CHAPTER 2

Corporate LMS Features

If you are not sure which type of LMS is right for your organization, a deeper explanation of the features available in each type of product will help. This chapter explores the features of the corporate LMS.

Organizations use a corporate LMS to deliver learning programs, most often to employees and, in some cases, to customers and business partners. Of the hundreds of commercial LMS products available, most fall squarely in this category. Corporate LMS products offer some of the most robust features and functionality. A corporate LMS contains user accounts and instructional content. It handles transactions between users and content and keeps track of the data generated when people use content.

Corporate LMS administrators can create and configure web-based and instructor-led programs; manage class schedules; manage resources like classrooms, equipment, and instructors; view rosters; track attendance, scores, and progress; run reports; and perform a variety of other tasks. Corporate LMS learners can browse and search course catalogs, register for classes, launch web-based programs, receive email notifications, earn credits, and view a transcript.

Let’s say you work for a multinational corporation. Your employees work in four global regions. Your company’s products, services, and business processes vary from region to region, as do the native languages spoken by employees and the regulatory compliance requirements. At the same time, your company’s values, HR policies, quality assurance practices, and many other topics must be consistent in all regions. How will you ensure the right people get the right training? You can use a corporate LMS to deliver global and region-specific training, whether it is e-learning, classroom based, or blended. You can assign global and regional LMS administrators to manage their own content. You can deploy courses in the appropriate languages to the appropriate regions. And you can track and report on your fulfillment of regulatory compliance requirements around the globe. These are just a few examples of what your company can do with a corporate LMS.

A corporate LMS targets business organizations as its primary customers, but it may also be used in government, professional association, or academic settings. The core features of a corporate LMS can be organized into the categories of user management, course management, user-course transactions, administration, and reporting. The following sections will delve into these core feature sets.

User Management Features

A corporate LMS must support the creation and maintenance of user accounts. Users must be able to log in to their accounts through a process called authentication. A user profile contains important information about each user. Users can be associated with the job roles and organizations in which they work. User groups or audiences can be created that enable you to connect the right people with the most relevant learning programs.

User Accounts

A user account must contain a unique user ID, username, and password. The user ID may be a system-generated number, an employee ID, or some other convention. What is important is that each user has an identifier that differentiates them from every other user in the system.

Typically, organizations set up the LMS to share user information with another system that already contains accounts for the same people who will use the LMS, like a human resource management system, member management system, or student information system. For organizations that don’t have one of these systems, the LMS can be configured to allow administrators to create user accounts manually or for users to create their own user accounts.

When you allow users to create their own accounts, people often forget their login information and simply create another account. These duplicate accounts may have incomplete and conflicting information. And while many LMS products allow you to merge duplicate accounts by combining the user profiles and training records for two user accounts, it can be difficult for administrators to notice when duplicate accounts exist. For these reasons and others, many organizations disable the ability for users to create or change their own accounts and, instead, import user accounts and profile data from a source system, such as a corporation’s human resource management system or a professional organization’s member management system.

Because users and their user profile data are constantly changing, importing the data once is not enough. The LMS user data must be synchronized with the source system so that, when the source data change, the change is replicated in the LMS. This typically involves a recurring scheduled process, such as a nightly feed of the data to the LMS.

Authentication

Authentication is the process through which an LMS identifies a user from the credentials they used to log in, authorizes them to use the system, and matches them to the appropriate user account. LMS systems always perform authentication when a user logs in, as do many other corporate systems and commercial websites.

If you’ve ever had to remember your login credentials for multiple systems and log in and out of systems you use throughout the day, you’ll appreciate single sign-on (SSO). Essentially, SSO allows your users to log in to your network or corporate portal once, and then gain access to other systems (including your LMS) without needing to log in again. This is possible because the credentials they used to log in to the network or portal are authenticated once, and then passed behind the scenes to all other systems they use throughout the day. Most LMS products support a variety of popular SSO methods.

User Profiles

A user profile is a collection of data that describe the user. It may include the user’s name (prefix, first, middle, last, suffix); contact information (email address, work or home address, phone numbers); employment information (position title, level, hire date, manager’s user ID); demographics (gender, birth date, preferred language); and other pertinent information.

