I work in a small company. We produce proprietary online training courses that we sell globally - in licence form.
Our offerings are outgrowing our internally developed LMS.
So I am looking to for info on an off the shelf LMS to administer our internally produces e learning course.
The functionality of most interest:
- allocation of training 'licences' (single and multiple courses)
- tracking of student progress
- report generation
- certificate generation/deployment
Any intormation on (most cost effective) solutions greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Leo
Leo Cullen
2 Responses
LMS at low cost
Leo
A very low cost off the shelf solution is one offered by Beadware. It doesn’t have all the high level functionality of the major LMSs on offer but it will manage what I think you are trying to do. I am looking into using it for a similar sort of purpose. The contact there is Terrry Riordan, 07866 546669, terry@beadware.com.
Pat Kyle
Take a holistic approach to your LMS Options
Dear Leo
The basic administration functionality you describe will certainly provide your company with administrative benefits and should generate cost savings.
However, to avoid any risk of defining your requirements too narrowly I suggest you take more holistic view of the learning experience you wish to provide. Canvas your existing and prospective customers about their views and wishes.
Would they be attracted by e-commerce enrollment processes? Would senior managers within corporate clients relish the opportunity to remotely review the progress made by their team members via your LMS? What about providing added value by offering new modes of learner/learner interaction or learner/tutor interaction? Would event and assignment reminders delivered to students via email or SMS text be an attractive feature or simply an annoyance? And so on.
Since your courses are both online and sold globally it seems safe to assume that your courses are hosted on the Internet. Whilst it would be perfectly viable for your own small organisation to provide its own hosting (or contract with a third party host) and then strike a separate deal for an LMS, you may want to prioritise providers that host courses and provide Application Service Provider (ASP) LMS functionality as a single integrated service.
This would allow you to contract against an integrated Service Level Agreement (SLA) benchmarked to your clients expectations for response time from both courseware and the LMS functionality.
This should avoid you having to act as referee in any argument about which party is at fault in the event of an unexpected outage. Whatever the problem, your contractor will need to fix it, or incur penalties.
There are a large and increasing number of providers offering ASP services.
Our Director of e-Learning Clive Shepherd wrote a general article on ASP options which you will find on-line at:
http://www.trainingfoundation.com/articles/default.asp?PageID=951
I hope these ideas prove helpful.
Regards