Thinking About an LMS System?
By Travis Piper

Many people think that when they put their first few courses online they need to buy a Learning Management System (LMS). A comparison could be made to a firm hiring their first few employees and feeling the urge to buy a complete HR/Payroll Management/Benefits Management software system.

An LMS is a sophisticated, complex business system not much different than an accounting system, inventory system, or customer management system. Like other major business systems, in an ideal situation, the LMS can be integrated into the existing systems so when a new hire is added to the system, he or she is automatically registered for all required training based upon job assignment.

Acquiring and implementing an LMS can rapidly reach and exceed six figures and higher. Often prospective shoppers decide that as long as they’re going to spend a lot of money, they might as well get something that can do everything they could ever want it to do. In one case, a large financial institution formed a selection committee that ended up with a “wish list” of requirements for such features as “all courses must be able to be taken on Palm Pilots” and “the system was to include student self-registration via telephone directly into the database”. When they went out to leading vendors for pricing the responses ranged from $1.2 million to $2.3 million.

The reality today is that what most people want from an LMS is simply to know:

• Who has taken what courses?
• How well did they do?
• How long did it take them (vs. traditional classroom training – for ROI calculation)
• What questions did they miss?
• Have they taken the latest version of the training?

We have created custom solutions for several of our clients that answer all of these questions and more with solutions costing just a few thousand dollars. The solutions are database-driven so the data is being captured in a format that is readily portable to a full-featured LMS down the road when many courses are online and a true need exists to “manage learning” vs. simply to “track completions”. Also, by using a “simple solution” first, you become familiar with features that are desirable (and unnecessary) when the time comes to invest in a “true” LMS.

Another significant consideration today is that the LMS market is still shaking out. Large providers are merging and choosing which of their systems will survive the merger, if either. Others are going out of business completely. It’s one thing to have written courses with an authoring tool that cost a few thousand dollars and have it cease to be viable. It’s another to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and even more internal resources in system integration only to find that the product is being discontinued by the vendor.

Bottom line: If you just need to do some basic tracking and be able to analyze student responses, contact us to create a very affordable custom solution for you.