These data are important to support a variety of features in the LMS. For example, the LMS might use the user’s name and email address to send reminders and transaction confirmation messages. Associating users with their manager allows managers to approve training registration requests if needed or otherwise participate in the users’ learning. You can also target a new employee orientation course to people with a recent hire date or highlight courses available in the user’s preferred language.

Job Roles and Organizations

Many corporate LMS products support the management of a list of job roles and your organizational structure. Although we have been using the term organization in reference to the larger enterprise, the LMS uses the term to refer to any node in your organizational hierarchy, which might include, for example, business units, departments, divisions, and districts. Each of these is considered an organization in the LMS, and the reporting relationships between these organizations reflect your organizational hierarchy.

Job roles and organization structures are often imported from another system, like an HRMS. Each user can be associated with a job role and a node in the organizational structure. This allows administrators to target training and generate reports for users in a specific job or organization.

For example, you can use LMS organization data to assign training or generate a report for a single organization and all organizations underneath it in the hierarchy. Let’s say your company is organized with the sales divisions for all product lines reporting to a single executive; you can run a report on that executive’s entire organization, or any part of it. LMS job role data add another dimension to LMS reports. If you want to look specifically at the account managers in the sales organization, you can add the account manager job role to your report’s parameters to further refine your results.

User Groups or Audiences

Many corporate LMS products provide a way for authorized administrators to create any number of user groups or audiences by selecting specific user profile, job role, and organization fields or using them in combination. This allows you to target courses for learners who have completed a specific prerequisite, reside in a specific geographical location, or speak a specific language.

A few LMS products provide a robust method for defining user groups using operators such as and, or, and not. For example, a user group may be configured to comprise all LMS users who manage direct reports and whose job role is account manager or sales manager or regional sales manager and whose hire date is less than three months prior to the current date, but not those who have already completed the course New Sales Manager Orientation. Once you have defined a user group, you can use it to assign specific training or run targeted reports.

Role-Based Views

Role-based views make it possible for users to see their own view of the content in an LMS, which is tailored to their user profile, job role, and organization. For example, an IT systems administrator may search or browse for a course on customer relationship management (CRM) and find a list of courses on CRM systems and systems administration. A customer service agent may search or browse on the same topic and find a list of courses on customer service features, processes, incident reporting, and key performance indicators. A salesperson perusing the same topic may find courses on customer sales history features, customer intelligence reporting, customer touchpoints, and marketing programs.

You can enable role-based views by restricting the visibility of a course to one or more user groups. The benefit to users is that irrelevant courses are removed from view, improving the system’s usability and reducing the risk of signing up for the wrong course.

Course Management Features

A corporate LMS contains a catalog of all your organization’s course offerings. Courses may be self-paced or event-based with a location, instructor, and start and end date. Each course has a title, description, and other properties such as prerequisites, credits, and completion certificates. Courses may be structured in a variety of ways with any combination and sequence of tutorials, assignments, surveys, and tests.

Course Catalog

A course catalog is a directory of the learning programs available in the LMS. Each course has a collection of properties, including, but not limited to, course title, code, description, and credits. People can search or browse the course catalog.

Searching the Catalog

LMS search capabilities can be somewhat limited when compared with the web search tools that we are accustomed to using. An LMS typically requires the user to enter search terms with exact spelling and capitalization to find matching courses. Often, the system only searches by course title and course code; some systems also search the course description.

Browsing the Catalog

People who want to explore the course catalog can do so with a calendar or list view, or both. The calendar view shows course offerings on the dates they are scheduled to begin and end. The list view may be menu driven—allowing people to browse topics of interest in the menu, select a topic, and see a list of courses—or a complete listing of all courses that can be shortened by selecting a topic, delivery method, or other filters from drop-down lists. You can define your own catalog menu topics. Whenever you add a new course to the system, you associate it with one or more menu topics that determine where it can be found in the course catalog.

Course Details Page

When people search or browse the catalog, they eventually see a list of courses. Selecting a course from the list takes them to a course details page that lists all the course properties and provides a way to enroll in the course. When you add a new course to the system, you populate all the properties that will appear on the course details page, such as title, description, and credits.

