LMS Implementing and Analysis
Before you even begin the selection and implementation process for your LMS, you should first turn your attention to the analysis and assessment of various aspects of your organization, its structure, and its learning needs. We will treat this analysis and assessment as steps one through four of the ten-step LMS implementation process. Plus, you’ll also need to assess your own learning and development organization’s needs in regard to the system, but we will discuss that as a separate step in your process.
To start with, you’ll want to analyze and assess the audience in general. This may seem easy, but some organizations have a diverse population in terms of technical experience, corporate or organizational learning experience, and even willingness to use online or hosted systems in regard to their personal development. In order to assess your audience, you may want to consider a survey that asks the organization’s members about their technical experience, their willingness to register for courses online, their ability to take courses online, and also their perceptions of learning management system tasks, activities, and functions.
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Corporate University: The Learning Management System
A corporate university must have some sort of unified delivery system for scheduling, online courses, classroom course schedules and descriptions, tracking, and instructor and facilities scheduling. It would be difficult to plan so heavily for the roll out of the corporate university only to find out that there is no way to deliver. So the next best practice is to purchase or build a Learning Management System (LMS).
Choosing an LMS is an important step for any Learning and Development organization. In fact, some organizations may already have a functioning LMS when they make the transition from training department to corporate university. But if you do not have an LMS, the setup phase of your corporate university is the time to buy, build, or “freeware” a system. You definitely don’t want to have to backtrack in order to catch up on scheduling, curriculum paths, and course tracking after the university is up and running.
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LMS: Scheduling and Facilities Management
When you bring your Learning Management System online, you can say goodbye to hand-written schedule books and inputting class lists in Outlook and Excel. Your LMS manages scheduling and facilities, and provides information and data that is easily accessible, just like reporting and tracking. Let’s look at how you can use the LMS to become efficient in scheduling and facilities management.
First, consider scheduling on the highest level, that is, scheduling classroom training. If your organization only uses a couple of rooms in one location, this may not seem like a great leap forward. But if your organization manages multiple training rooms in more than one location, the scheduling “arm” of an LMS can change the way you manage training and development. The LMS can most likely hold information about each of the training rooms, its equipment, its seating capacity, and even its classroom style, i.e. technical or soft skills / seminar. Anyone in the organization that has access to this feature can see the training room availability and plan accordingly.
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LMS: Tracking, Notifications, and Reporting
Your Learning Management System can be used as a valuable tracking tool, not just for the training and development department but also for employees, managers, and even executives. Most LMS systems provide you with tracking features, but some also include notification and reporting features, so that nothing is lost in the shuffle of a large training initiative or a push to complete required training within a certain time period. Let’s look at some ways you can employ these features.
On the tracking side, your LMS is first a tool for learners. Once they know how to use the system, a learner can log in, determine where he or she is on a career path, an assigned curriculum, or a certification program, and make adjustments for completion. In this way, the LMS data serves as a self-management tool for careers and development. But the employee can also maintain the tracking data to be used as a record when he or she is up for a performance appraisal, merit increase, or promotion. In addition, if your organization employs required training programs on a regular basis, the employee can also use this record to prove that he or she has completed required training. From this standpoint, the LMS and its data is a retention tool. After all, an employee who can manage his or her own development may be more likely to stay with an organization.
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LMS: Training Management
Your LMS can manage various aspects of your training life cycle as well as content. Consider how much manual management is involved with curriculum development and management, career-pathing, certifications, testing, and evaluation. With an LMS, once these items are in place you can allow the system to manage and track all of them. Let’s look at each of these functions a little more closely.
In relation to curricula, the LMS enables you to build curricula based on business unit, position, or other criteria, and then place each curriculum on the system. When someone is hired or moves into a position, he or she will get access to that curriculum. From there, each learner, and his or her manager, can work on completing courses and learning interventions that better prepare them for the job. Some organizations may even have multiple curricula for one person. For example, your organization may require every employee to go through “basic training” in your industry or company. Then, you may have a curriculum that goes with that person’s job or job group. Your LMS helps you manage all of these.
