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InfoSource: How to Master LMS

InfoSource produces training for technical and business skills and a suite of products designed to support training development and administration. All are branded as How to Master. The company course libraries include e-learning and instructor-led training offerings for desktop applications, advanced technical subjects, and soft skills.

InfoSource’s How to Master LMS (learning management system) is an intriguing offering that proposes there's an e-learning infrastructure for small to mid-sized organizations.

Evaluating how well a supplier supports such a value proposition, potential buyers should consider not only functionality and service but also what might be called the supplier’s “body language.” That type of evaluation reveals a continuum of providers. On one end of the spectrum are providers that understand the business problems of small to mid-sized organizations and offer an approach to change how they manage learning as a strategic business element. On the other end of the scale are suppliers who have some technology and decide to sell it.

The How to Master LMS falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum. It strives to be more than yet another LMS and has found a position of strength with organizations that see strategic value in InfoSource’s How to Master content libraries, which can be packaged with the learning management system. But it doesn’t offer the ability to manage organizational learning more broadly and thus serve a range of strategic needs.

Product description
The How to Master LMS is directed at the organization that may bristle at the idea of maintaining its own system and negotiating terms, conditions, and standards with multiple content providers—or else assume such a system is beyond its reach. For this client, the How to Master LMS offer is an integrated approach to learning and content management, with functionality presumably tuned to the needs of smaller organizations.

InfoSource has three pricing options for its LMS. In option one, InfoSource hosts the system and bundles it with the How to Master PC and Business Skills library. Annual fees are based on one-year licenses. Discounts are available for multi-year licenses.

In option two, the client hosts the LMS bundled with the How to Master PC and Business Skills library. License fees start at a minimum of 250 users. The price doesn’t include the cost of the server required to support the system.

In option three, the client hosts the LMS, but there's no bundled content. Prices begin at US$15,000 per year and are based on the size and scope of the implementation.

User environment. The user environment is divided into two broad categories: learner and administrator. The administrator environment accommodates up to 10 different levels, each with different system access rights and permissions. This structure provides the flexibility to subdivide general training administration roles and, presumably, to establish general business roles such as manager.

In general, the basic Web interface doesn’t provide much assistance in building an environment based on the needs of standard business roles—various learning and development professional roles or general business roles. For example, the interface doesn’t establish an effective framework for a typical line manager engaged in planning, reviewing, approving, and monitoring the training activities for a team. Instead, it provides the ability to set up an individual manager as an administrator who can then make course assignments for team members. In addition, no attempt is made to provide any personalization capabilities, including language preferences.

Delivery. The How to Master LMS is designed to deliver self-paced, online e-learning content primarily from the How to Master libraries. The LMS is designed to AICC guidelines, but isn’t certified, and it doesn’t support SCORM content. There's no ability to integrate virtual classroom capabilities either as a native capability or through third-party integration. Learners who attend a virtual classroom session cannot have their personal training records updated within the LMS. In addition, no special attention is paid to accommodating offline or disconnected use of learning materials, such as tracking learner activity after downloading a course for use while traveling or using a course delivered on CD.

Content authoring and content management. Through an LMS component called the Content Authoring Tool (CAT), some interesting capabilities open up for clients that incorporate How to Master content libraries. The How to Master content is organized within the LMS according to a structured hierarchy:

Libraries > Views > Sections > Tracks > Courses > Lessons

Lessons, the lowest level unit, can be either training content or tests. Lessons are combined and aggregated into the larger groupings that make up the higher levels of the hierarchy.

An administrative user with access to the CAT can view content at any level of the hierarchy and combine lessons into new courses, courses into new tracks, and so on. The tool can create training material or tests using a lesson-building template and then integrate them into a new course or combine them with the How to Master PC and Business Skills library lessons.

The template approach means the content developer must use the standard How to Master content navigation frame and approach. For example, each lesson page must contain a graphic element and some explanatory text. The tradeoff in flexibility ensures consistent look and feel and navigation across all content in the LMS. In other words, a company’s subject matter experts or training developers can easily create content that looks just like material from the How to Master libraries.

Once again, however, the scope of this approach is limited primarily to the How to Master content. The system doesn’t have a built-in view of the learning environment as something that accommodates a continuum of material from highly structured courseware to references, documents, and other bits of knowledge that may be delivered in various formats. This is a struggle for many learning systems providers—and businesses attempting to create rich learning environments. The How to Master LMS does little to declare its path to this vision.