Metadata

A course details page may list other information beyond the course title, description, and credits. For example, there may be a fee charged for the course. In many LMS products, you can configure a set of descriptive properties that course owners can use to “tag” their course. These properties are often referred to as metadata, which are essentially data that describe other data.

In an LMS, you can use metadata properties to describe the course delivery mode, the product line or business unit with which the course is associated, or any other descriptive information useful to your organization.

Configurable Course Structures

A course may involve a scheduled event, a self-paced module, assignments, tests, surveys, or other types of learning activities. Many LMS products provide a way to configure course structures that allow you to set up any number of these activities in any combination.

You can configure the course structure so that the activities must be taken sequentially, can be taken in any order, or a mix of the two. For example, your course could require a pretest that must be completed before any other activity, followed by a set of assignments and self-paced work that can be completed in any order, and ending with a post-test and course completion survey.

You can configure the course structure so that people must complete all activities, a minimum number of activities, or a subset of required activities to get credit for completing the course.

Every LMS product takes a slightly different approach to supporting the configuration of these course structures. If you are thinking about getting a new LMS, it is a good idea to make a list of the types of course structures you will need to support and make sure they are supported by the product you are considering.

Learning Event Scheduling

If your organization offers training events, either in a physical classroom or virtually, your LMS will need to support learning event scheduling. To configure a learning event in your LMS, you will need to create a course in the catalog first and then schedule offerings of the course, or classes. Each class will have a start date and time, end date and time, instructor, and location.

LMS products differ in how they support scheduled learning events. If you need to handle complex scheduling, such as a class that is held in one location on Monday from 9 to 11:30 a.m. with one instructor, at another location on Wednesday from 1 to 4 p.m. with a different instructor, and back to the first location on Friday from 1 to 3 p.m. with the original instructor, then your LMS will need to support courses with class offerings that occur in multiple sessions.

Some LMS products support self-paced online courses and do not support events at all. There are other products that support events, but do not support the concept of multiple sessions. Some cannot handle multiple instructors working as a tag team to teach a course. It is important that you make sure your LMS supports the way you need to manage your learning event scheduling.

Resource Management

Any LMS that supports learning event scheduling must also provide a way to configure a list of instructors and a list of training locations. When you schedule a learning event, you associate it with the location in which it will occur and one or more instructors who will teach it.

In many LMS products, locations are made up of a hierarchical list of buildings and rooms within each building. The LMS lists the building address and room number in the event description and includes this information in the confirmation email message sent to people when they enroll in the event.

LMS products often allow you to set up each instructor with an optional photo, bio, professional credentials, and other information that may be displayed in the event description. Some LMS products automatically detect and flag conflicts, such as double scheduling of an instructor or location.

In addition to instructors and locations, some LMS products support an equipment list. Equipment may include easels, flipcharts, markers, whiteboards, computers, Internet connectivity, or items needed for hands-on training. You can configure the equipment that your organization uses and associate the appropriate equipment with a scheduled learning event.

Publishing Workflow

Your course is not generally available in the LMS until it is “published,” which makes it visible and accessible to end users. This means that you can create a course and configure its properties without people seeing it. Then, when you are ready for people to take the new course, you publish it. LMS course publishing is a process that usually involves several steps that can be thought of as a workflow.

The publishing workflow in some LMS products is predefined and cannot be changed. In other products, it has configurable parameters that enable organizations to establish an approval process. When approval is required, a course owner who is ready to publish actually submits the course for publication. One or more approvers are automatically notified and can review the course to ensure it meets the organization’s publishing criteria and then approve or reject it. Some LMS products provide a way for the reviewer to give a reason for rejection and notes on what the course owner should do to resubmit the course. A few LMS products support multiple levels of approval.

Course Equivalencies

Some LMS products support course equivalencies—a set of two or more courses, any of which can be taken to meet a curriculum or regulatory compliance requirement. To use this feature, you establish a curriculum or compliance goal and select all the courses required to achieve the goal, some of which might include course equivalencies. For example, to achieve a first aid certification, you can complete a course from the American Red Cross or an equivalent course from another approved provider.

