I work at a software company that creates products for a specific industry. I have been tasked with creating a voluntary, online, customer certification program to ensure that our customers have mastered specific features of the software. I have a teaching and training background, but I haven't actually created and packaged something of this magnitude before. At this point, I have created a list of participant types, a list of objectives per type, and marked objectives as either basic or advanced. I have created an avenue for participant discussion using an existing forum in place for customers. I know that I need to align the current resources (self-study materials) to the objectives and create assessments to measure progress, but I'm not exactly sure how to proceed from here. Do I need an LMS? How can I learn more about the practical application of an LMS? Am I on the right track?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: KHannan,

You dont need a LMS. If you have a local database, you can create a web-based application for testing. It can store the details in the database.

The participants can log on from any place and access the questions stored in the central database. The questions can be randomly generated. The participant scores will be stored on the central database.

We can create this testing engine for you.

Rashmi Varma
http://www.kern-comm.com
rashmi@kern-comm.com

To be honest, I was looking for more information on the process of creating a certification program- with or without a LMS. Any ideas out there? I'm currently reading Designing Web-Based Training by William Horton.

I think you are on the right track. The assessment components are usually pretty straightforward if you have a background in it, which you said that you have.

What is the purpose of your certification program? I have set up certification programs at two different companies and used a different approach each time. One was done more for marketing purposes and the other was done to keep people from claiming they were experts on our software if they were really not.

You will also need to consider whether the certification will expire. If it will, does it expire by date or by product version? If by version, do you have to retake the full exam again or can you take a delta (upgrade) exam? Also if someone fails the exam, what is the retest procedure? Do they have to wait a certain period of time? Etc. Etc.

Those are the types of questions you want to think through, because that is what you will have to deal with once you launch. If you put some thought into it up-front, you can save yourself a ton of headache later.

The purpose of the certification will be to ensure customer mastery of the features and functionality of the software as they pertain to their job function. The hope is that we can reduce technical support calls by better eduicating our customers and that the customers will want to add our certification to their resumes, since we are the industry leader.

I'm trying to get the program approved for CEU credits for two professional licensing agencies. It will be self-study, using our existing training resources (help files, web-baswed tutorials, Quick Ref cards, etc.) There will be a re-cert by version, probably just a delta.