Improving the Modern Learning Management System

Users of any online system are constantly providing essentially data regarding their habits and needs, most Learning Management Systems are just now starting to take notice of this data to build a learning environment that follows its learner’s path through products, time spent on content, and performance on assessments to provide a system that organically adapts to the specific individual.

By moving away from a static system of delivery to a system that understands and adapts to its user’s behavior we can provide a presentation to facilitate better learning. Think about it from an in classroom environment, the Teacher knows their students and can adapt lesson plans and one on one communication directly based on the needs of the student. Alternatively, the students as a whole provide valuable feedback to the teacher regarding their understanding of the material.

Let’s evaluate a couple key specific functionalities a LMS should supply to meet this demand:

1. Easily establish relationships from Questions to Content and report back to the learner suggestions for further reading based on their performance on course questions.
2. Determine popular content through tracking of page hits, time spent, or user based ranking report back to the instructor this information to allow for improvement of the course.

We can expand on this through a variety of functionality, some of which has been available through SCORM but should be better incorporated into the LMS itself:

• Time tracking - Allow the user to set the amount of time they want to spend on each lesson, provide feedback to them on how much time they have spent so far
• Automatic Content Notifications – When new content is added to a course the LMS should automatically display this to any interested Students
• Lesson Plan Recommendations – Using a data relationship between offered products the LMS should be able to recommend enrollment in other courses based on current enrollment and completion
• Most recent interactions– Instead of simply content bookmarking, the LMS should be able to provide a reminder to learners of their most recent activity within the system

As a developer I can spend the time to create a SCO that stands on its own and offers most of this functionality using javascript, or even some server side code, but this functionality needs to be available globally within the LMS and should be applied either automatic or by non-technical developers of online learning with a reasonable investment of time.

Excellent example of displaying statistics

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four:



Obviously something like this has a high production value, and is out of scope for most elearning development, but what can we take from this video and put into our products?

1. Enthusiasm - Like your favorite teacher, Hans enthusiasm for this subject comes through in his presentation. The more interested we can be about the subject when creating products the better the quality. It is not unlikely that you may be doing audio in your elearning products, so think about getting a narrator who's excitement for the subject can come through!

2. Visual - Although the graph on top of the video may be to flashy for most of us to create, it's not that crazy to imagine developing a flash based graph that shows these stats moving about. This graph makes use of real time and some great colors and sizes to help display a huge amount of information in a relatively simple and interesting manner.

3. Time - As a learning 'chunk' this video is fantastic. Coming in at only 5 minutes it is something that can be viewed on the go, or in between doing other work. It has a clear focus of what it is going to teach and does not get bloated or distracted along the way. Our learners can have short attention spans, especially if the subject is dry, or the power point presentation is not that flash. By keeping things short and focused we can best make use of our learners time.

5 Tips for creating Portable eLearning Products

If you needed to convert your products to a new LMS tomorrow how prepared are you?

Having just finished working on a large scale conversion project (explaining the absence of posting) I feel that I have learned a lot regarding how we should develop our products to prepare for the future. Sometimes we make decisions to band aid problems, or to try and utilize every last functionality of an LMS, and while this is not always a bad thing, we must keep in mind the consequences they could have if we ever try and use our content in a different system.

For now here are 5 things to think about regarding developing portable eLearning products:

1. Don't use authorware specific to a Learning Management System
   
   There are fantastic Authorware products out there that can help you build courses not tied to any specific LMS, you may think you're saving time by using your LMS's page builder, but you could be trapping your content, and giving yourself unnecessary functionality constraints.
   
   
2. SCORM or other standards
   
   Always build products with a standard in mind. And don't just rely on publish settings, take a read through some resources online or take a small course to get yourself knowledgeable about what it means to create a SCORM package, or to have SCORM reporting.
   
   
3. Always test the import and export functionality
   
   Taking nothing for granted when it comes to this! SCORM packages are quite gentle and every LMS has it's own quirks, just go hang out in a thread 27 pages deep in a moodle forum to find that out. My advice to you, test your LMS export, take that package and try it out using something like Scorm Cloud.
   
   Shopping for a new system? Make sure you test your exported packages with their import functionality so you don't get stuck make small changes to xml files!
   
   
4. CSS!
   
   I like to do a little trick where all my SCORM packages point to two different CSS files, one hosted on my LMS and referenced by packages I import to hold style that brands the courses with the organization. And one in the package with some default styles (for H1 p a br etc.) so that the course would display well on it's own.
   
   This way if the organization needed to complete a system wide branding change, we could achieve this through all products by modifying one file.
   
   Is this completely against the idea of portable packages? maybe, ha! but I can still give share or move this course and have it display just as well with the css file included in the package.
   
   
5. Don't trap your assessments in the Learning Management System
   
   Most Learning Management Systems have Assessment tools, and some of them can build really great Exercises or Exams. However, if you want to be prepared to migrate your content between systems, you are way better off using an application that will publish SCORM based SCO's that are not confined to one LMS.
   

Have you had experience with course conversion? I would love to hear about other development strategies to keep in mind!

"no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it."

Bill Gates on Online Education:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/

Computer Science getting the recognition it deserves?

Not so much a direct eLearning story, but related none the less:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2010/07/bill_to_combat_comp_science_cr.html

Load an Articulate Quizmaker Quiz into your Flash Object and Track Score

This is an update to a previous post in which I proposed a way for you to load a quizmaker quiz into your flash project and track the score. I have now worked on a second version of this that works with most browsers, as the original solution was only for IE 7+.

For the HTML part, simply use Articulates published html, and swap the name of the swf it is loading. (you will also need to change the width and height)

In your flash project, for the onLoadComplete of the quiz, you must set all these variables:


function onLoadComplete(mc:MovieClip)
{
mc.vHtmlContainer=_root.vHtmlContainer;
mc.vCaptureRC=_root.vCaptureRC;
mc.vUseFSCommand=_root.vUseFSCommand;
mc.vLMSPresent=_root.vLMSPresent;
mc.vAOSupport=_root.vAOSupport;
mc.vIE=_root.vIE;
mc.vResumeData=_root.vResumeData;
}

Basically these are all the initializing variables sent by the Javascript/HTML to the flash quiz to let it know if it's in an LMS and also what type of Browser is being used.

There is one small code change that I made to api.js, this was to get the solution working in IE6, For some reason the only way I could get scores tracking in my LMS on IE6 was to add an alert box to the DoOnClose function in quiz.js

function DoOnClose()
{
if (!g_bCloseExecuted)
{
if(IE6)
{
alert("");
}
g_bCloseExecuted = true;

if (g_bAOSupport)
{
PostResultsOnUnload()
}
}
}

SCORM Cloud

Fantastic and Free! Site that helps you test any SCORM courses you're working on. Have been using it to debug several issues, and it's been nothing short great to work with.

Check it out: cloud.scorm.com