Course Prerequisites

Some LMS products support course prerequisites. You can use prerequisites to ensure people who take your course are already prepared with the appropriate baseline skills and knowledge. For example, you may require people to complete a fundamentals course before they are allowed to register for an advanced course. When a prerequisite relationship is established between two courses, the prerequisite course is usually listed, automatically, on the course details page of the course for which it is a prerequisite.

Some LMS products enable you to configure a prerequisite as recommended or enforced. A recommended prerequisite does not preclude your users from registering for the course for which it is a prerequisite, while an enforced prerequisite will not allow them to register without first completing the prerequisite course. Some LMS products support more than one prerequisite for a single course.

Curricula

A curriculum is a collection of courses. People who register for the curriculum must complete all course requirements to get credit. This is another feature that is not supported by all LMS products and, when it is supported, may be implemented with varying amounts of power and flexibility.

Curriculum administration can have complex requirements. For example, you may need to establish a sequence in which courses may be taken and identify which are required, optional, and equivalent. You may or may not want people who enroll in the curriculum to be automatically enrolled in its courses. If your curriculum contains courses A, B, and C, and a person has already completed course B before enrolling in the curriculum, you may or may not want that course completion to count toward curriculum completion. If you require curriculum support, make sure your LMS curriculum features fully support your needs.

Web-Based Course Hosting, Running, and Version Control

Web-based course hosting refers to an LMS’s ability to store course content files and directories. This is convenient for some organizations, while others may choose to host their course files on one or more separate servers, called remote content servers.

Regardless of where the course files are stored, the LMS must be able to launch, track, and report on self-paced online courses. This LMS capability is most reliable with courses that are based on standards such as SCORM, AICC, xAPI, and cmi5. Many LMS products support SCORM and AICC. As demand grows for newer specifications—xAPI and cmi5—more LMS products are supporting those as well. These standards and others are discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

You may want to make changes to an online course and create a new version. If so, you will need to use your LMS’s version control features. At a minimum, version control enables you to publish a new version of the same course, giving it a different version number but retaining the rest of the course properties and its place in the course catalog. Ideally, your LMS will enable you to run reports on everyone who has taken any version of the course, or people who have taken a specific version.

Because standards-based online courses are often self-paced, it can be challenging to publish a new version without interrupting people who are taking the course and whose data are associated with the previous version. To address this, many LMS products provide options for you to:

• Allow people who are actively taking the previous version to continue and complete that version while all new enrollments go to the new version.
• Require anyone who is active in the course to start over in the new version.
• Require people who have completed an older version of the course to retake the new version.

The first of these options is often preferred, but the other two options can be very useful when delivering compliance training, or when making important changes to the course.

Coursework Assignments

Some LMS products provide a way for a course instructor to create an assignment by posting instructions and optionally uploading materials that can be downloaded by learners. Learners can follow the instructions and either click a box to attest to the fact that they completed the assignment or upload assignment documents. The instructor can review any work uploaded by learners and take an LMS action to confirm that they have completed the assignment.

Survey Creation and Administration

While many organizations use third-party online survey tools, some LMS products have built-in tools for creating, administering, and reporting on surveys. LMS survey tools usually support several question types, such as multiple choice (select one, select all that apply); Likert scale; short answer; and free response. Surveys differ from tests in that they are not scored. You can view reports of individual or aggregated survey results.

Many organizations distribute surveys to learners upon course completion to gauge their reactions to the course. Some organizations distribute surveys to the learner’s manager several weeks or months after course completion to collect opinions and observations on whether the learner’s behavior or job performance changed as a result of applying what was covered in the course. If you plan to use your LMS survey tools with these goals in mind, make sure your LMS can support standard survey questions that can be reported across multiple courses, all versions of an online course, all offerings of an instructor-led course, and all classes taught by a specific instructor.

Test Creation and Administration

Sometimes, tests are built into online courses with the results reported through an LMS. Some organizations create and administer tests and report results using a third-party, dedicated testing platform, which may or may not be integrated with the LMS. Many LMS products also provide built-in test features.

