Three hurdles to using an open source Learning Management System in a corporate environment.

Are you tired of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a system that doesn’t meet your needs? Have you heard you can save big on an open source solution like Moodle or OLAT?  Well, don’t put away your checkbook quite yet.  Although you can save significantly in the long haul, there are a number of issues that you will need to overcome, and these can take time and money to make happen.  The biggest offenders are:

1. Management Hierarchy: Open source systems are usually funded by academic institutions and, therefore, serve the academic audience.  They don’t have much use for management hierarchies and most of systems don’t support them.  This means if you want your managers to be able to look at their employees, training (and only their employees’ training), you are going to have to extend the system or come up with some fancy reports.  Either solution can be troublesome to implement.
2. Activity Completion: In a corporate environment it is essential that a manager be able to verify that his/her employees have completed all training necessary to do their jobs.  This is true whether the “training” consists of an online course, a pdf, a virtual session or an instructor-led class.  Many open source systems only record completion for activities that have assessments or can be graded (such as ILT sessions).  This can be problematic or even — in the case of regulatory requirements — a show-stopper.  If this is a requirement for you, you may need to either extend the completion functionality of the system or create some custom course wrappers that allow completion for non-graded course types.
3. Domains:  It is often vital for organizations to separate particular groups of users and administrators to keep them from being able to access specific content or other groups of users.  Regardless of whether this is because of intellectual protection requirements or simply to prevent administrators in one department from altering other department’s courses, this is often an essential component of most enterprise LMS implementations.  Many open source systems do not support the ability to segregate users or content this way.  If this is a requirement, there can be some significant customizations to get this level of functionality.

Every system (open source or private) will have their own hurdles to working effectively in your organizations.  Just because open source solutions may have some significant hurdles to implementation doesn’t mean that they are not worth the effort.  When you don’t have to pay annual licensing fees, you can spend more on development of the system to bridge any gaps and still save money.  As long as you look at the long term, and establish realistic expectations of what it will take to make the system fit your needs, an open source LMS may be an option for you.

What are the minimum requirements for a Learning Management System?

The question of selecting a Learning Management System (LMS) is one the most significant decisions a learning organization will make.  The LMS will be the central location users will to access training for years. Since it is a new year, I decided to list the five most basic components that all Learning Management Systems should support for me to even consider them.

1. SCORM compliance.  There was a time when every LMS had its own proprietary course format, but those days are over and if you encounter a system that doesn’t support SCORM, you should look elsewhere.  It should, at minimum, be SCORM 1.2 compliant and be listed on the Advanced Distributed Learning site (http://www.adlnet.gov).
2. Data import utilities and bulk actions.  When you have more than (say) a hundred users, it is extremely time-consuming and expensive to maintain the system using only an administrative web interface.  Most systems will have a way to do an initial data import of users and transcript history, but, at some point, it is inevitable that you will need to make a change for a large number of users (or courses).  If the system doesn’t support the ability to make bulk changes through the web interface or an accessible API, you will regret not making this a requirement.
3. Customizable reports.  Getting access to data is one of the most important functionalities of an LMS, and yet many systems do not have the ability for administrators to easily create custom reports.  Even if you think you only need course completions and scores now, those requirements could easily change down the road, and then you will need to pay to get that functionality added to your system (often an expensive proposition).  Whether it is creating reports directly against the database or using a web-based WYSIWIG report engine, it is essential to have the ability to get the data that you need when you need it.
4. Reliable and responsive Support.  System support is essential to an LMS’ success, and yet enterprise-level solutions are notorious for having horrible system support.  They may solve an issue, but it often takes weeks and numerous meetings to get any momentum.  This can be more than a little frustrating when you need to spend hours creating hacky customizations just to make the system work the way it should. So, make sure that any vendor does more than just pay lip service to supporting their product.  
5. Cost-appropriate features.  Learning systems can have a wide assortment of features.  They can include special assessment and analytic tools, synchronous meeting integrations, competency management, asset management, wikis, forums, et cetera.  Often these features were built to fit a specific client’s requirements and then folded into the base offering, rather than having been designed as part of a comprehensive product “road map”; still, LMS vendors can justify a high base price because of all the included features.  Once you have an understanding of the features that you will use, make sure that you are not paying for all the ones that you do won’t.
   

This clearly is not a comprehensive list of what I look at when I am selecting an LMS vendor, but if the system doesn’t meet these requirements, I look elsewhere.