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LMS & LCMS Information
Learning Management System (LMS):
What is an LMS?
What does an LMS consist of?
Where do I get an LMS?
What do you need to know before acquiring an LMS?
Learning Content Management System (LCMS):
What is and LCMS?
What does an LCMS consist of?
Where do I get an LCMS?
What do you need to know before acquiring an LCMS?
What capabilities are important in an LCMS?
What is an LMS?
An LMS (Learning Management System) consists of an infrastructure platform that allows the tracking of courses or training experiences in relation to learners.
The LMS works at the curriculum level allowing the assembling of courses in to collections such as academic or training programs.
E-Learning courses managed by the LMS might be created with course-authoring tools and delivered with the assistance of Learning Content Management Systems.
An LMS is not limited to e-learning and can also manage other forms of instruction.
Tasks of the LMS:
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- Manage learners taking whole courses
- Manage the curriculum
- Manage courses in various curriculums
- Present options depending on learner profiles
- Track learner needs and preferences
- Track course completions and scores
Tasks a traditional LMS does not perform:
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- Create assessments
- Provide course navigation
Remember, however, that lines are being blurred between LMS and LCMS features depending on system design. You will find variations from vendor to vendor.
What does an LMS consist of?
An LMS consists of a relational database application designed to track learners, courses, curricula, and scores.
The LMS provides a web-based interface with which faculty and administrators can monitor learner progress through reports of enrollments, completions and grades.
The LMS also provides a web-based interface for the leaner to enroll in offerings and for online courses to be launched.
Where do I get an LMS?
There are a large number of LMS vendors offering a very large number of systems.
From very costly systems like OutStart or SumTotal catering to very large institutions to small systems like Generation21.
A list of vendors is not provided here as movement in this industry is constant with mergers and acquisitions happing monthly. For the latest perform a web search.
Because of the constant change in this area it is important that you not only assess the system but also the companies you are considering buying from. Some vendors have a few large customers (defense department or contractors) they might not be the best match for you in terms of cost of the leverage you might have for support. Others are more diversified in their customer base but may be more exposed to the winds of the industry.
An alternative to the commercial vendors are Open Source systems.
They are every bit as good as the commercial counterparts, don't let vendors tell you otherwise, they come at no cost to you (except for adaptations you might want to make), you have the right to customize them at will, and you benefit from the investments others have done in the system.
Moodle is just one systems.
What do you need to know before acquiring an LMS?
- How much you will manage: number of learner, faculty, courses, sessions, and administrators.
- Will you need e-commerce capabilities with the system? Will you be selling courses to outsiders or are they for internal use/training? Do you need automatic billing?
- What do you want/need to track? Courses, grades, prerequisites, types of course collections such as certificates, other learner activities?
- Will you track online courses or will the LMS have to track other activities or courses outside your organization? Will you need to track courses on CD ROM, video or other formats?
- Do you need to be standards compliant (IMS, SCORM, etc.)? Will you import of export courses to/from external organizations?
- How much connectivity with other systems in the institution will you need? Do you need your LMS to export data/reports to other systems in the organization? Will you be performing batch registrations?
- What�s your budget? What features are of highest importance?
- What kind of support will you need? What is the strength of your Information Technology department and how much support will they provide you?
The above is by no means an exhaustive list of questions. Those are the basics for you to determine the direction in which to go (large, medium or small systems).
LMSs can be extremely powerful tools with large numbers of features and capabilities; however, everything comes at a cost. Try your best to right-size your LMS by matching your institutions goals with the LMS�s features.
What is and LCMS?
A Learning Content Management System consists of an infrastructure designed to create, deliver, manage, and reuse instructional content. Content might be web pages, test, media, or assembled lessons and other course components.
The LCMS deals with content and its assemblies (learning objects, lessons, courses) and how that content is delivered. LCMSs convert information into learning content and are able to present it in a various forms depending on the learner and the learning objectives.
An LCMS may provide course to an LMS that tracks the learner and his/her enrollments.
What does an LCMS consist of?
Learning Content Management Systems consist of a central repository, a database, where content can be organized, assembled, approved, published, and from where lessons, courses and other learning events can be delivered.
Courses in a LCMS are typically created with web-based authoring tools and are viewed with a browser. An LCMS can also launch testing created by testing tools.
In an LCMS you will find:
Components: html pages, XML data, media, test questions
Learning Object definitions: use of the above components to accomplish learning objectives
Lesson and Course definitions: use of learning objects to accomplish instructional goals
Templates and style sheets: to control appearance and delivery
Framework: navigation and user interface
Metadata about all of the above
Where do I get an LCMS?
LCMSs vary widely in capabilities. Some are made for large institutions and some are more scalable.
There are dozens of LCMS vendors and we will not list them here as they are changing rapidly with mergers and acquisitions. If you plan to purchase an LCMS do check the vendor carefully to insure it will be around to support you.
Even apparent industry leaders have gone away almost overnight so don�t be impressed by displays at conferences and alike. Look at the financial data or have someone do this for you.
As with LMSs I suggest that you take a look at the Open Source alternative.
With Open Source you don�t really care if the original creator disappears as you will have the code and you will have a community to support you.
An Open Source LCMS such as ATutor is every bit as good as those offered by the commercial counterparts.
What do you need to know before acquiring an LCMS?
- Are you intending to reuse a lot of content? If you will reuse a lot of content then an LCMS is the right tool.
- Are you intending to manage a lot of content? What is the number of courses, lessons, and media you plan to reuse and manage? How many authors will you have participating? If you will manage multiple assets and people the an LCMS is the right tool.
- Will you deliver content in a number of different formats or will you give it a different look depending on learner needs? This is something an LCMS is geared to.
- Will you need to create content that is standards compliant to share it with other institutions or groups within your company? If so an LCMS is the right tool.
What capabilities are important in an LCMS?
Capabilities will vary in importance depending on your goals but here are some pointers for you to look into them further.
- Workflow management: used in the authoring
- Project management
- Collaborative authoring: very important in the authoring of modular content (learning object based)
- Can the system import/export IMS and SCORM content?
- Can the system easily use all of the media formats you expect to employ?
- Revision and change tracking
- Metadata labeling: can authors input or change metadata? How does the system populate metadata in the first place? Warning: be careful with systems that automatically fill metadata to make your instruction standard compliant. Some fill in the fields but the data might be deficient or inappropriate. Remember �junk in, junk out�. There are a few well known systems that do terrible things with your metadata!
- What instructional model is your authoring based on?
- What are the adaptive learning capabilities? Can the system adapt the presentation of the learning object to the learner? What level of adaptive learning do you need? Do offerings need to change depending on skills-gap analysis?
- Is the user interface appropriate for your needs?
- Does the system offer a testing environment?
This is not an exhaustive list of capabilities. It is meant only to get you thinking and help you take the first few steps
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