Learning management systems (LMSs) are, on one level, another space—beyond the classroom—to “interface” with students, both cognitively and metacognitively. They are spaces, as Merriam-Webster defines the noun interface, where “independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other”—a function that the Announcements tool in both Canvas and Blackboard, for example, makes possible outside the physical classroom. As I have argued before (Birkenhauer, 2010), the “spaces” that LMSs offer through their announcements tools allow us, as educators, to help students stay on track outside the physical classroom—to bolster, in other words, their widely varying (and for many still developing) metacognitive abilities. This was driven home to me especially during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when suddenly my traumatized students found themselves having to deal with the stress of their and their families’ disrupted lives in addition to adjusting to learning online. I felt then, and still feel five years later, that it’s more important than ever that we keep students on track by reminding them that they possess a prefrontal cortex—the executive function—that in many of our younger students is still developing.
