So you know you want an LMS.  Good. This article isn’t here to tell you why you need one, or why you should use one, this is a guide for anyone who already knows they want an LMS, just wants a guide for what to check for.

Over the years I have spent many hours testing content and trying various different Learning Management Systems, and have even done some LMS (like) design work with Articulate Online.  Over that time period I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about what does work well, and what doesn’t work well in a lot of systems, so based on my knowledge on the subject, here is my list 10 things to consider before choosing in an LMS.

1. What LMS Standard does it use (AICC, SCORM 1.2, or SCORM 2004)?

There are 3 LMS standards of significance these days, AICC, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004.

A little history on the standards…

The AICC standard was developed by the aviation industry in 1993 and has evolved a bit over the years, but remains pretty similar to its roots.

The SCORM 1.2 standard was released in 2001 and is the most popular standard (in terms of usage) to date, and was actually developed by the department of defense.  It was at least in part designed based on some of the limitations of the AICC standard.  Although some consider to be an improvement over AICC, it still had many shortcomings.

SCORM 2004 was released in 2004 (shocker huh?) and in this specification they addressed some of the shortcommings and ambiguities of SCORM 1.2.

In the years that I have worked with Learning Management Systems issues have come up where the LMS expects one thing, but the content expects another.  A big reason this has happened is that the early standards like SCORM 1.2 have left a lot open to interpretation.  For example, certain versions of Saba will expressly ignore the status that the content sends to the LMS if the content exits with a “suspend” mode.  With our content we expressly exit with a “suspend” mode when a user exits a course, which will normally allow a user to relaunch the content.  So when you launch and complete content in Saba we expressly tell the content that the status is “completed”, but Saba ignores this because the status is set to “suspend”.  Both sides are technically doing what is right, but still we fail.  Find a solution to the Saba problem here.

There are other places where the earlier standards were just flat out missing something that should have been included.  In the SCORM 1.2 standard there is no option for the content to communicate with the Learning Management System what the question was.  It allows you to send an “interaction id”, but this is generally assumed to be an ID, and not question text.  So the standard allows the content to communicate what type of question it was (t/f, MC, MR, etc), what the correct response was, and what the learner response was, but no way for us to communicate what the question was.  In SCORM 2004 they improved this part of the standard by allowing us to pass the question “description” which allows us to communicate the question text.

Some of the older standards have some shortcommings based on the age of the standard.  Back when AICC and SCORM 1.2 were developed, we weren’t in the same place that we are today in terms of computer processing power, bandwidth, etc.  This caused the standards to be limited in what they allowed the content to send.  For example, the SCORM 1.2 standard only allows content to send 256 characters to the LMS for a learner response to a question.   So, if you have an essay question that you ask your users, any response they give over 256 characters would violate the SCORM 1.2 standard.  Again, this is something that has been improved in SCORM 2004, where they raised the limit to around 4000 characters.

So as the standards have evolved, generally they have been improved along the way, with each newer version  addressing shortcomings, ambiguities and limitations of the previous veresions.  So make sure you consider what standard or standards (many support more than one) the LMS supports before making your purchase decision.  If your LMS supports more than one, or all, GREAT!

Other things to note when thinking about standards:

• Most major content authoring tools support AICC, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004
• If you often use custom developed content, make sure your content developer also can work with the standard of your LMS choice
• Beware of vendors that only partially implement a standard.  Both the ADL (who controls the SCORM standard) and the Aviation Industry for CBT Committee offer certification for LMS vendors.  If an LMS claims AICC, SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 support, see if they have been certified as compliant.

2. What technologies are required by the LMS?

Ok, I admit it, I have had a love hate relationship with Java…the hate part stems for a Java class I took in college and 2 years I spent working at Sun Microsystems.  The love part is that Java can do some really cool things cross platform (i.e. Screenr).

Java definitely has its place, but LMS environments is not one of them.  See post and comments here for more info.

Every once in awhile I get a report that our content doesn’t work in some LMS running a specific version of Java (example 1, example 2).  Why it works in every browser, and non-Java based LMS, but has issues with specific Java versions is a serious pain in the ass to figure out.

