Different customers’ often ask us very similar questions. This is a round-up of the more prevalent questions. The responses might only give you the initial information you’re looking for, but if you talk to us, we’ll be better able to understand your specific problems and can assist you from there. These questions are:
1. How can we encourage companies who buy our courses on the LMS to service themselves?
We’re often asked this question by commercial training providers who use our In2itive LMS to sell, distribute and manage their e-learning courses, instructional videos and other online training products.
“At the heart of the question, our training provider customers want to spend less time managing orders and administration tasks, and more time creating courses and making money!”
Here are a few things we’ve led our clients towards in order to help them achieve this.
e-commerce
This is the obvious one. If you link the LMS to a payment gateway and the LMS has a manageable catalogue that allows you to create and manage products and catalogue pages, as well as tiered price breaks and coupon/discount codes, then this is going to take away pretty much all of the order administration, as well as most of the LMS administration. Customers simply buy from the catalogue and the rest is automated — right from taking the payment straight into your e-commerce account, through to the user being automatically registered onto the LMS, having their courses assigned and receiving their welcome email and invoice.
Flexible licences and customer self-service
The LMS allows you to sell courses but it also allows you to sell quantities of User Licences and/or Programme Licences.
If a customer buys X user licences then the LMS can automatically create a private learning group for the purchaser and give the purchaser the LMS administration rights to be able to add their own users to their private group (up to the maximum number of user licences purchased).
The LMS allows your customers to allocate preferred products to their own staff
If Product Licences have been purchased then the LMS allows the Purchaser to add users. It also allows the Purchasing Administrator to allocate different Programmes to each of their users — up to the maximum number of Programme Licences purchased.
Bulk user imports to the LMS
To minimise manual administration the LMS allows bulk imports (from an Excel spreadsheet) of multiple users. Once the import is activated the LMS automatically creates those user profiles and sends each user their welcome email and login details.
Do you want to reduce your e-learning Administration?
2. What is meant by a “responsive” LMS?
A responsive LMS viewed on a laptop
The same responsive LMS viewed on a Smartphone
The context of a responsive LMS is not really any different to the context of a responsive website. It simply means that the LMS has been designed to provide an optimal viewing experience for the user, regardless of what device the user is accessing the LMS from — think PC, laptop or smartphone.
If you access the LMS via an Android phone, iPhone or iPAD the user interface of a responsive LMS will be presented to you with minimal need for you to be resizing, panning and scrolling around your screen just because you’re on a smaller handheld device.
The user interface (i.e. what you see) may not necessarily be identical when viewed on your different devices but the functionality and features will be.
Do you need a responsive LMS?
3. Does my e-learning have to be SCORM compliant?
The short answer is no … you may not actually need to create SCORM compliant courses to do what you’re looking to do. However, it is probably a good idea to investigate it before you start out because SCORM compliance provides you with interoperability across multiple different LMS providers. SCORM is therefore likely to be an insurance policy for any investment you make in e-learning.
If you invest in creating e-learning content you may want to be able to deliver it on a number of different learning platforms, either now or in the future. Conversely, if you invest in creating a learning platform then you may want to ensure that it can be used to deliver and track a multitude of different online training programmes from different vendors.
“If an LMS learning platform is SCORM compliant, it can work with any e-learning content that is SCORM compliant. Also, any e-learning content that is SCORM compliant can be used in any SCORM compliant LMS.”
Here is our a non-technical overview of SCORM and learning technology, entitled, What is a learning platform — and a template to help you choose the right one.
Do you need a SCORM compliant LMS?
4. Why do my e-learning courses sometimes ‘freeze’?
E-learning courses can be small data files or they can be huge data files — and they can be anything in between. So whatever the e-learning course data is made up of (e.g a video) it has to be transferred from the LMS to your device when you launch the course, and often also as you progress through the course.
If the LMS is ‘in the cloud’ then this course data has to travel all the way from the LMS (which could be anywhere in the world) to your device. It does this via ‘the Internet’. As you’ll no doubt know from personal experience, ‘the Internet’ (reliability, speed and quality) can vary depending on a huge variety of variables. If there are problems somewhere along the route (even in your own home office) then this can cause problems. This, along with a few tips and hints to try and identify the problem is covered in more detail here, Slow Internet and e-learning — who's to blame when websites slow down or stop? This isn’t the only reason why your e-learning course might freeze so if you’re having problems then we’d be happy to discuss them with you.
Need advice on how to get the most out of your LMS?
5. Why do I need to be connected to the Internet to do my e-learning course?
Traditionally the LMS and the actual e-learning course need to talk to each other as you progress through your course. This is so that the LMS can record your activity, progress and scores. Hence they need a communication connection which is provided by ‘the Internet’. If you lose your Internet connection then the conversation between the LMS and the course can sometimes ‘get in a tangle’ so to speak. This can cause courses to freeze or it can result in some of your activity going unrecorded on the LMS.
“Nowadays you don’t necessarily need to be connected to the Internet all of the time but your LMS will have to have what’s usually referred to as an ‘offline course player’. ”
An LMS with an offline course player will allow you to download your course and take the course wherever and whenever you like even when you are not connected to the Internet (via wireless, 3g, 4g, etc). Then, when you next connect to the LMS over the Internet the offline course player will then send your stored course activity back to the LMS.
