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Totally free, spend as much time as you like |
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Multimedia quick demos on look and feel |
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White papers, information booklet, cost-saving strategies |
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Tools to compare LMS features and requirements |
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Compliance TrainingCompanies and goverment departments need to provide their employees with a wide variety of compliance training on a range of topics. These vary a great deal by industry and nationality but often include discrimination and harassment, dealings with competitors, insider equity trading, protecting trade secrets, records management, bribery, mis-behavior, kickbacks, etc. For example, many of these compliance topics may be addressed in an organization's Code of Conduct, and the organization may offer employees periodic Code of Conduct training. |
Customer E-LearningCustomers often need online education in order to make the best use of your products and services. Additionally, online courses deliver a solid value and proven benefits, and can be an integral part of your revenue profile. Customers can learn in a private, secure environment with user-defined exercises and tests. |
Market Your Online CoursesYour online courses are a valuable asset, and may be capable of generating significant revenue. There are companies, organizations, and individuals who could benefit from your knowledge, and are willing to pay for it. You can sell courses to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection, and with the FlexTraining LMS you can have your custom-developed courses available quickly. No training solution is as easy to use and as well suited to experts who want to take their courses to market. |
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Totally free, spend as much time as you like |
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Multimedia quick demos on look and feel |
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White papers, information booklet, cost-saving strategies |
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Tools to compare LMS features and requirements |
In the past decade, the learning management system (LMS) market has matured considerably. Many companies are therefore moving from one platform to another, rather than making their first venture into the wilds of the online training “space”. Thus it is worth considering just how much data can be migrated from one system to another, what kinds of data are available, and how one might go about it. This article, based on years of practical experience, provides a high-level view of factors to be considered in each area.
When every enterprise or substantial software application resided on the customer’s internal network, access was a given. The old system and the new system were both housed within the confines of the customer’s infrastructure, perhaps even on the same server. This was true for all types of applications, such as financial applications (like General Ledger, AP, AR), logistics and transactional systems (Inventory, Purchasing, Sales Order Processing) and others. This included learning platforms and their databases.
Recently, cloud-based solutions have become popular, even while customer-hosted applications are also commonly used. In a cloud based system, where is your data? Does the vendor control it? Can they even access it, and do they want to? If your legacy vendor has all your data in the cloud, and you are terminating your business relationship with them, they may not be motivated to supply you with all current data so you can get on with your life.
It can be a rude awakening. Many customers are surprised to learn that the minute they sign up with a cloud-based training system provider, their data is gone, gone, gone.
Note here that training platform solutions like FlexTraining make your data available to you whenever you need it, including at contract end. But many providers simply don’t.
In a very summarized view, training data can be broken into two categories; course data and learner data. Course data includes obvious attributes like course name, scheduling dates, lessons, screen content, knowledge assessments, operating parameters, etc. Learner data would include names and email addresses, and possibly mailing addresses, organization information, training progress, test scores, skill groups, etc. A big customer with thousands of learners (usually, but not always, employees) is very likely to want to programmatically convert data from one system to another. There is just too much data to load manually. But exactly what data is available, how is it used on the old system, and how will it be used in the new system? These important questions drive the planning step in a data migration project.
Once you have a detailed understanding of the available data and an equal understanding of what data is needed, you can consider alternatives. In a database, as you may know, information is organized into tables, and tables contain fields.
A big part of designing a migration process is “table-mapping”, where the needed information is sourced from the legacy data at a high level. A more detailed task is “field mapping”, where actual fields are assigned to source fields. Mapping a field named “Last-Name” from a legacy field called “Learner-Last-Name” is easy, but most fields are not so straightforward. You may end up converting some data from legacy data tables, but also decide to plug defaults into other fields, or actually enter some data manually.
In most cases you are working with two electronic databases to make the migration. But if your previous supplier does not provide you with your data, alternatives such as screen-scraping of reports, or using a modified export/import process may be your only course of action.
It’s a good practice to utilize the services of an experience data migration planner to minimize your risks and achieve the best outcome.
A collection of tools, software, authoring screens, technologies, repositories, learning content and infrastructure that provides an online sudience with courses on practically any subject, in large or small volumes.
Another name for an LMS. This term has only come into common use in the last ten years. It is naturally comprised of the same software componetns as an LMS, delivering easy-to-use course creation, course-delivery, learner tracking, and filtered real-time management reporting.
This is a term that is often misunderstood. The word "virtual" can be isolated and assigned the meaning "without an instructor in the room". It should be noted that this term fits situations where there is an instructor provided to assist students, and also where there is no instructor at all. It also may refer to a synchronous method of learning where everyone must be online at the same time.
This is a common techique used in testing during an online course. With Item Banking, a course author, as an example, might create 100 questions for an online knowldege assessment. However, when a learner accesses the test, only 30 of the questions, randomly selected by the learning system, are actually included in the exam. In this way it is guaranteed that no two students have the exacy same test.
JPG is the most common file format for images that can be viewed over the web. As a result, when an author is building lessons and courses for online delivery, images are usually in the JPG format. For example "myOfficeImage.jpg". Alternatives are GIF files or PNG files, but PNG files tend to be larger that JPG files, and thus add an extra load on the server and available bandwidth.
GIF is an alternative image format that displays in a web prowser. Therefore it is an option for web developers and course authors to use for online images and graphics. GIF is best for charts or drawings with few colors, and is not recommended for photographs.
PNG is an alternative image format that displays in a web prowser. Therefore it is an option for web developers and course authors to use for online images and graphics. PNG format is very large, thus causing slow performance. On the positive side, PNG graphics store "layers" for various elements in an image, making editing and changes to a PNG file fairly easy.
MP4 files are video files that have a file extension of "mp4". They are compressed video files, saving space and decreasing transfer time, so this format is an excellent option for online training, or any web-based application. In addition, almost every tool whose purpose it is to create videos is capable of exporting to the MP4 format. For example, screen capture tools like Snagit and Captivate and video editors like Camtasia produce excellent quaklity videos in MP4 format that are very useful for online training
When a learner begins an online course, she has to have a means of navigating through the content and tests. Typically the LMS provides icons or buttons at the top or bottom of the screen for this purpose. Buttons might provide access to the next screen, the previous screen, the next lesson, the previous lesson, or back to a home page or main manu.
The screen where the learner logs in, and is presented with his/her options, course list, and tools such as profile editing. Each learner has a different home page, containing the appropriate courses. The screen is created dynamically from information in the LMS database. In this way, an LMS is said to have a custom student menu.