I could rant for another 2 pages on everything I think is wrong with Java in a LMS environment, but that is not the point of the article.  The point is, look at what is required by the LMS to view content.  Does the LMS work without any additional plug-ins or odd system requirements?  Also check to make sure your LMS system requirements match the systems your users will be using.  Do they support Safari browser on a Mac, do they support Firefox?  Do they support IE6 and later?

Note: JavaScript is different from Java.  JavaScript is cool, Java is not.

3. How easy is it to get content up on the LMS?

One of the problems with many Learning Management Systems is that getting content up to the LMS takes a monumental effort.  I kid you not, in some Learning Management Versions it is a 15 step process of getting content up to the LMS.  Seeing that getting content up to an LMS was often a difficult task, the AICC board along with several eLearning experts developed the PENS standard (Packet Exchange Notification System).  The idea was that the content authoring tool like Articulate Presenter or Captivate would notify the LMS that some content was available, and the LMS would then go pick up the content from the authoring tool.  This sounds great, and is great, but the problem is that most content vendors and Learning Management Systems are slow to adopt new standards.   It is kinda like the problem with clean fuels for cars, gas stations won’t get green fuel until cars start using them.  PENS is an improvement, but it hasn’t been adopted by most LMS vendors or content vendors, so it is important to see how easy it is to upload content to the LMS.

Use Scripted Demos

Map out common things that you are going to need to do with the LMS, and ask your LMS Sales Representative to walk you through those tasks.

Some ideas for scripted demos:

• Upload content to the LMS
• Enroll a student
• Run reports on tracked content

These are day to day tasks that you are going to want to do, so you should know how easy or how difficult this will be before purchasing.

As a bonus, ask your sales rep to take content you have and upload it to the LMS and prove that it works.

4. Focus on ease of use of the features you need, not on the number of features the LMS offers.

We use to have a bugbase that we used at Articulate that was truely aweful.  It was slow to load, took forever to log a bug, had poor text handling and would always throw exceptions, it was just a terrible bugbase for actually logging and tracking bugs, and those should be the core features.  Every year the bugbase would release a new version and they would keep piling on new features that I didn’t care about (CRM Management, Case Management, external bug reporting system), without making the core features work.  The company that made the bugbase was about competing on the number of features, not on making the core features work.  On the complete opposite side of the spectrum look at the iPhone.  A phone that has really high customer satisfaction year after year.  The iPhone doesn’t win all feature comparisons with other phones, yet the iPhone continues to sell really well.     The iPhone sells well not because it has more features than any other cell phone, but because the features they did build they built well.

5. Beware of the “home grown” LMS.

Too many support cases and forum posts begin with “Our in house developed LMS…”.  As I mentioned above, the SCORM standard leaves a lot open for interpretation.  It is naive to think that because there is a documented standard creating a SCORM based LMS will be easy.  There are many companies that (like Rustici Software) have made an entire business out of doing SCORM implementation, and if building an LMS and doing the SCORM implementation was easy, they wouldn’t be in business.

6. Hosted or Licensed?

Do you need to license the LMS and host it on your own servers, or is it alright for it to be hosted by the LMS company?

There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches.

Benefits of licensed

• You own the software, and likely won’t have to pay re-occurring fees for anything but maintenance (if you choose to get it).
• You control the security - if security is a big issue for you, licensing the software might be better than a hosted solution because you can control access to the LMS (through a corporate firewall, etc).

Benefits of hosted

• Usually less expensive - If you outright buy the software you will likely be faced with a bigger upfront cost.
• Don’t have to manage the servers  - We for example host Articulate Online and Screenr at Rackspace.  Why do we do this instead of owning our own servers?  Well, Rackspace is the premier hosting provider in the world.  They are better at setting up servers, better at dealing with security, better at managing load balancing, fire walling, etc. than we are.  We handle the software part, which is a core competency of ours, and let Rackspace host the servers, which is a core competency of theirs.
• Updates are usually included for free – If you own your own server you may or may not be entitled to free upgrades.  We have many customers that are stuck using AICC because they licensed their server years ago, and no longer get free updates.  If you are on a hosted solution you most likely are always on the most up to date version of the software.