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LMS: Content Development, Delivery, and Management
One of the most effective abilities of an LMS relates to your online learning content. Your LMS can help you not only to deliver and manage content, but also to develop it. And it typically does not matter what the source of the content is; most LMS vendors provide pathways for their own content, your internally developed content, and externally licensed content, as well.
First, content development can be an important part of your learning initiative. Suppose you’ve decided to develop your own eLearning content. Without a content authoring tool, provided by and LMS, you’ll have to develop courses in HTML or using another content authoring software, and then package the courses into SCORM-compliant formats. Although this may be a preferred way of doing things, an LCMS that provides content authoring can cut this process down in time and cost. With a content authoring tool, your edited content becomes course-ready as it’s being created in the system. In this way, it also becomes ready to deliver upon completion. In some organizations, both Instructional Designers and Subject Matter Experts have access to content authoring. However you do it, content development via and LCMS allows you to provide rapid deployment for just-in-time initiatives, plus the ability to customize and brand the content to your organization and its various audiences.
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LMS: The Foundation of Your Training Initiative
In today’s environment, your learning and development department must be many things to many people. Managing that environment may have become difficult, but Learning Management Systems are making all facets of training management more efficient-and easier. In this series, we are going to examine the Learning Management System as the foundation of your training initiative, so let’s look at the basics first.
You may have seen or heard terms relating to learning management, like LMS or LCMS, or content management. To begin with, an LMS is a Learning Management System, while and LCMS is a Learning Content Management System. Both provide virtually the same services with one major exception: content development. An LCMS usually has a content development “engine”, which allows you and your staff to develop eLearning content in the system and have it available for delivery fairly quickly. So what are the available features with Learning Management Systems? Keep in mind, we will discuss each of these features in detail in this series.
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25 Top Learning & Development Posts of 2009
Here are 25 Learning & Development posts (excepting all of my posts of course) over the last year.
- 9 Free Tools to build better e-learning
- Top 10 Videos that inspire us to rethink the way we learn
- 13 Tips to help you record narration like a pro
- What training costs: Converting content from ILT to WBT
- Top 100 eLearning items: eLearning Technology
- The 10 Commandments for eLearning
- Learning Strategies that you can use
- eLearning is not the answer
- The Myth of “Best Practices”
- ADDIE is Dead! Long live ADDIE!
- 7 invaluable thoughts about Film Making that apply to Instructional Design too.
- Principles of eLearning
- 50 Practical Tips & Tricks to build better eLearning
- 10 online icebreakers
- 10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work (part 1)
- Learning for the 21st Century
- Top 50 Mobile Learning Resources
- 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009
- Free eLearning Events
- Why you want to use scenarios in your eLearning
- Social vs. Not – Pictorally
- How Long Does It Take to Develop One Hour of E-Learning-Updated for 200
- Jane Bozarth: Better than Bullet Points
- Top tips for managing an e-learning project
- The Standalone LMS is Dead
There are many more, but these 25 impacted my view of eLearning and hopefully will influence yours.
Learning Management System Basics (LMS)
A Learning Management System (LMS) can provide tremendous benefits both for the training department and for the organization in general. There are numerous choices for LMS providers, as well as functionalities, so an LMS implementation project can become quite confusing. Just what are the LMS basics and how can a system help your organization?
To start with, let’s discuss what an LMS really is. In basic terms, the LMS is a system that helps you deliver and manage training in numerous formats. One of the first misconceptions about an LMS is that it is used solely for the delivery of online courses. While this is an important component, it is not the only reason to use an LMS. The LMS consists of a few separate parts. First, the management system consists of the tracking and reporting of the organization and individual learning activities. Second, the content authoring system (or LCMS) allows the training department to create and or upload its own in-house or purchased learning content and courses, and the third part is the content and courses themselves.
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