened in how people taught, not just in which platform they happened to be teaching on. The faculty in that first cohort became the people the next cohort learned from.
Common questions
Is low feature adoption a problem if faculty and students are satisfied?
Often not. It is worth acting on when the capability was named in the purchase justification, when it supports an obligation like accessibility, or when the quiet features are the ones carrying connection in asynchronous courses. Otherwise, it is reasonable to leave it alone.
We already run faculty development. Why has not it closed the gap?
Most programs are organized around tool features. The ones that change practice are organized around teaching problems, use the instructor’s own course as the material, run across a term, and put faculty in contact with peers doing the same work. The content is often similar. The design is what differs.
Should we require use of specific LMS features?
Requirements suit genuine floors. An accessibility or records requirement, for instance, for pedagogical choices, the instructor’s judgment about their own course is doing the important work, and support moves the needle further than a mandate does.
How do we make the case for a cohort to a budget committee?
Frame it as an investment that is already been made. The license is a sunk cost. What the development spending decides is whether that license comes back as a better teaching environment. Model it against your own course counts and the capabilities named in the original purchase justification.
Sources & references
- Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press.
- Dahlstrom, E., Brooks, D. C., & Bichsel, J. (2014). The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2014/9/the-current-ecosystem-of-learning-management-systems-in-higher-education-student-faculty-and-it-perspectives
- Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319-340. https://doi.org/10.2307/249008
- EDUCAUSE. (2017). ECAR Study of Faculty and Information Technology, 2017 - Learning Management Systems. https://www.educause.edu/ecar/research-publications/ecar-study-of-faculty-and-information-technology/2017/lms
- Ertmer, P. A. (1999). Addressing first- and second-order barriers to change. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47(4), 47-61. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299597
- Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
If this is on your desk
Wrightmann assesses LMS adoption and integration as scoped assessments, comparing what the platform provides against what is used, and asking why, and designs and runs the faculty development that closes the gap as project work.