LMS products that offer testing features usually offer a variety of question types, which may include some combination of multiple choice (select one, select all that apply); Boolean (true/false, yes/no); short answer; matching; and more. Some products support advanced features like question pools, where a test can randomly present questions from the pool, and other features like random question order, question weighting, question groups, and timed questions. You can set a cut score. People who achieve the cut score or higher pass the test. Some products enable you to configure the maximum number of times a learner can retake the test and whether to count the most recent score or the highest score achieved across multiple attempts.

You can run reports on individual and aggregate test results. Some systems provide item analysis reports to help you check the quality of your questions. For example, if a large percentage of people answer the same question with the same wrong answer, you may determine that the question is written ambiguously, or the answer options are not distinct enough for people to discriminate between them. This information can help you improve the validity and reliability of your test.

Credits

LMS products typically allow you to configure any number of credit types, such as clock hours, continuing education units, or continuing professional education credits. You can associate a course with a specific number of credits for one or more credit types so that people who complete the course are awarded the credits.

Completion Certificates

Like many companies, your organization may need to provide a personalized, nicely formatted course completion certificate that can be viewed, saved, and printed by people who complete a course. Your certificate may need to include the name of the course, the name of the person who completed it, the completion date, credits awarded, and other information.

LMS products usually allow you to create any number of course completion certificate templates. Some organizations use multiple templates to represent different business units or curricula, or to differentiate between employee and customer training. Template setup is done by an authorized administrator who specifies the layout, imports any graphics, defines fonts and sizes, and enters nonvariable text and placeholders for variables such as learner name, course name, completion date, and credits awarded.

User-Course Interactions

We’ve already established that an LMS has users and courses. Users interact with courses in a corporate LMS by doing things like enrolling, getting on a waiting list, expressing interest, earning a certification or recertification, accessing online courses, or viewing a personalized transcript.

Self-Enrollment

A key benefit of an LMS is its ability to support self-service. People can search or browse the course catalog, find a relevant course, and self-enroll. After enrolling for an online course, they get immediate access to the course. After enrolling in an event-based course, people can select the date and location of the offering that best fits their schedule to reserve a seat in the class. All of this can be done without any delays or need for the involvement of an administrator, registrar, or instructor.

Enrollment Approval

There may be times when you want to configure a course so that enrollments must be approved by a manager or administrator before they are finalized. Some LMS products enable people to request enrollment in a course. The system notifies one or more designated approvers who can review the request and approve or deny it. This feature may be useful to organizations that need to manage training budgets carefully or ensure that only qualified people gain access to a course.

Enrollment by an Instructor or Administrator

If you ever need to set up a private class for people at their work location, you may want to have an administrator or instructor register the people in the class. Most LMS products provide a way for an administrator or instructor to enroll one or more people in a class.

Automatic Enrollment

Some organizations provide training that is mandatory for a group of employees. In this case, you may want to automatically enroll everyone who belongs to a user group in a mandatory course. For example, your company employs forklift operators who must complete a course to meet OSHA compliance.

Maximum Class Size and Wait List

A wait list is a feature that automates the management of overbooked classes. If your organization offers instructor-led training, you may need to define a maximum class size. After the number of people enrolling in the class reaches the maximum class size, any additional enrollees can be presented with the option to be placed on a wait list.

You can monitor the wait list. If it becomes very long, you might decide to move the class to a location with greater capacity and increase the maximum class size, or schedule additional class offerings to meet the demand.

If someone withdraws from the class, people on the wait list are automatically notified and given the option to join the class. Some LMS products notify everyone on the list and the seat goes to the first person who responds. Some products will notify the first wait-listed person and give them time to respond. If that person has not taken the seat or responded within the given timeframe, the next person is notified, and this process continues until the seat is taken. Although notifying wait-listed people sequentially is perhaps the fairest approach, a late cancellation that requires a quick response may necessitate notifying all wait-listed people simultaneously. Some products provide both options, allowing you to decide which method to use on a course-by-course basis.

Express Interest

An unfortunate situation that I have seen happen many times is where people spend valuable time and effort searching and browsing the LMS catalog, find the exact course they want to take, and then cannot register because there is either nothing scheduled close by, nothing at a time fitting their schedule, or worse yet, no offerings scheduled at all. This can be very frustrating to LMS users. Some LMS products provide a way for people who find themselves in this situation to click a button that indicates they are interested in taking the course. Clicking this button adds that person to a list of people who have expressed interest in the course.

