I’ve been having other LMS vendors contact me wanting me to see demonstrations of their systems several times over the last year. A situation arose recently that made my department seriously question the system we had in place and should we switch to another vendor. I made arrangements to visit a colleague at another hospital to see their system first hand from a user’s perspective rather than the sales pitch that provided by vendor demos.
I can not begin to tell you how invaluable this visit turned out to be for my learning. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I actually had some features that she didn’t have offered on her system. I was able to ask what the best features were from her perspective and which ones she never bothered to use. This was such a great comparison and was quite relevant as we both work in health care, I with 2700 employees, her with 10,000 employees and 4 sites.
I thought I’d share some of the questions I took with me on my visit as they might come in handy for you should you be on the LMS shopping journey. I highly recommend seeking out someone else in a similar industry to you and seeing first hand how the user is using the product. If you can do it with out the vendor’s assistance I believe you’ll get an even greater unbiased opinion from the user. The questions are in a particular order and some may seem like they have obvious answers, but I’ve learned that you can’t be so sure of what is exactly included in a system.
- How does the system import user ID information? (Active Directory, or what every system your HR team uses)
- How responsive is the vendor to your inquiries, troubleshooting, etc.
- Can users access the system from home? (Is this important to your organization? – probably)
- Is there a yearly licence or a one time fee, per user or for the whole system?
- How often are upgrades issued? Are they part of the fee?
- How long did the user take to pilot the system? How did they run their pilot?
- Does the system track external credits?
- What kind of comments have you heard from learners using the system?
- How intuitive is the system for learners and users(admin)?
- Does the system allow for email notification to learners?
- How many years has the person being using the system? How much longer do they plan to continue using the system?
- Does it integrate with Outlook or what ever mail/calendar system you use?
- Can you display course thumbnails or other images?
- Can course due dates be assigned or does a learner have to manually adjust?
- Is there space for News, Updates, Info text to be displayed on homepage of system?
- Is it searchable? How so? Might you need to purchase a mini-search engine?
- Can you administer practical, hands-on tests/assignments to users?
- Are evaluations attached or part of courses?
- Does it have discussion boards, wikis, etc? Are these important to your org.?
- What kind of reporting does it allow? Can it be exported? In what kind of formats? Is it customizable – can you report on anything/everything?
- Is it SCORM compliant? What version?
- How robust is the support documentation for the user? For the learners?
- Can you set up course/info that online one particular set of learners can access?
I’m sure there are a million other questions that could be asked, but I hope these at least arm you with the option to seek out greater knowledge of a system before you commit to purchasing. Please feel free to respond with additional questions someone buying a system might want to have answered.
Comments 2
Fantastic questions. For me I would also ask:
Is it AICC compliant, in addition to SCORM?
How easy is it to edit/update the interface (GUI)? For example, putting a news update on the 1st screen, changing the colors, adding a company logo, etc.
Can I see it run reports and can they be manipulated into numerous types of graphs?
Is there an e-learning development tool(s) they consider most compatible with the LMS, and to what extent have other development tools’ been tested with the LMS? For example, courses built in Toolbook and SoftSim run well on SumTotal, but may not work so well on another LMS.
Is it an LCMS? Allowing courses and assessments to be built within the system? How intuitive are the content development tools in the LCMS?
Can it handle m-learning courses? If so, what were the m-learning courses built with and/or on what platform? Where the m-learning courses SCORM compliant, and did it record assessment scores or just completion?
Thanks for this great post!
Jeff
Great thoughts Jeff. You’ve obviously seen systems more robust than I have. Graphs???? they can make graphs???
As for the LCMS, I would add to that, if it does have development tools how robust (my word for the day) are they. T/F and Multiple choice can’t be the only options. Just inserting text and a few pictures.
M-learning – I hadn’t even considered this, but definately. As this mode becomes to the forefront of just-in-time learning this will become much more important.