• The big issue

An interesting question and one I’m sure anyone who has ever had to go through the pain of rolling out an enterprise level LMS will no doubt have thought at many times during the process. But what are the alternatives? If you want to simply track learners as they work through SCORM compliant e-learning then there are many lightweight LMS type tools out in the market place to choose from. However, think about what else they offer that might tempt you away from that behemoth of an LMS application that is currently gobbling up your resources and training budget?

The big issue

In my last article on this subject ‘Is your LMS over-priced and under-used’ I highlighted a lot of the issues I am currently seeing when visiting new clients. An interesting example came to light towards the end of last year at a learning technology show in San Jose. I was talking to the head of L&D of a major global organisation who was telling me about a problem he was having with the company’s current LMS. Like many large global organisations the choice of an LMS had been taken over by the IT department. In a way it’s understandable why this happens - a global LMS solution becomes a strategic issue, must integrate with existing systems and be hosted in a way that is safe, secure and available to all users 99.9% of the time. But somewhere in this mix the IT department can lose site of the requirements of the L&D function and this is precisely what had happened, to a point where the L&D team had encountered the worst case scenario: Their users, the learners the system was designed to support actually found the system intimidating, the LMS had become a barrier to learning instead of the benefit it should be. Does this sound familiar? This problem can manifest itself in many other ways, another example I have seen lately included an LMS where it was so complicated to find anything meaningful to the learner that they had given up trying to find any learning and had instead adopted a more informal approach to gaining knowledge. In this scenario most people find the global search engines such as Google or Bing a far more accessible route to learning. But this informal approach only works where the company or organisation have not imposed strict restrictions around Internet usage, when the shutters are down and the learner can’t get beyond the local Intranet, what happens to the informal learner? Back to basics Of course there isn’t one answer to this problem, but there are certainly a numebr of tips to help you generate interest and engagement in your learning interventions, none of which have to be elaborate or expensive – just well conceived and relevant.

Build some interest

What does the L&D team need from a learner development system? I’m intentionally not calling it an LMS at this stage because of the potential issues discussed above and maybe an LMS is not the answer to the learner development issue you have, sometimes we must accept that one size does not fit all. Perhaps the most important aspect is to make sure that the learner has quick and easy access to the learning material they are required to work through and this should extend beyond the e-learning course material and take into account other learning options. I was talking to one of the large councils in London recently, they had a great example of how learning material gets scattered across the local organisations network. They had a health and safety induction course to run on a regular basis for new starters, this consisted of a fairly generic e-learning offering, a short face-to-face classroom session and then the new starter was given a list of documents, check sheets and videos to find which were scattered across the network. The work station assessment PDF file was on drive N, the health and safety checklist on drive Z and so on. Shouldn’t this all be in one place where the learner can easily find everything they need without having to navigate their way around a labyrinth of network drives and folders? This is a very simple example of an all too familiar problem with a lot of systems that support learning, they can do the classroom and e-learning side of things, but what about the support materials, the follow-up workbooks, the pre-course study material. Where is that kept and how easy is to find?

Content Relationships

This in itself is a huge topic that will be covered in more detail in a later article, but for now think about the induction scenario and how you could build relationships between the various aspects of the content to make sure the learner was pushed the correct information. Amazon does this to perfection, I’m sure you’ve seen the ‘People who bought this also bought’ section? More on how you do that in a later article.

Learner tracking

Learner progress tracking is standard with any and all learner support systems or LMS’. It’s vital the management team know who is undertaking what training and when. But SCORM tracking and classroom session tracking is, only part of the information you need if, as a manager or team leader, you are to understand the learner’s actual progress. These don’t tell you about the learning items utilised that are considered as more informal aspects of learning, the conversations via email with a subject matter expert, the website visited that was signposted as part of a learning programme, the document read, video watched, podcast listened to and so on. To get the complete picture the manager or team leader needs to view a full user history.

Contributors

A question I am always being asked is how do you make an application ‘sticky’, what makes people come back for more? Try asking why is Twitter so popular? What is it that makes hundreds of people follow every tweet from some contributors? I am in no way endorsing installing a Twitter style system inside your organisation, but do you have access to subject matter experts? Would they be willing to be regular contributors to Wikis and Blogs? Re-think how you could use tools like this as well, a Wiki can be simplified to the point of being a glossary of terms, those three letter acronyms explained by your own experts. A Blog simplified to being a collection of best-practice articles and yes you’ve guessed it, allow users to follow contributors in their field of interest so that whenever they post a new glossary term or best practice article then the followers will be informed.

Is it an LMS?

So to wrap up this article, consider the items and scenarios covered so far. We need to make all types of content available to the learner in a formal and informal way, structured classroom and e-learning courses, documentation, videos, podcasts and even websites. We need a method of building relationships between this content to push it to the learner. We need to be able to track every aspect of the learner progress. We need to provide experts with a set of tools to share their knowledge and allow learners to ‘follow’ contributor’s key to their own fields.

Does this sound like an LMS to you? Here at Infinity Learning we have spent the last two years perfecting a system that can deal with all these issues in an agile and user friendly way. It’s not an LMS for so many good reasons! It’s a system designed to promote learner engagement that we just call Involve.