APPENDIX A

Key Takeaways From Each Chapter

Chapter 1

• An LMS is a multiuser software application, usually accessed through a web browser that helps organizations manage training events, self-paced courses, and blended learning programs.
• The three main categories of LMS products are corporate LMS, academic LMS, and integrated LCMS-LMS. Each has a unique feature set and use model.
• There are commercial and open source LMS products. A commercial LMS is fully supported by the manufacturer; an open source LMS has no licensing costs.
• Most LMS products are stand-alone systems. However, some are packaged as apps or plug-ins for popular website frameworks such as WordPress, SharePoint, and Salesforce.
• An LMS should not be confused with an LRS, which collects and stores xAPI learning data generated in other systems. While LMS users are learners, instructors, and learning administrators, LRS users are xAPI developers and data analysts.

Chapter 2

• A corporate LMS is used to deliver learning programs to employees and, in some cases, to customers and business partners.
• Corporate LMS products offer features for managing users, courses, and user-course interactions.
• Corporate LMS products provide features for system administration and reporting.
• Some products offer messaging and discussions, e-commerce, competency management, and other features.

Chapter 3

• An academic LMS is used as a virtual classroom environment to replace or augment a physical classroom.
• Academic LMS products are used by a wide variety of organizations, including higher education, continuous adult education, government, and professional associations. Businesses sometimes use an academic LMS in combination with a corporate LMS.
• Academic LMS products offer features for managing users and course content.
• Academic LMS products provide features for class administration and reporting.

Chapter 4

• An LCMS-LMS has collaborative course development tools and delivery features.
• LCMS-LMS products are mostly used by organizations that develop and deliver their own learning content.
• LCMS-LMS course development features support collaborative authoring, a searchable content library, version control, global changes, templates and skins, reusable content, development workflows, and exporting content to different formats.

Chapter 5

• Three corporate LMS interoperability specifications ensure your e-learning courseware works properly with your LMS: AICC, SCORM, and cmi5.
• A collection of academic LMS interoperability specifications ensures your online content, teaching tools, and LMS can exchange data: Learning Tools Interoperability^®, Question & Test Interoperability^®, OneRoster^®, Learning Information Services^®, Common Cartridge^®, Thin Common Cartridge^®, Caliper Analytics^®, and Open Badges.
• Three standards support data sharing among the various learning technologies, including the LMS, used in business, government, and professional associations: the xAPI specification, the Competency and Skills System, and the vision for a total learning architecture.
• Accessibility standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 work with assistive devices to make software applications usable to more people with visual, physical, auditory, and cognitive challenges.
• Security and data privacy are concerns for any information system, including your LMS.

Chapter 6

• A thorough needs analysis engages stakeholders and sponsors throughout your organization to identify your learning management system needs. Make sure to explore the viewpoints of your executive leadership, management, and IT.
• Clearly define and document your requirements and use them as the basis of your product selection criteria.
• Derive vetting criteria from your requirements; that is, distinctive requirements that will help you select a short list of vendors to evaluate.
• A funnel approach to your product evaluation activities helps you narrow hundreds of products down to the handful that are best matched to your requirements.
• Getting bids from two or three vendors whose products are equally good candidates for your organization positions you to negotiate the best terms and pricing.

Chapter 7

• A core team will have primary responsibility for the success of the implementation, and an extended team will be involved in several of the more resource-intensive implementation tasks, like user acceptance testing.
• Implementation of an LMS hosted on-premise can take six to 12 months. Implementation of an LMS in the cloud can take three to nine months. If your requirements were not well defined and your system is not well suited to your organization’s needs, the implementation is likely to take much longer.
• Planning is rigorous at the beginning of the implementation process, and it continues all the way up to the day on which your system goes live. A strong project manager is a key asset to your core team.
• There are many configuration decisions to make as you implement your LMS, such as authentication, profiles, organizational structure, domains and audiences, security roles and permissions, course catalog, metadata, courses structures, credit types, evaluations, notifications, reports, e-commerce, branding, and homepage layout.

