[sumtotal_users] Re: LMS course priority process

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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