8. Is Open Source a possible solution?

I am not advocating this solution as the most painless, easiest option.  There are going to be a lot of implementation costs, time cost, hardware cost associated with an Open Source solution to your LMS needs, but Open Source should definitetly be considered.  The benefit of Open Source is the software is free.  The downside is that most Open Source Learning Managment Systems that I have used can be buggy, and hard to deploy.  I have only personally used Moodle and Dokeos (have used Moodle for about 4 years), and they have gotten better over time, but they still have some issues.

In addition to Moodle and Dokeos there are at least 10 other open source LMS options.

On another note, just because it isn’t open source, doesn’t mean they will have good support.  I will refrain by calling out any vendors by name.

Also there are some vendors that do open source hosting and support for the fraction of the cost of a traditional licensed LMS vendor.  Some names in this field are:

• Moodlerooms
• Kineo

9. What kind of reports are available?

Rustici Software (SCORM.COM) points out in SCORM for RFPs for LMSs that:

SCORM can provide a wealth of data about what a learner does in a course, but it’s up to the LMS to keep the data and use it. You’ll want to know what kind of reports there are, how data is tracked and what the learner sees at a minimum.

Really good point here.  Some Learning Management Systems do a really good job with capturing all the data, but don’t do the greatest job on reporting the data.  For example, Moodle does a good job at capturing all the SCORM data, and will do a great job of reporting status and score, but gets lazy with the reporting of the interaction data (how people answered each question).  If you want to see this in action, check out this post I did on uploading and tracking in Moodle.

A big part of the success of Articulate Online has been the richness of our reports (see this Articulate Online report presentation for more info).  With SCORM 2004 reporting, the LMS should be able to generate reports that are just as rich as what Articulate Online offers, but few LMS actually provide such elegant reports.

A good idea is to list out what type of information you will need to gather in your LMS, and then ask the LMS sales representative how to get that data.

For example, you might need to:

• Know who has taken a quiz
• How that person scored
• What questions are people missing consistently
• What is your most popular contet

Make sure your LMS is capable of generating the data you need.

10. How well do they work with content vendors?

During our beta cycles I occasionally reach out to LMS vendors to ask if I can test our content in their LMS just to make sure that everything works ok.  Most LMS vendors a really cool about this, and allow us to test in a trial or sandbox account.  But occasionally some of the bigger vendors ask for a substantial amount of money ($2000-$5000) just for us to test content in their LMS.  Seriously, and then they claim the charge is “nominal”.  Anyway, ask your LMS vendor if they partner with any content vendors, or if the authoring tool you use has been tested in their environment.

More information

SCORM.COM has a really good post on What to ask about SCORM in an RFP that has 7 questions anyone should ask of the LMS when getting a request for proposal and (at least) 27 questions to ask about your LMS vendor about SCORM.  Highly recommend checking it out.

Do you have any suggestions that you think should be added to the list?  Do you hate your LMS vendor?  Tell me about it in the comments.

Note: Someone pointed out this list only contains 9 items (I skipped 7).  Going to keep it titled a list of 10 though, because 10 reads better than 9  Sorry to short change you by 1.

We (at Articulate) are working on developing some Screenr screencasts that show you how you can upload and track Articulate content in various Learning Management Systems.  I got a head start on the project by doing a screencast on tracking Quizmaker in Moodle a couple of weeks back.  In this screencast I am going to show you how you can upload and track Quizmaker ’09 content in Dokeos.

Dokeos is a Free Open Source LMS like Moodle.  Doesn’t contain nearly the feature set of Moodle, but it is a little simpler to use.  Enjoy the demo!

Got a question yesterday from Colin asking about the Moodle theme I was using in a couple of the blog posts I have done showing how to use Articulate content in Moodle.  I created this short screencast that shows you how you can change, find, and install new themes for Moodle.

Another good location for finding Moodle themes is just googling for “Moodle themes”.  There are a ton of free, and paid versions of Moodle themes on the market, and many people willing to fully customize Moodle for a price.

3 1/2 years ago I blogged about uploading an Articulate Quizmaker to Moodle.  It has been one of my most popular and heavily commented on posts.  In this post I wanted to revist that demo.  I used Captivate at the time to create the demo, so I wanted to redo the demo using Screenr, and add some narration.