Learning management. Most LMSs are built with functionality to accommodate a catalogue- and learner-centric view of the world. In the catalogue-centric view, a learner has free choice to enroll in structured learning events listed in a catalogue. A commercial training firm may be the purest example of an environment driven by the catalogue view—no user is assigned anything. In the learner-centric view, an attempt is made to provide a more robust set of methods to match learners with learning activities that take into account unique learner attributes such as job function, language preference, career interest, competency rating, development plans, or performance management objectives. Accommodating both views requires a range of process, self-service, and management features.

How to Master seems to take an administrator-centric view. For students to be able to access learning material, the content must be assigned to them by an administrator. When an assignment is made, a user can access the material in the “My Courses” section of the student environment.

When using the How to Master content, an administrator can create an assignment at any level of the content hierarchy, from library down to lesson. Students may also be members of a group (job function, organization, and so forth) that has similar training requirements, allowing an administrator to “push” content more effectively to a larger audience. With the How to Master content hierarchy, it’s possible to create a catalogue-like listing for a user group by pushing an entire library into the My Courses framework, although users still don’t need to enroll—the process of assigning allows the users direct access to the material.

What this creates, however, is a system that is based on a single process. An intelligent central resource assigns learning to appropriate groups and individuals, relying heavily on learning material organized according to the How to Master hierarchy. There is no real self-service registration or enrollment function.

The How to Master system also lacks significant capability to handle instructor-led training as an element of the learning mix. A student cannot self-enroll for a specific session of an ILT course within the LMS. Part of the process must be handled outside the LMS and then completed by an administrator who assigns the student to the session. The supporting workflow and automation for instructor-led training (room management, resources, and instructors) is also missing. Those obstacles would be significant for companies in which instructor-led training is a key element of the learning mix or where blended learning events are employed.

Although the How to Master content architecture provides real value in being able to mix and match content components, features that help package learning activities, create prerequisites, and special types of programs such as certifications are limited. Building such programs doesn’t seem easy or intuitive.

Reporting and analysis. The How to Master LMS includes a set of standard reports that contain much of the learning activities information required by training professionals:

• student course
• student lesson
• lesson usage
• student training time summary
• student assignment
• group assignment.

It also incorporates a simple, smart approach to customization: Every report can be easily exported into a delimited file for import into another desktop tool or database.

The system can add custom fields to the student profile data. This may be used, for example, to capture more detailed information about the student’s job function, organization, location, and so forth. Custom fields can then be part of the reporting capability. Reporting capability is constrained, however, by the limited scope of learning management functionality and financial-budgeting features.

Enterprise integration. How to Master is primarily implemented as a hosted solution and targets small to medium-sized organizations. As a result, integration with other enterprise systems isn’t a significant element of the design. User information is imported into the LMS in a semi-automated fashion and then may be maintained by the LMS administrators. That approach may work fine in many environments, but over time, it may also result in disconnected islands of information.

Implementation management. An LMS implementation is a continuous stream of events that doesn’t end after the initial system launch. Unless the system is used to support a specific training intervention that is limited in time and scope, business users typically find new ways to extend the reach or functionality of their learning management environment.

How to Master uses a standard approach to implementation, combining consulting with technical support. For its most common implementation, a hosted system, the company works with clients in a series of conference-call meetings to prepare for set up and initial launch. The conference calls are conducted by How to Master support staff with experience in both the technical aspects and the adoption and marketing of e-learning initiatives. No outside professional services firms are used in the process.

For the client that wishes to host its own system, How to Master offers a service that preloads the LMS software and content onto a server, which is then delivered intact to the client for installation.

Recommendation
The How to Master LMS is a tool tuned to support the How to Master content libraries and InfoSource’s approach to learning delivery. It can provide an effective solution for organizations that find strategic value in the content libraries and the ease with which customized content can be added to the system through the content authoring tool. But the How to Master system is not well suited to change the way learning is managed through strategic learning and operational excellence in learning. In those areas, the system has fundamental limitations.

	How To Master LMS
User environment
Delivery
Content authoring and management
Learning management
Reporting and analysis
Enterprise integration
Implementation management
Overall rating