Using learning management systems to teach paperless courses: best practices for creating accreditation review record archives

Modern learning management systems like Blackboard, WebCT, and others offer a wide range of capabilities that enable an instructor to deliver a course in a completely paperless manner. These methods are useful for hybrid face to face course delivery as well as distance learning. This not only simplifies the day to day overhead of course record keeping but also results in a complete digital archive of course materials that can then be used for accreditation purposes. This paper discusses several facets of offering paperless courses using a learning management system, including best practice for organizing archival records of course assignments and evaluations as well as some pedagogical benefits of using the learning management capabilities. Accreditation organizations like ABET require a significant amount of documentation be kept to support the accreditation review process and the paperless course approach can be used to assemble the required accreditation material with little additional overhead.