Playing 20 Questions
By Margaret Driscoll and Michael Dennehy
Here’s a primer designed to prepare training and HR professionals to work with their informational technology group and e-learning suppliers. It provides 20 questions training professionals need to ask, including definitions, examples, and concepts that are important when assessing suppliers and working with IT departments.
If you’ve been following the e-learning market, you’ve probably noticed a lot of positive data about the growth of this technology. Statistics show that 24 percent of U.S. organizations are now using e-learning to train employees, up from 16 percent in 2001. Thirty percent of organizations that responded to an IDC e-learning survey train their customers using e-learning. Despite these numbers, the growth of e-learning has been slower than predicted. Industry experts suggest that two problems are responsible for slow adoption: organizational issues and technical issues.
Organizational issues include finding a champion in the executive suite, linking to strategic initiatives, and calculating return-on-investment. Training and HR professionals have a deep comfort level in analyzing and solving organizational obstacles, which they understand better than technical issues because they’ve solved organizational problems within traditional programs.
Technical issues are another story, however. Although equally important, training and HR professionals often are reluctant to tackle technical problems. One of the key reasons technical problems aren’t addressed is that technical expertise hasn’t been a core competency. More important, technical problem have been exacerbated by the fact that the e-learning market entered the scene without much announcement. Indeed, e-learning’s rapid introduction created the need for a steep learning curve.
The following questions are useful for trying to understand the technical issues that influence selection of a learning management system.
1. Will my legacy data be migrated to the new LMS?
You don’t want to lose learner information, course catalog entries, and courseware when you implement a new system. Can every field, such as name, phone, division, and job code, transfer to the new system? If you’re buying an LMS and integrating more than one learner registration system, will the new system allow you to migrate multiple sets of legacy data? Are there tools to do this? How will the system manage old catalog descriptions, courseware, and test items? If the LMS doesn’t handle migration, how much will the migration cost and how much work will it require?
2. How does the LMS integrate with back-end systems?
Even if you currently don’t need to integrate back-end systems to the LMS, make sure you have the capability when the time comes. Integration with back-end systems means your e-learning system can pass data to other applications in your organization, such as e-commerce, sales force automation, customer service, and HRIS systems. For example, find out whether you can integrate with an e-commerce system to track and charge for courses. Ask about the ability to integrate with HRIS systems that link employee records to training records.
3. Does the LMS comply to standards?
Standards are important because adherence to them means off-the-shelf and in-house developed standards-compliant content will be portable between systems. Systems that don’t comply to standards create proprietary content that may not be usable outside that supplier’s system. There are also computer industry standards related to operating systems, networking, and security that you need to consider. Find out what standards your IT organization expects.
4. What kind of technical and administrative skills are required to manage the system?
Any on-site application must have an IT person available to perform such tasks as backing up data, rebooting the system, managing the database, and optimizing the application. An administrator who’s in a training role rather than an IT job function most likely will be responsible for posting courses, scheduling classes, replacing lost passwords, and managing mass enrollments. Keep in mind that the skill level and number of people dedicated to implementing e-learning isn’t a black and white issue due to such variables as the number of users, complexity of the application, number of sites, and basic computer skills of learners.
5. Is the application available as an on-site system, hosted ASP offering, or both?
The options your supplier offers for providing the application are important. If you want to keep your options open, ask about availability. Find out whether the system you’re considering can be deployed behind your firewall. In other words, can you buy the system and have your IT people run it? Can the supplier run the system for you and fulfill the IT functions, such as maintaining the system, managing upgrades, adding users, and backing up the system. Be sure to ask about your options for the future. For example, can you move a hosted system behind your firewall later?
6. Can the application grow? Is it scalable?
Scalability may not be important when you start, but consider the long-term growth of your company. How many users can the system support? In addition asking about to the number of user records it can hold, make queries about the system's performance levels for multiple simultaneous users. Will there be times when a large number of people might be logging on? Consider different scenarios: 1000 users taking a self-paced course, 90 learners in a virtual classroom, three system administrators running reports. Think about possible extended audiences, including customers, partners, and resellers.
7. Does the system have documented APIs?
API stands for application protocol interface, which is code that enables customers to connect their LMS to other applications. For instance, customers will need to integrate their LMS with other backend systems, such as HRIS, CRM, SFO, and ERP systems. The APIs must come with documentation explaining how to perform integration tasks.
