TRAINING VENDORS: 7 KEY THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN SELECTING A LMS

Transcription

1 TRAINING VENDORS: 7 KEY THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN SELECTING A LMS

2 There seem to be many articles available providing guidelines on features to look for when evaluating a Learning Management System (LMS). While these articles offer good advice in the general case, they don't address the special needs of training vendors and publishers. Companies that sell online and blended training content have unique requirements. They often have large libraries of content that need to be distributed among tens or thousands of clients. Since they serve many organizations, they require a system that can handle many different scenarios. Here are seven key things that training vendors should consider when evaluating LMS solutions. 1. Easy Management of Clients and Distributors Most LMSs are designed to support only a single organization. While many allow you to segment your users in some fashion, they don't support the concept of separate organizations. It is critical for you to be able to easily add clients to the system and be able to manage them all from a single interface. You don't want to have to create a separate instance of the LMS for each client. You may be serving organizations of vastly different size and complexity. Some may have thousands of users while others may only have a few that use your content. You should seek out an LMS that enables you to efficiently manage all clients, regardless of their size. If your organization sells through channel partners or distributors, you'll want to ensure that the system you choose supports this. Can you easily setup an organization so that it can create its own clients and have access to grant appropriate portions of your content to its clients? 2. Easy and Secure Content Management As a training vendor, your most important asset is your intellectual property -- your content. You want to ensure that the LMS system you select makes it easy for you to manage your content, keeping you in control and keeping it secure. Administrators should have the ability to upload content by themselves without any LMS vendor involvement and the content should be instantly available for use. Once loaded, it should be easy to make revisions and determine whether your changes should be applied to the content already deployed or not. The LMS should make it easy to grant all content or just portions of your library to your clients. Likewise, it should be an easy task to revoke such access. Many LMSs do not secure your content, once loaded, and only provide security by obfuscation. Ensure that the system you choose only allows access to content for authenticated users, not Page 1

3 anybody on the Internet who knows the address to access it. If it's accessible, search engines are likely to find it. While it is not critical that the LMS you select supports a whole variety of different e-learning standards, it is critical that it supports the one that your content utilizes. If you are in the process of creating your content or converting it for online use, support for the newer SCORM 2004 standard may be critical. SCORM 2004 offers many advantages to the earlier SCORM 1.2 and AICC standards and makes it easier to repurpose or adapt content to your clients' needs. If you use a third-party tool to create your content (such as Adobe Captivate, Articulate or Lectora), ensure that the LMS has evidence that it's well tested with your tool. The e-learning standards leave much up to interpretation, so, while the LMS and your tool may both be certified for a standard, they may not work together optimally. 3. Hassle-free IT Deployment and Management As a training vendor, you should be concentrating on your core competency - publishing and selling your content. Using a hosted LMS service, often called SaaS (Software as a Service), is an option that is highly recommended. Most training vendors, and most companies in general, have limited IT staff and resources. A hosted service offers companies the feature-rich, real-time functionality they need without the burdens of deploying, managing and supporting costly hardware and software in house. Most hosted LMSs will offer pay-as-you-go type subscriptions, bundling software, service, maintenance and upgrades in one fee. The pricing scales as your online business grows, enabling you to match the cost of the solution to your revenue stream. Using a reputable hosted service removes the concerns of scaling as your LMS traffic grows, both from a technical standpoint and on the support side. With more and more companies making use of SaaS vendors for key parts of their businesses, it seems the past concerns about security and losing control over data and applications by going with an SaaS vendor have largely disappeared. 4. Brand as Your Own and as Your Clients' Most LMSs allow you to brand them in some fashion to meet your needs, usually by allowing you to add your logo and changing the colors to match your own. Many are true 'white-label' solutions, allowing you to use your own domain name and hide all reference to the LMS vendor. Page 2

4 These are nice, but going beyond cosmetic changes, how much flexibility do you have with the interface? Can you add custom fields to support the specific requirements of a client? Can the terminology and instruction and feedback text be customized? Flexibility to use terminology and field names that your clients use can significantly reduce your customer support load. Consider whether the branding can flow down to your clients and distributors and be overridden where needed. Some clients may not require any further customization other than including their logo while others may have more demanding requirements. Are the changes you make to the branding of the LMS automatically inherited by your clients or are you required to make them for each and every client you add? If you deliver your content in multiple languages, ensure that the system you choose supports that. Keep in mind that not all your clients may require the same languages so you should have the flexibility to turn on or off languages for particular organizations. 5. Flexible Integration Options Flexible integration options are crucial to an LMS, especially for training vendors. Since you serve many organizations, you'll be faced with many requests for different levels of integration with the LMS solution you offer. Look for an LMS vendor that provides programmatic access to its features (e.g. Web Services API) with sample code for immediate deployment to handle the more common scenarios such as singlesign on authentication. Support for the HTTP AICC/CMI Protocol (HACP) is very useful. If you deliver training to larger enterprises, you'll find that you'll encounter organizations that already have their own LMS solution in place and use that system exclusively within their organization to manage learning-related activities. The HACP interface allows other LMS systems to launch content directly in your LMS and have the outcome data posted back to the launching system on exit. This allows your clients to use your content from their system without the hassles of installing and maintaining it on their own servers. Depending on your how you sell your content, built in payment processing capabilities may also be critical to your business. 6. Powerful Reporting, Both for Clients and Yourself Tracking usage and results and providing reporting is common to all LMSs, but consider the data that is useful to your own business when evaluating the list of standard reports that come with a system. Page 3

5 As a training vendor, you'd like data that can improve the effectiveness and sales of your content. Can reports be run across all your clients to determine usage and benchmark data? Can you get accurate high-level usage data so you can determine which clients may need more support? Look for flexibility in terms of a system's reporting capability. Can the raw data be exported into other formats for you or your clients to do further manipulation? Does the LMS provide ad hoc reporting or the ability to add custom reports? Some of your clients may have very unique reporting requirements. 7. Ease of Use Ease of use is something that is applicable to everyone that is evaluating an LMS (or any solution) but it is especially critical for training vendors. Your business is the content that you sell and the experience that goes along with its use. When selecting an LMS, you want to ensure that the users of your content will have a good experience -- both the learners that use the content and the people administering the system. The easier the system is to use, the less training you'll need to provide to each new client and the less support requests you'll receive. Ideally, you're able to customize the system to your needs and turn off any features that are not used, simplifying the interface. The Firmwater LMS is designed for training vendors and publishers looking to effectively service multiple clients and deliver training to their learners online. To learn more about how Firmwater can help you, please visit our Web site at Toll free in the US and Canada: info@firmwater.com Page 4