Old School Learning Tools

1. Articulate Studio ’09. Hands down, the best eLearning toolset on the market  How about that for a completely unbiased opinion from the QA Manager for 3 out of the 4 tools in the suite?  Honestly, I do think it is the best eLearning toolset on the market or I wouldn’t work at Articulate.  We offer great support, and make products that are so easy to learn even your grandma could use them.
2. WordPress. It is impossible to ignore what blogs have done for eLearning, and how can my list be complete without including the BEST Blogging software.  Wordpress.
3. Twitter. This choice might turn some heads…you might be thinking, how does constant updates from Ashton Kutcher and Shaq facilitate learning?  Good question…it depends on how you use Twitter.  If you only follow the tweeps like Shaq or Ashton Kutcher you probably aren’t going to gain much from it, and you probably don’t have a whole lot of friends (Ok, I admit it, I follow Shaq).  However, if you use Twitter to connect, share, and ask advice from other professionals in your industry it can be an invaluable tool.  Find a blog that you like, and subscribe to his/her Twitter feed, you will be smarter for it.
4. Screenr.  Screenr is a tool for creating instant screencasts for Twitter.  Although this is a very new tool, it is easy to see the impact this is going to have on people making software demos and screencasts.  Screenr has eliminated the barriers to entry for anyone looking to create demos and screencasts.
   
5. Wikipedia. Originally I was going to list this as Wiki’s in general, but then figured I should probably suggest a specific vendor.  Problem is I don’t know enough about the different Wiki vendors to say which one is the best.  I don’t really think I need to explain this selection, it kinda speaks for itself.
   
6. Articulate Online. Another tool from the great guys at Articulate.  I know listing two products from the same company (or 3 I guess, technically) is a no-no, but this had to make my list.  The reason…Articulate Online has made distributing and tracking eLearning training easy.  One problem with traditional Learning Management Systems is that it is often difficult to deploy content to them, and then distribute content once it is on the LMS.  Articulate Online has changed that with one click publishing and easy deployment links.
7. Moodle.  Yes, Moodle, the Open Source LMS.  Why does this make my list…so many people are using it to distribute and track training.  It is free and reasonably good, which means it works for a lot of people.
   
8. Google Search. I am reading an eBook on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because it came free with the purchase of my WordPress theme, and in the book it mentions that 90-98% of Google’s revenue comes from ad-words placed on Google’s site.  So why does that matter?  Well, Google stops making boat loads of cash if people stop using their search, and people will stop using their search if they stop finding what they are looking for.  So cool, now you get the Google business model, but what hell does this have to do with learning and being a good learning tool?  Simple, it allows you to easily and quickly find the information you are looking for.  My dog @winstonpotacho has recently been diagnosed with an elevated lymphocyte count, and the only reason I know what the implications are of a high lymphocyte count is that I was able to find the information by googling for it.  I now know just as much about leukemia in dogs as just about anyone.  In the time before Google I would have no idea what it meant to have an elevated lymphocyte count.  On the positive side of not knowing though, I probably would have slept more than 4 hours a night the last 2 weeks.

Like my list?  Don’t like my list?  Want to submit your own list?  You should let the Center for Learning and Performance technologies know here.

I am finally in the twittersphere, and if you want you can follow me there:

http://twitter.com/dmozealous

I ocassionally tweet about work related things, like SCORM, Moodle, Articulate, or big references to me in recently released Articulate Studio books.

I also tweet about cycling, my dogs, and sports non-sense.

I have posted from time to time on the Open Source LMS Moodle, which is a pretty nice, free, and Open Source Learning Management System.  There is another Open Source Learning Management System on the market that is worth looking at as well, it is called Dokeos.  Seems a little bit simpler than Moodle, and a little more Web 2.0ish.

Some cool features of Dokeos:

• Offer video conferencing (I have yet to check this out)
• Fairly straight forward content upload process
• Cool Flash tutorials which makes figuring out how to do stuff very easy

I got dokeos installed on my server pretty easily, it only took about 30 minutes.

Took me a bit to figure out how I could upload my own content to dokeos, but finally stumbled across a tutorial on how to import SCORM content into dokeos.

Anyway, let me know if any of you have tried it, and what you think of it if you have.

Have you ever run into a scenario where you wanted to test your content in an actual LMS environment, but didn’t have an LMS to test in?  Or have you ever just wanted to play around in an LMS and see what is available?  Well I got some good news.  I use a hosting company called Dreamhost to host this website and a whole slew of other websites I have, and one of the really cool features they have is the ability to do a one-click install of Moodle on any of your websites hosted with them.

