The LMS Wishlist

from Raj Alphonse, Learning Management Systems Consultant

on March 14, 2011

22 comments

Introduction: Raj Alphonse is a Fredrickson Communications' affiliate specializing in learning technology consulting. This blog entry is a lead-in to the April 14, 2011 meeting of the Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders where the featured discussion topic will be "The LMS Wishlist."

Have you run into a brick wall lately? I felt like I did when I saw an article in the March issue of the CLO magazine titled, “Assessing Learning in a Post-LMS World.”

Did I read that right? Post-LMS? Is the LMS dead? The world stopped for a moment, then I felt dizzy. In disbelief I asked Google, “Is the LMS dead?” and got 16,900 results, including an article titled “Is the LMS Dead?” from CLO magazine dated September 26, 2010.

In six months CLO Magazine has gone from pondering if the LMS was dead to a dissertation on a post-LMS world. The authors assure us that a “post-LMS world ... merely means that assessing learning only utilizing an LMS is becoming obsolete.” Sad, but true, there is ample evidence to support this notion. Just spell L-M-S out loudly to a gathering of training professionals and watch the reaction. No matter what LMS they use, everyone will have at least one gripe, one horror story, one wish. Summarize the feedback, and you can see the writing on the wall: the LMS badly needs to evolve.

Can this lumbering beast get its groove back? What can we do to make the feedback heard by those who can do something? Create a blog of gripes, a book of horror stories? That would be too negative.

Instead, how about we compile an LMS Wishlist and send it to the Beast Makers? A list that spells out what you want. And what you don’t want. A list that puts the spotlight on the gaps, goof-ups, and glaring omissions. A list that points to features no one asked for. A list to transform the “monolith” mindset of LMS designers into a “modular” mindset. A list to upgrade the evolutionary effort to a revolutionary one.

There is another benefit to drawing up a collective LMS wishlist: we can learn what everyone else wants, needs, likes, and dislikes. This is the beginning of a conversation about the future of the LMS because it shows us where learning professionals want to go and what they want to leave behind.

So please make a wish and make it known. This blog entry is just for that.

All wishes are welcome; no wish is too small, too large, nor too far-fetched. There are no limits to how many wishes you can have. Wishes may be related to operation, budget, technology, infrastructure, user interface, reporting, and whatever else you have.

And hurry please, before CLO Magazine starts thinking about an LMS autopsy report.

Comments

WISH: You could easily assign a course to a group of employees. (The LMS would interface with existing company system(s) so that the adminstrator could assign specific courses by, say, employee role or department.)

by Jan Parker
on March 21, 2011 - 12:03

WISH: For an annually required employee course, we could change the course title (e.g., “Xyz Course 2010” to “Xyz Course 2011") without this title edit changing the report results for previous years. For example, if you run the course completion report for 2010, it wouldn’t have the title “Xyz Course for 2011.”

by Jan Parker
on March 21, 2011 - 12:07

WISH: For one course you could have two different sets of questions for the final assessment. For example, all nurses would take the same course, but Behavioral Health nurses would take a different final assessment than the Medical nurses would take.

by Jan Parker
on March 21, 2011 - 12:10

WISH: For an annually required employee course, if needed, we could change the passing grade one year without it affecting the course completion results for previous years. (For example, if we change the passing grade from 80 percent to 90 percent, the LMS course report for the previous years would not change employees from passed to failed, if they received from 80 to 89 percent.)

by Jan Parker
on March 21, 2011 - 12:21

I’m not a member of this Learning Leader group so I hope it’s ok that I comment.  BTW, Raj, I believe you and I may have met at Mazie’s conference 2 years ago or so? 

Anyway, here’s my wish:  Why is it so hard to have and manage a process around submitting eLearning courses for connection to the LMS? 

Maybe you folks in Minneapolis have it all figured out, but down here this is a constant mess.  How about a course connection workflow that allows the learning groups to access our standards, then submit their course for testing, receive test results, and then submit a final copy for uploading?

Maybe I’m making this too simple and this is asking for too much? 

I see that there’s a one-wish-per-post limit, so I’ll be back later.  I’ve got a few issues with our learner-side LMS user interface that I want to talk about.

by Ron Fitzgerald
on March 22, 2011 - 4:12

Here’s my LMS wish #2:  User Interfaces.  Why are these so bad? 

The interface our employees use to register for courses, search, and so on is TERRIBLE.  It looks like it was designed by 13 year olds in 1994 using Windows 3.1.  I’m not going to go into specifics because it’s too bad to even start in on.

Why is this so hard?  The administration side of the LMS looks fine.  It’s not great, but it at least looks like it was designed in this century by someone who mainly knew what they were doing.

Besides the issues I have with people not being able to find classes or register, there’s a nagging feeling that I’ve got that the bad UI makes our L&D;group look bad. 

I go to do my expense report or check my vacation balance and the interface is good, modern, well designed.  I go to schedule myself into a mandatory course all managers have to take this year and the interface looks like a clown designed it.