You can monitor this feature and respond by scheduling new offerings of the course in the appropriate locations. People on the list are automatically notified when a new offering has been scheduled and, upon enrolling, are automatically removed from the express interest list. This is a very useful feature; however, relatively few LMS vendors offer it.

Certification and Recertification

Many organizations are concerned with meeting regulatory compliance requirements, which often require proof that employees have received training. Compliance may also require that the training be refreshed periodically, such as every year or every two years. Many LMS products handle this need through a set of features called certification and recertification.

You can associate a course with compliance certification and configure it to expire in some number of months, after which time recertification is required. You can then assign the course to specific employees or those in a specified user group who need to meet the certification requirement. If needed, you can set a due date by which time employees must complete the initial certification training. Any employee who has not completed the training successfully by the due date is notified, with a copy to their manager. Once an employee completes the training, the LMS initiates an automatic countdown toward expiration. A few weeks before the expiration date is reached, the employee is automatically notified that it is time to get recertified and reassigned to the training course.

Active Course List

After enrolling, people must be able to view a personalized list of their active courses—that is, the courses they are enrolled in and have not yet completed. An LMS will provide a place where people can view these courses and launch web-based training, tests, surveys, and other online learning modules.

Transcript

An LMS transcript provides a personalized list of all courses a user has completed, the credits they have earned for each, and a way to view or print a course completion certificate.

Email Notifications

Anyone who has shopped online has received email notifications that confirm the purchase, indicate the product has shipped, and announce its delivery. In the same way, an LMS provides notifications to confirm transactions, or alert or remind users of actions to take.

Most LMS products provide an array of notifications out of the box. You can disable, enable, and customize each of these notifications. You can modify the message recipients as well as the message subject and body. You can plug in dynamic data fields that represent the username, course name, dates, and other system-generated information.

Email notifications are important, but if overused may be ignored by users. It is important to enable only the most useful notifications and disable the rest.

Administration Features

To properly manage learning, LMS administrators need to be able to perform certain tasks. These tasks include configuring the course catalog, creating and publishing courses, taking attendance, running reports, and much more.

Administrator Roles, Permissions, and Span of Control

Most LMS products allow you to define and configure your own administrator roles, sometimes referred to as security roles, and set permissions for what each role is allowed to do in the system. Permissions allow you to grant or restrict access to specific LMS features and content at a granular level. You can then assign people to each administrator role.

An administrator’s span of control is related to where, in the organization hierarchy, they have been assigned permissions. You can assign a person to an administrator role for a specific organization and all the organizations under it in the hierarchy. So, for example, one person may have permission to publish courses and run reports for the entire company, while another may be able to do so for the sales division only. This approach lets an organization configure the LMS to support learning program administration in a way that reflects how the organization operates.

Batch Enrollments

In some cases, an LMS administrator or instructor may need to enroll multiple users in a class. Rather than selecting users and enrolling them one at a time, an LMS may provide a batch method that allows you to identify a group of users through profile information, work location, organization, or job information and enroll them all at once. Some LMS products allow a list of enrollees to be imported from a spreadsheet for batch enrollment in a course.

Class Rosters

An instructor may need access to a roster of all people who have enrolled in a class. The instructor can use this roster to take attendance and change enrollee status in the course to attended, completed, no-show, and so on.

Gradebook

When a course involves multiple activities such as events, self-paced modules, assignments, tests, and surveys, you may want to keep track of people’s progress. You can do this with an LMS gradebook. The gradebook displays the user’s status and test scores for a multiactivity course or curriculum.

Proctored and Timed Tests

A few LMS products provide the capability for you to administer a proctored or timed test. Proctored tests are administered with an authorized observer in the room, who opens and closes access to the test. Timed tests provide an automated timer that opens and closes access to the test within a configurable timeframe.

