Activity 1.6 – Learner Management Systems

e-Learning Management Systems can be loosely divided into 2 categories:
1) Learner Management Systems = LMS
2) Learning Content Management Systems = LCMS

Read: “LMS and LCMS – What’s the Difference” by Leonard Greenberg (2002) http://www.learningcircuits.org/NR/exeres/72E3F68C-4047-4379-8454-2B88C9D38FC5.htm

Read: “Course Management Systems Versus Learning Management Systems” by Saul Carliner (2005) http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/nov2005/carliner.htm

What is a Learner Management System (LMS)?
A Learner Management System (LMS) is software that plans, delivers and manages all learning activities within an organisation. “The focus of an LMS is to manage learners, keeping track of their progress and performance across all types of training activities. It performs heavy-duty administrative tasks, such as reporting to HR and other ERP systems but isn’t generally used to create course content.” (Greenberg 2002, para.1)

In more depth, a LMS “identifies the people who need a particular course and tells them how it fits into their overall career path, when it’s available, how it’s available (classroom, online, CD-ROM), if there are prerequisites, and when and how they can fulfil those prerequisites. Once learners complete a course, the LMS can administer tests based on proficiency requirements, report test results, and recommend next steps. In that capacity, LMSs are instrumental in assuring that organizations meet rigid certification requirements in such vertical markets as healthcare, finance, and government.” (ibid, LMS close-up section, para.1)

What is a Learning Content Management System (LCMS)?
A Learning Content Management System (LCMS) on the other hand, focuses on learning content. It gives authors, instructional designers, and subject matter experts the means to create reusuable content chunks (learning objects) and then stores this instructional material in a central repository which is accessible by developers throughout the organization who can retrieve and assemble them into personalized courses. “The primary business problem an LCMS solves is to create just enough content just in time to meet the needs of individual learners or groups of learners.” (Greenberg 2002, para.2)

Which would you recommend to your organisation? Why?
“Because an LMS can have a direct impact on the work of thousands of learners and manages all aspects of organizational learning, experts recommend starting with an LMS that can be easily integrated with an LCMS.

IDC’s report The Learning Content Management System: A New E-Learning Market Segment Emerges explains: “LCMSs and LMSs are not only distinct from one another, they also complement each other well. When tightly integrated, information from the two systems can be exchanged, ultimately resulting in a richer learning experience for the user and a more comprehensive tool for the learning administrator. An LMS can manage communities of users, allowing each of them to launch the appropriate objects stored and managed by the LCMS. In delivering the content, the LCMS also bookmarks the individual learner’s progress, records test scores, and passes them back to the LMS for reporting purposes.”" (Greenberg 2002, How does an LCMS fit within an LMS infrastructure? section, para.1-2)

Comparing CMSs and LMSs
A Course Management System (CMS) is very similar to a LMS. The only difference is that they are designed for very different uses and thus serve different purposes – CMSs for universities and other academic environments and LMSs for workplace learning environments.

“Course management systems (CMSs) are online systems that were originally designed to support classroom learning in academic settings, such as universities and high schools” (Carliner 2005, CMSs: designed to support academic classroom courses section, para.1). Examples of CMSs include the commercial products Blackboard and WebCT, and the open source system, Moodle. Carliner’s article explores these differences in depth.

One of the distinctions that Carliner made: “A client once asked why universities and other academic institutions cannot use LMSs. The answer: because education and training are different types of learning activities, the systems that support them are essentially different. As education is intended to build long-term knowledge, the CMSs that support it are designed to support long-term academic classroom classes. In contrast, as training is intended to build knowledge for immediate application, so LMSs are designed to support a large number of short training events.” (ibid, Comparing CMSs and LMSs section, para.5)

Read: LMS Survey Results from 2005 http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/jun2005/LMS_survey.htm

What do you find interesting from these figures?
It was interesting to see that in the span of 10 months the percentage of organizations who used learning management systems grew from 46% to 81.7% in June 2005. It doesn’t surprise me as the importance of organisational learning is growing and the employment of e-learning to meet these learning needs have to be managed in an efficient manner – of which the solution is found in LMSs.

The figures on how LMSs are configured – 62.7% using LMS only and 27.8% using LMS/LCMS combo – also stood out as another interesting point because from the previous readings the latter has shown to be a more “richer learning experience”. I would think that these figures would change over the next year as more research and upgrades emerge about advances in these technologies.

Employee buy-in was listed as the third biggest challenge in implementing a LMS. I think this needs to be addressed by organizations as employees are a major stakeholder in successful implementation of LMSs and they bring many benefits to the learner which is something they should understand. Generally, if introducing new technologies it is always best to build understanding and acceptance of the technology so that the issues such as buy-in and resistance and so forth can be reduced.

Most organizations listed that in the next 12 months they would be keeping the current system that have in place. As technologies continually change I would think that most organizations would seek to upgrade the current system in the next 12 months. Again I wouldn’t be surprised if these results would change for reasons similar to those mentioned before.

Bersin and Associates (http://www.bersin.com) have been researching the LMS market for a number of years. To understand the size and impact of this market – listen to Josh Bersin discuss their latest research results: http://store.bersinassociates.com/lms.html#

What are some of the key issues raised by Josh Bersin?
In his discussion of directions of the LMS Market, Bersin raises the point that there has been an increase in the level of capability in enterprise learning – he notes that with any emerging technology regardless of what it is within a few months someone is going to find a way to apply it to corporate learning and so this is a continual process. There has also been an increase in talent management capabilities.

The key findings of the research:

• Continued market growth and maturity
• Core requirements continue to be training related
• Vendor consolidation into three primary segments
  - global enterprise, enterprise, mid-market (largest and fast growing market)
• OnDemand solutions now proven
• Customer satisfaction still disappointing
  - service, data quality, reporting still challenging
• Governance and change management keys to success
• Talent management is real but few implementations
• LMS evolving to “Backoffice System” over time

Summarise the key issues – as you see them – from the readings
From the readings the key issues would arise from integrating LCMSs with LMSs. This is supported by the figures on content integration (42.7%) as the biggest challenge in implementing a LMS. Other challenges identified were:

• customization requirements (41.1%)
• employee buy-in (32.3%)
• system administration (29.8%)
• system performance (25%)
• management buy-in (23.4%)
• integration with legacy systems (22.6%)
• vendor management (18.5%)
• IT buy-in (17.7%)
• vendor selection (16.9%)
• standards compliance (16.1%)

Furthermore, another issue would regard implementing the correct systems. As identified in Carliner’s article, in particular with CMSs and LMSs, they are designed for different needs and so a needs analysis should be conducted prior to implementing any system so as to ensure a match.