I wish I could attend this meeting to hear what others have to say on this.  Will you be publishing the compiled wish list on this site?

Thanks for doing this, this is really interesting. 

BTW, Jan, I totally agree with your #1 wish.

by Ron Fitzgerald
on March 23, 2011 - 9:32

Ron there is no limit on wishes. I haven’t been to Mazie’s, so far, perhaps this year.

User-friendly interface, Seamless work flow, Painless integration— all seems so ‘futuristic’ when you look at some LMS installations. In general, the WOW factor in LMSs is super low; ho-hum appears to be the norm; even my accounting system looks so adorable.

It might be helpful to let us know what system you are using.

by Raj Alphonse
on March 23, 2011 - 10:33

Jan,

In Blackboard Vista you can create a new course from existing content—audio, video, HTML pages, quizzes etc. —of another course. You can also import student and instructors from another course. But you cant simply make a copy of the course and rename it as we do with documents. Does your LMS have an option to import content from other courses?

To configure quiz availability based on student groups (Medical nurses, Behavioral Health Nurses), the LMS should allow categorization of students. If this function is available, directing students to quizzes made for their group isn’t that difficult.  Does your LMS allow such grouping of students?

by Raj Alphonse
on March 23, 2011 - 11:16

Hi Ron, I wish you could join us on the 14th as well. We will blog on the trends that we hear during the session. I’d also be happy to connect you to some colleagues who do have a process for getting eLearning content onto an LMS. Feel free to contact me at .

by Joyce Lasecke
on March 24, 2011 - 1:08

One wish is for reporting that works and is easy to use.

I also wish for easier ways to update content.

by Suzanne O'Brien
on March 29, 2011 - 2:40

Raj,
Thank you for the info about how Blackboard Vista works. It sounds like our LMS (SkillPort) works differently. We create our new and updated courses outside of the LMS, using either Dreamweaver/CourseBuilder or Captivate, and then we load the new course to the LMS, asking our LMS to overwrite the old course or pages with the new. So, for example, the 2011 version of the course will be available to employees, but the historic report data (learners, scores, etc.) for the previous years’ courses will still be available for running reports.

On the other topic, I don’t believe that our LMS allows for catagorization of student groups: if it does, it would require a lot of data entry by our on-site administrator to set up the categories.

The issue related to two different groups of nurses is that we’re trying to save money by having all nurses take the same course, but within that course, we’d like to have the two different groups take some of the same quiz questions but also some quiz questions that are specific only to one group. This makes the score reporting very complicated. Given our current LMS limitations, perhaps the better solution for the future would be to develop two separate courses for the two different audiences, even though much of the content and many of the quiz questions would be the same.

by Jan Parker
on March 29, 2011 - 3:02

Jan—creating 2 separate courses with similar content is double the work and not very efficient in the long run. Guess you gotta do it that way if there is no choice.

I have handled this issue by assigning a department ID and a group ID to students which are attached to their LMS ID. It makes it easy to assign course content and quizzes based on departments and groups within the departments. I agree this would be a lot of work for the administrator to set up categories. If SkillPort could interface to a HR system that contains this info, it would be really awesome.

by Raj Alphonse
on March 29, 2011 - 5:18

Thanks, Raj, for explaining how you have set up students and IDs in an LMS. Good to know.

by Jan Parker
on March 30, 2011 - 9:24

Wish: Changing the cost when needing to and having it not effect the historical data.

by Sue Rowland
on March 30, 2011 - 10:53

Wish: Adding another component to a class after someone has enrolled

by Sue Rowland
on March 30, 2011 - 10:54

Wish: Change completion or passing requirements information after someone has enrolled but we realized we forgot to adjust that section when we set up the class and realized the implications later.

by Sue Rowland
on March 30, 2011 - 10:56

Thank you Sue.That makes it 9 wishes so far. The wish list is growing!

by Raj Alphonse
on March 31, 2011 - 11:46

Hi Raj , I wrote some wishes according to the roles in an LMS.
Wish: As an user, i wish an LMS as a modular and all inclusive system allowing connection to needed training in the mean (direction) of Personal Learning Environment with communications tools.
From an admin side: manage blended Learning cursus for companies with the appropriate reporting and dashboard.
From an author side, the LMS is also an LCMS and you can create authoring CoP (community with graphics, expert, validator, test users....) when creating a course.
from a tutor side: The LMS allows me to check, evaluate, communicate through my tutor interface.
Very interesting subject - For me the LMS is not dead but in constant evolution as is training in companies.
Happy to continue this discussion
http://www.mindonsite.com/en/

by Mido Raffier
on April 01, 2011 - 3:00

>> LMS as a modular and all inclusive system allowing connections to needed training

I like the way you said that Mido.

by Raj Alphonse
on April 12, 2011 - 10:50

As we are getting close to the Roundtable (April 14) , my mind is trying to categorize wishes.

Just got started with these categories:

User Interface Wishes
Course Management Wishes
Integration (with other systems) Wishes
Reporting Wishes

Please add more!

by Raj Alphonse
on April 12, 2011 - 10:56

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