Reporting Features

One of the key benefits of an LMS is its ability to track learning data and produce reports. Organizations use LMS reports to determine who is using their learning programs, which programs are most popular, the number of credits people have earned, and much more. Reporting is especially important to organizations that need proof that they are meeting training requirements for regulatory compliance or to dispute claims that an employee who was dismissed due to poor performance may not have received necessary training.

It is important to note that only a subset of LMS data is available in reports. Many times, custom-defined user profile fields and course metadata values are not available for use in report result sets or filtering selections. Identify your most critical reporting needs and work with your LMS vendor to make sure you can get those reports from the system.

You might be tempted to want reports on lots of data, viewable in lots of different ways. For every report, you should consider who needs the data, how often, and for what purpose. Too often, I have seen organizations create dozens or even hundreds of reports and then end up using only a handful of them. Before requesting a custom report, it is important that you define who, specifically, needs the report, how often it will be used, and what decisions can be made or actions taken as a result of the report data.

Typically, LMS products provide a set of canned reports that can be customized with filtering and sorting options. Many LMS products allow you to export reports to a variety of formats, such as HTML, PDF, or Excel. Some allow you to schedule reports to be run and emailed to a list of recipients automatically. Others offer more sophisticated reporting features, such as dashboards and analytics.

Canned Reports

Most LMS products provide a wide selection of the types of canned reports that are most commonly needed, such as all people who have enrolled in or completed a specific learning activity or set of learning activities, and all learning activities that a specific person or set of people has enrolled in or completed.

You can apply filters to these and other reports to produce a more specific data set. Report filters include items you can select or enter, like those listed in Table 2-1.

Because an LMS contains a roster of people enrolled in a class, many LMS products provide special reports that enable instructors to print sign-in sheets to help with attendance tracking and tent cards or name tags for attendees. Of course, tent cards and name tags require heavier card stock or specially designed paper for your printer.

Custom Reports

Many LMS products provide a way to generate custom reports. Sometimes, a web-based form is provided where various data fields and filtering and sorting options can be selected. Once an administrator completes and submits the custom report form, the LMS queries its database using the selected values and generates a report. Table 2-2 describes some examples of the types of parameters you might set to create a custom LMS report.

Some LMS products provide integrations with popular third-party reporting tools. Many LMS vendors offer fee-based custom report creation services to customers.

Export Reports to Various Formats

The default format for most LMS reports is hypertext markup language, or HTML, which you can view in your web browser. Most LMS products allow you to export a report to other formats as well. Table 2-3 lists the types of report formats you might find in an LMS and describes the advantage of each format. Keep in mind that each LMS product will support its own subset of these report formats.

Automated Report Scheduling and Distribution

Many LMS products allow you to establish a recurring schedule, such as monthly or quarterly, for a specific report to be generated automatically. You can also create an email distribution list for the report. Whenever the report is scheduled to run, it is automatically emailed to everyone on the distribution list.

Some LMS products require that everyone on the distribution list has an LMS account and permission to view the report. In these systems, you create the distribution list by selecting a group of user IDs. The email people on the distribution list receive contains a link to the report. Message recipients can click the link to access the LMS and view the report in their web browser.

Other products allow you to distribute reports to people who are not LMS users. In these systems, you create the distribution list by entering a list of email addresses. The email people on the list receive contains the report as a file attachment, often in PDF format.

Dashboards and Analytics

Many LMS products can generate graphical reports that represent high-level data in pie charts, bar charts, cluster charts, heat maps, and other formats. Often, you can click on the graphic to drill down to more detailed data in text-based reports. Some LMS products provide “widgets” representing graphical reports. You can select any of the widgets to create a custom dashboard.

Other Feature Options

Now that we’ve discussed the essential features of a corporate LMS, let’s move on to some special features. LMS vendors sometimes add these special features to differentiate their product from their competitors’. These features may support things like social networking, e-commerce, and competency management. Some vendors offer complementary products, such as talent management suites that are fully integrated with the LMS.

Messaging and Discussion Boards

Some LMS products include features for communication and social networking. Messaging allows LMS users to communicate with one another in a way that is similar to email. Discussion boards provide a way for people to create topics and post or reply to questions and comments. If you are interested in these types of features, ask your vendor whether messaging and discussion board features are available and, if so, whether they are limited to cohorts in the same course or class or whether they are open to all LMS users.