8. Is the application interoperable?
Interoperability is the ability for two or more applications to exchange information. For example, if the systems are interoperable, you’re able to pass information between your HRIS and learning management system that enables the HR department to store an employee’s learner transcript with the employee’s other HR data. Meanwhile, the training department could use data from the HRIS to identify and register all junior sales people for an advanced selling course.
9. Is the application extensible?
Extensibility is the ability to add new features and capabilities to a software application. For example, a training department might have an LMS that deploys a simple text-based catalog. If the application is extensible, programmers can add functionality to the text-based online catalog to make it a hypertext Windows catalog. Using the extended program, learners can click on the name of the instructor teaching the course and learn about the instructor’s background.
10. What kind of support does the supplier offer?
Support should include the obvious options, including who to call when the system has bugs and performance problems. Less obvious features are training, documentation, users groups, a Website for customer and service professionals who need consulting. Ask about the depth of the support organization and the process it has for responding to problems. Is the service available 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 24/7? Where is the service based? How does the supplier manage problems generated from outside the United States?
11. What does maintenance and support really mean? What is the cost?
Ask about maintenance and support costs early in the selection process. These terms can differ from supplier to supplier. Maintenance contracts can cover the ability to get patches, the right to get product upgrades, and the right to access to information to enhance performance. Support can services include any or all of the following: access to telephone support, onsite technical support, access to email support, online customer service tools, membership in a user group, regular communications, and input into defining future features. In some cases, maintenance and support services are purchased separately.
12. What languages does the LMS support?
Employees, customers, and partners may not all speak the same language. Find out whether the system can offer interfaces, online help, and user documentation in a learner's native language. In addition to simple interface translations, ask whether the supplier has tested the application on local language versions of other browsers, operating systems, and databases.
13. What are the underlying databases, operating systems, and clients upon which the LMS is built?
Ask the supplier about the LMS’s infrastructure programs. In other words, what program does the LMS run on? The reason you want to ask these questions is that your IT department may not be able to support the dependent technology or they don’t have the skills to install, support, or maintain it. What browsers does the LMS work with, and what versions does it use? What kinds of operating systems are supported?
14. Does the LMS support an LDAP directory?
Lightweight directory protocol or LDAP is an application that stores user information data, including name, phone number, address, and reporting structure. The LDAP manages authentication, which means it makes sure that when you connect to an application like email or online expense account forms the system can confirm that you have the right to use them. Some companies have more than one LDAP as a result of mergers or they have an LDAP for customers and one for employees. The LMS should be able to use information from one or more LDAP systems to allow people access and to determine what functions users can access.
15. Take a close look at the user interface. What flexibility is available for calendars, dates, time, and localization of interfaces? Is the LMS compliant with the Section 508 Americans with Disability Act?
Ask about subtle usability functions. Look for a flexible program that enables the end user and learner profiles to drive default settings. For example, displaying the date in a way that’s familiar to users in North American (mm-dd-yy) is different than a European-friendly format (dd-mm-yy). Or you may need to offer your users a time displayed in a 24-hour and 12-hour clock.
In addition, find out how the LMS has addressed Section 508. For example, are graphics adequately defined in programming code. Is navigation easy to follow by voice conversion programs?
16. What level of customization options does the supplier offer?
Customization is important to most organizations that need to make a generic application suit their needs. User interface is the most common example of customization. Frequently, organizations need to apply their brand colors, logo, and taxonomy. Other common customization options include reports and various types of notification messages. Be sure to ask whether the features you pay to have customized will be preserved as you upgrade the system.
17. Can the LMS be partitioned?
Many companies have fragmented training efforts; it’s not unusual to have separate groups for sales, IT, leadership, and customer training. As a result of fragmentation, learners and administrators may require different catalog views or unique reporting options. In response, suppliers typically offer a feature called partitioning, which is the ability to segment the views presented to end-users based on such attributes as job title, location, or project team. The ability to partition an LMS enables fragment training groups to share the LMS without wading through excess information. In turn, that allows the company to have a single solution for corporate-wide and department-specific audiences.
18. What assumptions does the LMS make about authoring courses?
The reason most companies have an LMS is to deliver and track content. One of the key questions to ask is how the supplier envisions the development of e-learning courses. Ask if the system ships with an authoring tool. Is the authoring tool standards-based? Is it intuitive and user-friendly or will it require training? Is the tool designed for SMEs, instructional designers, or multimedia developers? Will the system support other authoring tools, such as Dreamweaver, ToolBook, or Lectora? Can you import courses from content libraries? Can you track CD-ROM courses? Is a test or quiz development tool built into the authoring application? Do simulation-authoring tools work with the authoring tool?