Dear Colleagues,

I would like to ask for your assistance. I know your time is valuable, and if I can be of any assistance to you in the future, I will certainly respond to your post :-)

I am an independent consultant / educator working in the health care field. While I primarily deliver live workshops and use a blended learning approach. I have recently decided to convert some of the more popular workshops into online learning courses, allowing participants who attend the live workshops to utilize the online courses, as well as evaluation and performance feedback components to support the transfer of learning back to the workplace. I very much like Articulate Studio 09, due to its ease of use as opposed to some others I have tried to develop the modules and courses. I am a one person shop, with little to no IT abilities.

I recently discovered that some LCMS are only capable of tracking one quiz per course, thus eliminating the use of simple pre and post test, not to mention the recording and tracking of questions that are asked all throughout a particular course. In addition, I have found some LCMS systems do not permit multiple modules within a course. For instance, I have a course, and it has ten separate modules. In the interest of self directed learning, I wanted the user to be able to sign into the course, be required to take modules one and two, however, be able to self select the order for the next 5 and then be required to complete modules 8, 9 and 10 in that order. I would like to be able to track the order in which the self selected modules are being completed, the pre and post test for each module, and the mini quizzes, or questions that are being asked throughout each module.

I am looking for an LCMS that has the capability to track individual performance, aggregate results, and be able to produce comparison reports pre and post by individual and or group. BUT, I am looking for an LCMS that is either free, or relatively inexpensive since I am a one person shop. It would be great if it were able to utilize courses created with Articulate Studio, all though If I find an LCMS that does what I need, and is not Articulate capable, I certainly am open to using a product other than Articulate, as the Tracking, Reporting and Performance Feedback is most important. Am I asking for too much?

Any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated, thanks for your assistance.

Thomas

We had this topic not to long ago, if you could search the archive you will find this discussion about 2-weeks ago.

You mention that you like Articulate. Have you looked at Articulate Online? A very simple online delivery tool.

There is also a difference between an LMS and and LMCS your note reads more like you want an LMS, but I am not sure.

My favorite FREE tool is Moodle.

The type of system and solution that you are looking for depends on whether you down the LMS or LCMS rabbit holes. If you are leveraging Articulate, you lose a lot of the content management and reusability provided by an LCMS because all of the content is in the Articulate course package (probably a SCORM package). That means you must be able to manage your content outside of the system.

In the LMS role, there are a couple of ways that you can get your required behavior in many systems. If (and this is a big if in my experience) the LMS support SCORM 2004 sequencing, you can create a structure that will limit access to each SCO based upon a variety of prerequisites. This would probably meet your requirements for self directed learning. The alternative way that I have seen this done is to set up a curriculum structure in the LMS and use their registration prequisites to limit access to appropriate content at appropriate times.

Your other criteria are to be able to report on all of this. This is where the LMS often comes up short. Although they usually will capture question level information, they do not usually report on them or give access to create reports for them. So you will likely need to create custom reports to get anything more granular than completion and score. This is where an LCMS often has a better record (although if you use Articulate, you probably lose that reporting ability as well).

I think Moodle may be a possible solution that could meet all of your requirements. Although there are a lot of costs associated with having a system production ready besides the licensing fee, my company does provide a low cost Moodle based hosted solution that I would be happy to show you how it could fulfill those requirements. If you are interested, let me know.