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Implementing an LMS in Small or Medium Organizations: What is most important

David — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:26:28 +0000

“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?” mussed an ASTD member this morning. He went on wondering if the most important attributes were price, speed of implementation, or specific features that are “must haves” in a small or medium sized organization.

I thought I would share my answer with you in case you too have been wondering about this.

“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?”

A ‘free’ full function LMS can be obtained via open source…so it may not be price.

If a small or medium organization has not invested in content that needs to be loaded into the LMS the implementation of the LMS takes less than an hour…so it may not be implementation.

LMS systems are converging when it comes to features and functions. They all support AICC/SCORM, and there are many “Learning Off the Shelf” (LOTS) vendors that provide content that will load into any LMS system thanks to the industry standards…so it may not be course availability.

I suspect the biggest issue for the small and medium sized companies is the understanding of the benefits and organizational changes needed to really implement a learning culture–something that NO LMS system can do. Thus it is the change initiative that needs to happen before an LMS is selected and MUST continue until long after the LMS is up and running that is the biggest hurdle.

If you would like to see the original thread, just go to the ASTD Community Forums.

Formalizing Informal Learning

David — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:53:15 +0000

Lately the wires are abuzz with the importance of informal learning. Attention is now turning to how to formalize informal learning. The right way to formalize informal learning is to create an environment that supports, and therefore recognizes, informal learning. Here is what I have done to support informal learning:

Build a system for aggregating informal content. Much easier to find valuable content when it is in one place.
Provide tools and training so SMEs can create better informal content.
Provide minimal support. Some folk just need a bit of help capturing or editing the content. But they control the content that is posted. Think of this as “ID lite.”
Allow a discussion to take place around the informal content. This can be done by linking a discussion forum to the aggregation system mentioned above (see first item in this list). A good comment system can also suffice.
Allow content to be voted on. This allows the best informal content to be noticed and the worse to be demoted or hidden once thresholds are met.
To track informal content, I created quizzes that were in the LMS that when passed, recorded the learning event. After all in the spirit of knowledge acquisition, it does not matter if knowledge was gained via formal or informal means.
Lastly, create a culture of giveback–so that others learn to share as well.

Simple Audience Analysis

David — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:36:58 +0000

Audience analysis does not need to be a long and overly complex undertaking. Often the approaches that are discussed end up generating such a lengthly document that it is unusable by the instructional designers. What is needed is a simple and concise approach to audience analysis. An approach that is focused on capturing what is needed to answer the question, “What do they need to know and be able to do when training is finished?”

This paper will introduce the reader to a simple approach to audience analysis using Bloom’s Taxonomy and and Knowles “Performance System Domain” as the framework.

AudienceAnalysis_SimplyConcise.pdf

If you would like a copy of the Audience Analysis Template shown in the paper, the template is included below.

AudienceAnalysisTemplate.dotx