Why Do Language Teachers Struggle with LMS Platforms?

Language teachers frequently resist the LMS platforms their employers require them to use. Based on conversations with dozens of educators, the main friction points are excessive complexity, poor mobile usability, and a lack of tangible benefits for teachers themselves. Newer, purpose-built platforms are emerging to address these gaps, but most still miss the mark.

What Are Traditional LMS Platforms?

The dominant LMS platforms, like Blackboard (1997), Moodle (2002), and Canvas (2008), were built around early web technology and remain fundamentally page-oriented content management systems, even after two decades of development.

The traditional and biggest LMSes, Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas are around 20 years old (Blackboard: 1997, Moodle: 2002, Canvas: 2008). The first were build in the infancy of the world wide web and they ended up being build around advances in web technology that allowed for better interaction beyond the initial fairly static web pages. As such, they are still build around creating web pages with content. Some have evolved like content management systems with templates, so adding new content becomes easier. Some newer LMSes like Google Classroom and similar evolve around the office productivity tools and sharing files, while still having the page like and similar exercise content.

The first LMSes have been around for a long time and have tried to handle many use cases. They may for instance be used by a single person creating a course, a company creating learning content for employees, or full-on learning institutions. And they may be used by primary schools to universities. They may assist in the planning of courses with availability of rooms and teachers, keep track of student attendance and grades, support various workflows for correcting assignments and other things besides the creation and distribution of learning material.

Why Do Language Teachers Dislike Their LMS?

Teachers cite five core friction points: excessive complexity, perceived low utility compared to learning cost, poor usability, inadequate mobile support, and a lack of direct benefits for the teacher's own workflow.

Below we list the main issues mentioned by teachers as well as a few reasons that we believe are relevant to why teachers may dislike the LMSes they are required to use.

• Complexity: Traditional LMSes are complex as they have been developed for all sorts of scenarios as mentioned above. We heard of an organization of schools that created a project to remove and limit functionality to make it feasible for teachers, but who didn't succeed in making it easy or attractive enough for the teachers.
• Change: If a teacher already has materials and a system that works, why change it? Being required to use a new system requires learning and extra work - not to mention change of habits, uncertainty and the things that often can provide resistance to change. In many cases schools may not provide the help and support to facilitate the change.
• Usability: The usability and learnability suffers from the complexity and in some cases from the fact that the systems were initially developed many years ago as mentioned above. A lot of teachers don't work every day in the LMS, and getting back and making changes or creating a new course may not be straight forward.
• Web first: Many traditional LMSes don't work well on mobile. In some case they have an app, which is just a packaging of their web pages. Also, when creating the content on a laptop the teacher may not be assisted to make it work well on mobile. Some layouts may be difficult to use on small displays, and some files may not work on some mobile devices. 
• No benefits: There may not be any experienced benefits from the teacher. That the learner gets feedback in the app or that administrative flows requires less from the school, or that the school can expose their course catalogue from the same system, may not be experienced as a benefit to the teacher.

Removing complexity and improving usability holds some potential, but it seems equally important to give the teacher some benefit or reason to use the LMS, so it is not only the learners or school administration that benefit.

Using self-correcting interactive exercises may be beneficial to some teachers that do not have to check the exercises. However, to other teachers they may just go through the exercises in class. This may give the teacher some more understanding of the learner's understanding and struggles and offer opportunity for teaching - and be what they are used to. It may probably be more efficient for the learner to get the feedback immediately, and time in class can be focused on issues or learning new things. However, this may also require more work from the teacher and also affects how teachers approach lesson preparation in general. For more on that topic, see our post on what challenges language teachers face with lesson preparation.

Easy access to learning content and assistance in quickly creating content, for instance with help from automation and AI-assisted content generation, may offer benefits. Also, gaining better automated insights and summaries of the learner's struggles, may be a help to the teacher. Finally, offering smart features for explaining and rehearsing the things the specific learner struggles with, may assist the teacher in teaching the learners.

What Alternatives to Traditional LMS Platforms Exist?

A growing ecosystem of specialized platforms — from creator-focused tools like Thinkific and Teachable to enterprise training systems like Absorb and iSpring — offer narrower, more usable alternatives, though few are built specifically for language educators.

Newer and more narrowly focused LMSes or services are being developed. A lot has focused on individuals that want to teach or sell learning content, with examples like Thinkific and Teachable. Some, like LearnWorlds come from the same place, but and try to expand into more scenarios. And others, like Circle come from other domains (community building) and try to add teaching and learning to the domain.

A lot of newer LMSes or services are focusing on enterprises that have to teach their employees or customers something. Eloomi, Absorb and iSpring are a few examples. Axonify and eduMe are a few examples that focus on frontline workforce. These and other services cover variations of training, like upskilling or employee development, safety training, compliance training, and employee onboarding.

We are not aware of general LMSes that focus on removing complexity, improving usability and offering benefits to teachers as described above. We assume that all LMSes to some extent are working on some of these, but may be restricted by legacy code bases, or having to or wanting to support the current scenarios their customers use and more. We are aware of a lot of smaller services that have popped up over the years that focus on the creation of and distribution of learning content. Quizlet, Wordwall and Kahoot are a few examples of services that language teachers may use. These typically evolve from focusing on a single or few types of content or exercises to supporting more types.

How Does Edumo Address LMS Friction Points?

Edumo tackles LMS friction by deliberately limiting complexity, focusing on mobile-first design, and building features that directly benefit teachers — like AI-assisted content generation and automated learner insights.

We hope that Edumo can be the more focused LMS or service that addresses the issues described in this post. It requires us to fight complexity, by not offering all functionality and simplifying some functionality for instance by offering reasonable defaults and "hiding" advanced options for when they are needed.

It also requires us to find issues that we can actually help teachers with, so we can provide benefits. We have found several of such issues when talking to teachers. If you want to help with scenarios and issues that may be beneficial to help teachers with then contact us on one of our social media profiles below or sign up to our news mail and reply to me there.