If you haven’t heard, Moodle is an Open Source LMS that is free.

Some of the cool features of Moodle:

• It’s Free!
• It supports SCORM 1.2
• It also supports AICC
• They plan on supporting SCORM 2004
• It supports and works with Articulate Presenter, Engage, and Quizmaker

The problem with Moodle is that it is a tad difficult to configure yourself, and upgrading versions is often a pain in the ass.  Well, Dreamhost has made installing and upgrading moodle versions really easy.

Dreamhost is a web hosting provider that will host your website, and offers a bunch of custom one-click installable plugins.

Some of the cool features of Dreamhost:

• Only $5.95 per month to host your domain
• Offers free one-click install for Moodle
• Allows you to host unlimited domains
• Offers free one-click install for wordpress so you can start blogging
• Offer a slew of other one-click installable software

It is pretty cool, and I highly recommend checking it out, as it is really cheap.  But I wouldn’t recommend using this as an enterprise level solution if you need an LMS.  The hosting provider charges only 5.95$ per month, so that kinda tells you that you shouldn’t expect a really high level of quality of service.  They also offer no additional support for the 3rd party plug-ins such as Moodle, so if something is not working in Moodle, they likely will not be able to help you.

We used Moodle on Dreamhost very extensively for testing the Articulate Studio ’09 products, so our products are guaranteed to work with Moodle.

You can sign up for a dreamhost account here:

http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?182057

I’ll be interested to hear if anyone else checks it out, so please comment if you sign up and try it out.

-Dave

If you have ever worked with a Learning Management System before you probably have noticed that uploading content from any eLearning development tool can be an arduous and confusing task. For example, check out the blog posting I did several months ago on uploading content to Moodle. When working with an LMS you will quickly realize what a pain it is to upload content to a Learning Management System.

The typical workflow for uploading content to a Learning Management System is as follows:

1. Start your authoring tool of choice – Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker recommended
2. Select the LMS standard that your LMS uses, either AICC, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004
3. Set your tracking options
4. Publish your content as a zip file
5. Log into your Learning Management System
6. Upload your content to your Learning Management System

If you are unfamiliar (or even if you are familiar), publishing to a LMS can be very confusing.

Questions you might ask yourself:

• what LMS standard does my LMS use?
• what does AICC or SCORM mean?
• how do I upload content to my Learning Management System?
• why are there so many damn acronyms?

When we designed Articulate Online we definitely saw this as a problem that we didn’t want Articulate Online users to experience.

That is why we created a simple one click publishing process for Articulate Online.

At this point I was going to create a presentation that compared how easy it was to publish content to Articulate Online as opposed to Moodle or Breeze, but then I realized how much work that would be, and Alli Starr’s presentation documents pretty well how easy it is to publish to Articulate Online.

But, if you want to see an example of how easy it is to publish to Articulate Online compared to Moodle, check out Alli’s presentation to see publishing to Articulate Online, and this blog posting for publishing to Moodle.

So if you haven’t done so already, sign up for a free trial of Articulate Online to check it out yourself.

It seems like lately a lot of people have been asking if Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker work with Moodle. For those of you that don’t know Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities (that definition came from moodle.org, I have no idea what pedagogical means). For more information on Moodle please visit http://www.moodle.org.

The good news is that Moodle has a SCORM module which allows you to upload any standard SCORM package, which includes Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker content, to include in your course. Both Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker are certified as SCORM compliant by an independent ADL certification expert which means without having to do anything special Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker will work and report results to Moodle.

The reason this question has come up so often is that Moodle, like many Learning Management Systems, is very complicated and difficult to learn. In the brief video below I have included a demonstration on how to integrate Articulate Presenter content (with an embedded Quizmaker quiz) into Moodle.

As you can see in the demonstration Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker can work with and report results to Moodle.

Note: Moodle can be a very complicated system to install, like many other Open Source applications, if you are not an advanced computer user. I would recommend getting the help of an advanced user before attempting to install and use Moodle.

For more information on this subject please visit the following sites:
Articulate Presenter SCORM certification information.
Articulate
Moodle
Moodle and SCORM