What’s
In An LMS?
February 2009
Considering
a Learning Management System? To be successful, an LMS
must fit into your overall E-Learning plan and facilitate the business goals
you want to accomplish. An LMS
worthy of your time (and money!) must provide an infrastructure that allows you
to plan, deliver and manage E-Learning programs in new and existing formats.
So, what should you look for in an LMS?
- Supports blended learning. People learn in different
ways. An LMS should offer training options that are student-paced
or instructor-led.
- Administration. The LMS must enable administrators to
manage user registrations and profiles, define roles, set curricula, author
courses, manage content, chart student progress and administer e-commerce.
- Reporting. Standard and customized reports on individual
and group performance must be available to Administrators. Reports should
be scalable to include the entire learning-base.
- Scheduling. The system should be able to build schedules
for learners and instructors.
- Learning Screens. All learning screens and features
should be manageable, using automated, user-friendly student and administration
screens.
- Assessment. Evaluation, testing and assessment engines help
you build a program that becomes more valuable over time.
- Skills management. A skills management component
enables organizations to measure training needs and identify improvement
areas based on learners’ collective competence in specified areas.
- Configurability. If an organization needs to
completely re-engineer its internal processes to install an LMS or employ expensive
programming resources to make changes to the LMS, then it’s probably not a good
fit.
- Content management capabilities
connect smaller learning
objects to build courses and curriculums. Existing content and formats
should transfer quickly and easily into the course builder features.
There's
little doubt that an LMS, an online training system, is a great investment that will
offer new frontiers for your training initiatives. Finding the system that's
the best fit for your company requires a careful selection process and thorough
survey of available features.
Training Tips
How can you evaluate the success of your assessment
strategy?
One key benefit of a fully-automated Learning
Management System is that tests are graded automatically, in real time, as they
are taken. You can generate reports from testing data that tell you
whether your course content and testing strategy are aligned.
Evaluation and reporting focus can include:
1) How each student performed on each test.
2) Analysis of each question, and how students are answering
it.
3) Pre-and post-test scores, demonstrating the effectiveness
of the training.
4) Performance graphs plotting average test scores against
goals.
What
kind of test questions should you use?
When establishing your testing strategy,
consider your class size, complexity of the training content and the workloads
of the participants. Choose question formats that are suitable to your testing
material and subject matter. Consider these formatting options:
- Multiple choice
- True/False
- Fill-in-the-blank
- A mix of the above
With FlexTraining, you can add videos and images
for test questions, generate a warning when the time
is nearly up and randomly select from a pool of questions at test time.
You can also set timing parameters, define the
number of test attempts for students and present the correct answers or
explanations after the test completion.
Whatever your strategy, test
question format and user-defined options, the FlexTraining LMS can handle courses of
any length and can incorporate any number of tests, including
pre-testing, progress testing and post-testing.
Your
successful testing strategy begins with aligning your content and evaluations
around training goals and tying both to
business objectives.