I have found that most corporate organizations tend to use, rather than their LMS, other business platforms that have a more specialized focus on social networking and collaboration. However, messaging can be useful for announcements related to the LMS system, and discussion boards can be a useful ingredient in blended learning programs.

Manager View

Some LMS products can track the reporting relationships between people and their managers. This is often done by adding a manager’s LMS user ID to each user’s profile. These reporting relationships can be used to provide managers a view into the learning activities and achievements of their direct reports.

Some systems enable managers to assign training to their direct reports. These features are helpful to organizations in which managers are actively involved in the learning and development of people who report to them.

Extended Enterprise

While many organizations use an LMS for employee training, some are also concerned with training customers and partners, such as suppliers, dealers, and distributors. This model is often referred to as the extended enterprise.

Organizations that deliver training to the extended enterprise must have tight control over what content each user group can see and access. LMS products that support this model typically enable you to create different sites, or domains, in the LMS. This allows each group to have its own URL to access the LMS, its own homepage, its own content, and its own course catalog. Each site may have a different set of administrators and produce a different set of reports. You can configure the features and workflows differently for each site. For example, you can enable e-commerce features for customers and disable them for employees. You can restrict proprietary courses to be viewable by employees only and make other courses available to all groups.

E-Commerce

If your organization needs to charge users for courses, you will need an LMS product that supports e-commerce. These products typically provide a shopping cart and checkout experience. Payment for courses may be processed using a credit card, purchase order, or other method.

Some LMS products provide a way for a customer to purchase a credit that can be debited when anyone in the customer organization enrolls in a fee-based course. If your organization accepts payments using a credit card or PayPal, you will need to contract with a third-party payment processing vendor. Find out which payment processing vendors are supported by your LMS. While you can often choose from a list of supported vendors, many products support the configuration of only one payment processing vendor at a time.

Some organizations need to handle interdepartmental billing in their LMS. While this is not the same as e-commerce, it is an accounting process to manage course funding. If you need to handle this type of accounting in your LMS, you will need to find a product that can associate a course with a sponsoring organization, the organization that purchased the course. Every time someone enrolls for the course, the enrollee’s organization is charged a fee, which is paid to the sponsoring organization. This may be handled manually using LMS reports, or it may be automated through integration between the LMS and the organization’s general ledger. More information on LMS integration with a general ledger can be found in chapter 8.

Competency Management

Some organizations use competency models to describe job requirements. A competency is an observable behavior that can be described at various levels of proficiency. A novice may not know what needs to be done, let alone how to go about doing it. A less experienced practitioner may have baseline competence, like an understanding of what needs to be done, but limited ability to do it well. A more experienced practitioner may have advanced competence—that is, the ability to do it pretty well, fairly consistently. An expert may excel, being able to do it extremely well all the time.

Each job role may have its own set of competencies, each at a required proficiency level. Together, these competencies and proficiency levels define a standard for effective performance in the job role. So, to be effective in that role, a person must be able to demonstrate competence at the required proficiency level.

Some LMS products support competency models, allowing administrators to enter them or import them from another system spreadsheet. Once entered into the LMS, competencies can be associated with jobs, people, and courses.

Some LMS products automatically generate a job-specific, competency-based self-assessment. People can use these self-assessments to improve in their current job role or prepare for a new one. If an employee wants to improve in their current role, the system knows their job, based on their user profile, and presents them with a self-assessment where they can rate their proficiency level for each competency their job requires. Their self-ratings are then compared with the job standards, and they can view the competencies where they exceed, meet, or do not meet the job standard. For any areas where they do not meet the standard, training may be recommended. If they want to prepare for a new role, the system provides a way for them to select their desired role and compare their self-assessed competencies with the standards for that role. They can use the results to create a professional development plan.

Three general cautions about competencies:

Key Takeaways

This chapter described the features that are available with corporate LMS products:

• A corporate LMS is used to deliver learning programs to employees and, in some cases, to customers and business partners.
• A snapshot of corporate LMS features is shown in Table 2-4.

The next chapter introduces the features that are available in another type of product: the academic LMS.