Chapter 8

• LMS products are often integrated with systems that manage user accounts and profiles such as the human resource management system used by a business, the member management system used by a professional association, or the student information system used by an academic institution.
• Implementing a single sign-on solution streamlines the user experience for people who have already logged in to the organization’s network, allowing their login credentials to be passed to the LMS automatically so that they do not need to log in again.
• LMS products may also be integrated with portals, enterprise search tools, a company’s general ledger, or a data warehouse.
• There are many ways to integrate LMS systems, including data feeds, application programmer interfaces, and deep links to specific LMS webpages.
• When replacing an old LMS with a new one, the training data from the old system must be migrated to the new LMS. This process must be done sequentially and repeated in three different stages.
• A guiding principle is to move as little data as possible to reduce risk and speed the implementation process.
• To migrate data from your old LMS to your new one, you will need to create a map of the data fields across the two systems and compensate for differences in field types, character lengths, and data integrity rules.
• Moving standards-based e-learning courseware can be tricky and must be coordinated with the training data migration process. Different procedures are required to move SCORM, AICC, and cmi5 courseware.

Chapter 9

• User acceptance testing involves thorough end-to-end testing of all LMS learner and administrator features. This is where you, the customer, make sure the LMS is configured, loaded, and operating exactly the way you expect—before you go live!
• There are a number of things you must do to plan your user acceptance testing efforts, including identifying and documenting test cases, preparing testing worksheets, scheduling the tests, and assigning people to perform them.
• As your organization executes the user acceptance testing process, you will need to meet at the end of each day to inventory, document, prioritize, and route bugs that are found. You can create your own bug-tracking spreadsheets or use a commercial bug-management system.
• You must update the status of bugs as they are reported and fixed. Even after a bug is declared “fixed,” you must be sure it is retested and the fix is confirmed. You may also need to rerun some of your test cases to make sure that fixing one bug didn’t introduce other bugs.
• Going live involves some critical steps that must happen in a prescribed sequence. You will need to work with your team to anticipate things that might go wrong and how to mitigate them.
• You must prepare your users, administrators, and help desk in advance of going live.

Chapter 10

• Standards are a critical ingredient in making an LMS easy to use and administer, yet too many organizations operate without them.
• At a minimum, you need four key policies: content inclusion, content ownership, content life-cycle management, and training data retention.
• Clearly documented and communicated administrative procedures help ensure that learning is managed in a methodical way, consistent with the standards and policies.
• Guidelines and conventions for course titles and course numbers make it easier for people to find relevant content, by avoiding inconsistency, redundancy, and ambiguity.
• With multiple administrators, a common set of standards for configuring learning programs makes the LMS easier to use.
• The LMS taxonomy organizes the content and includes the course catalog menu structure, course metadata tags that enhance searching and reporting, and user profile data used to create course audiences.
• It is important to document your current LMS configuration, along with reasons for your configuration decisions, and keep it up-to-date to inform future changes.
• Implementing a major LMS upgrade or new LMS presents opportunities to clean up your data.
• Governance is critical to your ongoing LMS operations. There is a general model for a governance structure that you can use as a starting point in establishing your own.

Chapter 11

• Look for the LMS to move from the most important L&D technology to being one system among many.
• Look for the LMS to update learner transcripts and issue credits for learning that happens outside the LMS, functioning as a transcript warehouse.
• Look for the LMS to become increasingly “unwrapped” so that its content and functionality can be plugged into existing portals and websites.
• Look for more commercial LMS products to introduce gamification features such as points, badges, and leaderboards.
• Look for the LMS to get much better at what it already does pretty well, shifting from SCORM to cmi5, offering better mobile user interfaces, becoming more streamlined and easier for administrators to use, and offering enhanced search capabilities and personalized dashboards.
• While its feature set grows, the price of the LMS will drop as more open source and low-cost products continue to enter the market.
• There are two types of systems related to the LMS: MOOC delivery systems and microlearning delivery systems.

Chapter 12

• Training is not the only way people learn. We also learn through gaining experience and practice, using tools and resources, completing self-directed study and research, observing and networking with others, and consulting with experts.
• Academic education programs are becoming increasingly experiential. Corporate L&D organizations are shifting from a focus on learning to a focus on job performance and productivity.
• Learning and performance ecosystem solutions can consist of any combination of performance support, knowledge management, access to experts, social networking and collaboration, structured learning, and talent management.
• In the learning and performance ecosystem, our role is not just to teach, but to create environments where people can learn on their own, and from one another.
• The learning and performance ecosystem is supported by multiple learning technology platforms, some of which may have been deployed by IT and HR but can be used by L&D.
• While the LMS may not be the central, most important technology supporting the learning and performance ecosystem, it is still a critical component.
• Much of the LMS selection, implementation, and operation guidance in this book can be applied to other technology projects as you continue to expand your learning technology tool set.