What's in a Name for Your LMS?

What you must know before you plan

Change is on the immediate horizon. And many in your organization are still wedded to what works in their neck of the woods. If you have not detailed your goals with the LMS, you will need to do so now. Describe those outcomes so your team can see the bigger picture. Understand exactly what you want your course naming convention to accomplish.

• What types of distance education will you add to existing instructor-led sessions?
• What are your performance standards for the LMS?
• What are the plans for providing information to employees or customers in an efficient manner, and for gaining their participation?
• What is your knowledge management strategy? Do learners need to meet mandatory training requirements regardless of the delivery type?
• Will all online training be tracked using SCORM or AICC standards? Are there other types of synchronous learning that will take place?

Collect-ahead information checklist

This checklist gives you the details of what to collect before building your first draft of a naming convention.

• Find descriptions of current naming conventions.
• Find logic behind current naming conventions and use of any abbreviations.
• Identify new forms of learning activities and reasons for distinguishing these from traditional classroom training.
• List needs to distinguish funding sources, course ownership, course location, fiscal year, etc.
• Detail the reports necessary for tracking training activities.
• Identify stakeholders in current and future training activities – these should include departments that create courses, administrators that handle enrollments, and individuals responsible for reporting.
• Find out LMS limits and parameters such as the number of characters allowed in a course name field and the architecture for courses – event, track, session, etc.
• If the enrollment and registration process will change, detail the changes.
• List the identifiers critical to your organization – dates, locations, account numbers, course categories, fiscal or calendar year, instructor names, department ownership, etc.

Build the naming convention model

If you haven’t done so already, you must now involve your project team. If you've used the checklist in the previous section, you have most of the information you will require. But here are a couple of ideas for how to select the pieces that go into the naming string.

By now, you should have established the total number of characters your LMS name field will allow. (See Figure 1.) One option is to give each different kind of course a prefix that allows you to distinguish it for the purposes of ownership or reporting. This prefix should be limited to three or four characters at most because it may not mean anything to a learner viewing the course name in a catalog.

Figure 1 Constructing a course naming string

For example, those first few characters could represent a division, department, or bureau within your organization. Or these characters could represent a fiscal year or funding account number. Remember that this prefix is a critical course identifier that no course name can be without. The prefix should contain distinguishing information that you can use for sorting in reports you compile from the LMS.

Another option is to make sure the first or second prefix of your naming string identifies all the courses that belong on a single catalog page or library, with a series of letters. These letters can represent the topic area of the class or a class category. For example, use LD for Leadership Development or CS for customer Service. This sort of prefix is especially handy if you may need to report course completions by category.

Once you have selected one or two prefixes, do the necessary math. Subtract the number of prefix characters from the total number of name field characters allowed by your LMS. The remainder is what you can use for the true course name, less suffixes.

The true course name, the one all learners should recognize, must be made of short descriptive words. There’s no need to be lengthy or elaborate. The actual course name is crucial because it is where learners are likely to stop reading if you don’t provide them with sufficient reason to say, “Aha! That’s exactly the course I’m looking for.”

If you have space for any suffixes, use it wisely. Maybe your old system used numbers that some of your stakeholders can’t live without, so add these here. If you need to distinguish traditional classroom training from online courses, a suffix could also be a classroom session start date.

This linear approach, putting key prefixes before the true course name, is only one way of building the model. These ideas aren’t necessary for the naming convention to work, of course – they’re just to help you to the starting line.

As final reminders, watch your use of capitalization and avoid use of spaces in your naming string. LMS software may be case sensitive when it employs search features. Spaces are bad medicine when combined with certain software. Some programs may not be able to locate the correct file if you’ve used spaces in the name. Find out what your LMS permits rather than risking failed transactions.

You get what you test

Calling it as you see it may not always work. There are several ways to approach testing your naming convention. But most importantly, do test.

Your organization and culture are unique. When you test, you will learn nasty little secrets about your LMS that no one ever explained to you previously. Most of these revelations will not be show-stoppers – they won't keep your implementation from going forward. But what you learn will help you plan workarounds and reframe disadvantages into pluses.

There are many good reasons to rush to your “go live” date. But do take all possible time to test. Many organizations, after they have gone live with their LMS and naming convention, express regret that they didn’t have time for more testing.

Track and test your course name results continually. Modify key elements and eliminate, as quickly as possible, what’s not working. When the naming convention is right, the testing phase will draw to a close.

If you are lucky enough to have a test environment, such as a mirror image of your production LMS, by all means use this for testing. On a test or sub-learning center site you should be able to create test user accounts. Use these accounts to try all possible transactions on the system and to view new course content.

But if you have no test area for your LMS, you can still identify willing test users. Graduate your rollout and have your testers access and use the LMS be fore the real go-live date. Use feedback from your administrators and testers to further modify your naming convention.

If you create test user accounts, recovery from name string modifications is easier. Because the key is flexibility, no naming convention stays static until it meets your business goals.

Your test is only as accurate as you make it. To find out what’s in a name and how your LMS handles that name, include the following test procedures.

• Try the entire course enrollment process. Start with the learner selecting a course and registering.
• Review the course name as it appears on a Web site or in an e-mail message to confirm enrollment status for the learner.
• Have an administrator test changes to a class loaded on your LMS, and have that person generate a class roster. The administrator should find the course on the system using the course naming convention.
• If you have the ability to push out courses and to assign mandatory learning events, test this process as well. See how the course assignment name displays.
• Review how the course name appears in any automated communication concerning class enrollments.
• Run reports off the LMS using the course naming convention in the report parameters. Check enrollment reports, completion reports, grade books, and reports by user or category.

Don’t be tempted to skip this last step. Everyone seems to struggle with agreeing to a naming convention on the front end. But it’s not just what you put into the system, it’s what you get out as well that counts.

How can you make it easy moving forward?

Try these plan-ahead strategies.

• Plot several months of traditional courses as well as distance education classes using the new naming convention.
• Trim or modify existing courses to see how the new naming convention fits.
• Write out the naming convention, or use a visual to include in style guides or procedural manuals. If it helps administrators, use a table, chart, or graphic to compare the old and new versions of the course names.(See Sidebar 2.)
• If you lack the time for upfront testing, graduate the rollout of your LMS to include only some employee populations or only some courses. This way you can tweak your naming convention to make it usable in the long haul.
• For large organizations with multiple administrators, control the point where you add to the course names, or publish them in the LMS catalog.
• Reward administrators who consistently follow the course naming convention. If you have built a solid foundation with quality training and effective enrollment processes, your course naming convention should be icing on the cake. You have many issues yet to tackle such as getting the word out and the visitors in. Let your course names lead the way so your users can access great content on your LMS.

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