What
options do you have for managing your e-learners and
content?
As e-Learning adoption increases, the options
for managing learners, and creating and managing content, continue to
evolve. At some point in your decision-making about why and how to add
e-Learning to your repertoire of training delivery systems, you will have
to consider which tools in this evolutionary chain represent your particular
needs.
On offer, you will find a range of products broadly categorized as either
learning management systems (LMS) or learning content management systems
(LCMS). In both cases, systems are server-side database packages that's
designed to register, track, and manage online learners and content. The
goal of these systems is to maximize the time you spend with learners
engaged in meaningful interactions, rather than the day to day management
tasks that occur with multiple learners.
Despite the fact that the terms LMS and LCMS are commonly used interchangeably, they are, in fact, distinct variations on a theme. Hall (2002) makes the following distinction in his survey of the LMS and LCMS products currently available:
|
Product
|
Primary Objective
|
|
LMS
|
To manage learners, keeping
track of their progress and performance across all types of training
activities
|
|
LCMS
|
To manages content or learning
objects that are served up to the right learner at the right time
|
Click here
to view a list of LMS and LCMS products.
Just as your e-Learning should be designed and developed to suit your context, so too should your LMS/LCMS solution. Click here to view a table comparing standard LMS and LCMS features that will help in determining which ones, if any, are relveant to your needs.
It is important to note that almost all of the packaged
LMS/LCMS tools have been designed to serve corporate e-Learning environments.
Unless your organization is planning to deliver content to thousands of
users and track their completion of courses for certification, chances
are you will not require the complexity nor suffer the high costs
associated with many of the LMSs that are on the market today. This is
certainly the case at IRRI and we developed our LMS accordingly.
For small numbers of students, it is possible for a good web developer
to write a custom LMS or LCMS. This is especially important in developing
countries where bandwidth is limited and commercial systems can require
more than is available.
The LMS that manages this course and the Rice Knowledge
Bank
This, and other e-Learning courses delivered through the Rice Knowledge
Bank, uses a combination of approaches to manage its users. When you first
registered for this course, you submitted information about yourself using
a simple html form that was created with Microsoft Frontpage.
After acceptance into the course, you were provided a link that took you
to the course registration screen. The software that manages this and
the discussion features for this course is a Microsoft SQL Database-driven
package titled, WebBoard
v.5.0. While WebBoard is not marketed as an LMS, it—combined
with features available in html authoring packages—can provide a
low-cost solution for providing password protection for your course, posting
and managing discussons, tracking participant usage, and launching course
content. The welcome message you received after registering for this course
was generated automatically by WebBoard.
For further reading on this topic you can access the following
on-line resources:
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage/sub_page.cfm?section=4&list_item=4&page=1