We made the decision that courses would be loaded centrally. Our reason was to control the quality of offerings. However we quickly ran into overload for our resources for this process. So, we've decentralized for some areas and not for others. We have a decentralized educational organization with 5 groups doing most, though not all, training and education for staff. Some of these groups are quite prolific and have staff with advanced degrees in adult education and training. For those groups we've opened up the LMS and allow them to do their own thing. For everyone else we maintain control over content quality (not content itself, SMEs do that) and over types of offering available.
This partial decentralization to groups with adult learning principle backgrounds has allowed us to almost keep up with demand. We still have a backlog of a few months. We're attempting to address this by educating the educators in the other groups who don't have formally trained educators. We've developed online instructional content on how to create online educational materials, templates with clear and easy to follow instructions, and a regular series of in services for educators on best practices that are pretty well attended. As the SMEs come to us to put something up on the LMS we work with them, mentoring, consulting, guiding them through the process of development. Once we're sure that the quality they will produce in the future meets our standards we cut them loose and let them begin putting things on the LMS.
All of the above is applicable to those educational offerings that are for particular groups in the organization. Any educational offering for all or most of our staff we bring in house. We're the central location for organization-wide education. The individual groups concentrate on a single population of staff, e.g. nurses, facilities, administrative.
Thanks
B
Barbara Eckstein
Director, Learning Management Services (MLearning)
University of Michigan Health System (UMHS)
700 KMS Place
Ann Arbor, Mi 48108
Pager: 1391
Phone: 734-936-0129
Fax: 734-615-6021
>>> "Jon" <jtrelfa@yahoo.com> 11/13/2008 9:25 PM >>>
--- In sumtotal_users@yahoogroups.com, mv <mvaccaro411@...> wrote:
>
> Hi there,
> Our small centralized LMS team just launched our LMS a few months
ago and now we are attempting to develop a process around a) how LMS
requests come to us and b) what gets loaded in to the LMS first given
limited resources.
>
> Can anybody share their process? Perhaps you have a decentralized
model where administrators in their respectives units are loading
courses themselves?
>
> Thanks!
> Melissa
>
We use a content server outside of the LMS and used the global
administrator to create an upload share. When the user uploads
content using the upload tool, it uploads to the content server rather
than the LMS server. The content server has gigantic hard drives that
can host all of the big media files used by SCORM courses, etc - and
it keeps us from having to worry about running out of space on the LMS
server.
Configuring it to work is a little tricky - we're using windows
servers on a small internal domain. A common domain user is used to
'link' to a virtual directory on the LMS server that points to the
content server. From the user's perspective, the content appears to
be delivered from the LMS server, even though it's the content server :)
As far as decentralizing, I've found that only 1 or 2 individuals
representing a business unit (i.e. domain) be granted access to upload
content for their respective area of responsibility. It's best to
keep the power in as few hands as possible.
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In my experiecne designing
In my experiecne designing content development and management processes for various businesses I've found a decentralized group of content authors to be the most responsive to business demnad for training material - it just makes sense to have the experts who know the content make the content.
But will they produce quality content? Even if they are all expert Instructional designers, the individual tastes, group needs, and even politics can cause decentralized authors to break away from each other, having potentially disastrous results when all content is run within a single LMS. SCORM requirements, navigation, and Activity configurations can make or break content deployment.
These factors can be mitigated without crippling the systems flexibility.
First and Foremost, you must identify core requirements for the organization as a whole - classify your Activity Types and define the functional requirements for each type - this drives the SCORM and Activity configuration.
Define standards for activity development - including the testing process - and identify responsibilities and accountability for each step in your processes, which should also be standardized across the organization as much as possible. When your sharing a resource such as an LMS, everyone needs to play by the same rules, and who else is playing. those players aren't always going to get along well, so their acceptance and support of the standards and processes is also crucial.
Crate generic templates for SMEs to start with - build standard navigation, presentation, logos, etc.
Also provide standard generic configurations designed to be as compatible as possible. this reduces the amount of work your LMS support team must engage in to deliver a course, and provides a template for troubleshooting faulty Activities.
You will still need to provide some centralized content development to assist groups in situations where the templates don't satisfy their needs. this gives the groups incentive to avoid non-standard activities as they will take longer and be more expensive to develop.
Implement some form of content Management - Despite your best efforts to train and prepare content authors, mistakes will happen. content will need to be updated or replaced - without a content management layer in your system, updating a SCORM course in the LMS becomes very tricky over time and can be very labor intensive depending on the amount of user records for the content. Further, an LCMS provides a layer of insulation between the critical user completion data in the LMS and the content associated that will prevent sever and sometimes disastrous Data Integrity issues.
Some LCMS systems also provide web-based content authoring and testing/deployment of content outside the LMS - all of which simplifies the groups interaction with the LMS and reduces the need for central services to support daily authoring.