CallSource^® Aim Higher

What’s So Great About Learning Management Systems?

by Ann Kwinn, Ph.D. , April 8 2010

I love getting into those old computer technology conversations that go something like this: When I was in school, there were no monitors, only printers. Oh yeah? We had no disk backup – only tape. We had punch cards! My own version of this goes like this – when I started in eLearning, we had to provide a login to each course. The student data was stored in a spreadsheet on the local computer’s hard drive and the administrator had to mail a diskette to a central location. The children listening, eyes wide, now ask: What’s a diskette, Auntie Ann?

These days we have Learning Management Systems (LMS’s). An LMS is a website to house all of a company’s eLearning content. It also provides the three R’s of online education: registrations, reminders and reporting. One big advantage of Learning Management Systems when they came out was simply collecting all the content in one place. Before that, in some large companies, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing – at least when it came to training. Multiple departments might have developed their own prevention of sexual harassment course, for example.

Enter Humanet – the Learning Management System my company at the time developed for our retail clients such as Kroger, who wanted to make sure every store was on board with the new way of training – eLearning. Their policy was – if a student didn’t score 80% or more on the test, it’s as if they never took the course. And once we could show who took the training, the company could prove, for example, that the safety training reduced accidents and insurance claims. We created our own scoring systems for the courses and passed this data to the LMS. This was before SCORM.

What is SCORM? If you must know, it stands for sharable content object reference model. Sorry you asked? I tell my clients – the only thing you need to know about SCORM is that it is a way for the courses to talk to the LMS. It is a standard. Most commercially available LMS’ are SCORM compliant meaning they use this standard. So, as long as your courses are SCORM compliant – which is very easy to do with a push of a button in most eLearning authoring tools, you will have a relatively happy marriage (at least for the first seven years).

In our LMS, we had a permission structure in which the admin could see all student data; regional managers could only see data for their region and employees could only see their own data.

Then when I taught for UC Irvine in an instructional design program, I had the opportunity to take a course on LMS’ and compare the feature sets of many different commercially available tools.

LMS’ still let you slice and dice data in various ways, but today’s LMS’ also provide email notification to students and supervisors, allow you to register students for classroom training and synchronous online training (such as WebEx sessions) and allow you to store documentation as well.

But since the early days, some systems have become very large. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. You need to take ongoing training to keep up with new functionality and tech support sometimes has gate keepers to keep you from talking to the people with the real answers. LMS’ were a great idea that in some cases became overly complex and expensive.

A while back, my new company, CallSource, embarked on developing a Learning Management System that is easy to use and geared toward Multifamily Housing, yet still provides functionality such as:

• Assigning courses for a job position or individual
• Importing personnel data for automatic registrations and updates
• Importing student records from other LMS’
• Self registration
• Posting courses or tests – including pre and post tests
• Course bookmarking (so you can return to where you left off)
• An individual page for each user 
• Printing certificates

In fact, the National Apartment Association’s Education Institute selected CallSource to build on this system and to create a custom LMS to roll out to the NAA and its affiliates.

We hope our customers find that including the most popular current LMS functionality while keeping it simple is the best policy.

Ann Kwinn is VP of Interactive Learning for CallSource in Westlake Village, CA; akwinn@callsource.com; www.callsource.com