There are times when it’s no fun being right. When you see intelligent, capable people unnecessarily fall into a disaster, while you are on the sidelines and unable to prevent it or help in any way, the fact that you were able to accurately predict the outcome isn’t particularly satisfying.
- Selecting, Integrating, and Extending Learning Management Systems
- Selecting, Integrating, and Extending Learning Management Systems, Part 2
This situation befell a customer Camille was working with several years ago. The customer brought in a consultant to help select a Learning Management System (LMS). This consultant had been involved for more than a year, with over one million dollars invested, and there was still neither a LMS selected nor a single line of custom code written. The director of the department was asked to resign. The Vice President of Human Resources was “reassigned” to another job with no managerial responsibilities. A third of the department either quit or transferred to positions outside the department. All of this happened because the customer tried to implement a LMS without following a systematic and concrete process.
We, your authors, work together at C.R. England. Camille has been a participant in the development, implementation, and integration of LMSs for 10 of the 20 years that she has been in technology-based training. In the last two or three years she has been the person primarily responsible for selecting, implementing, and integrating a LMS. Amy is a Management Information Specialist by training. Through our experience, we have developed a very concrete method and approach (a “road map,” if you will) for this process.
The core of this approach is the development of a process data map (PDM) — a snapshot of the business process that supports learning management at C.R. England. While this is not necessarily the first step in the LMS selection and implementation process, we have found that documenting critical processes with these maps makes the difference between a successful experience and a nightmare.
We will present our approach in two articles in Learning Solutions Magazine. This article discusses the LMS selection process. You may already be familiar with parts of this process. A lot has been written about identifying stakeholders, setting key objectives, and handling other aspects of choosing a LMS vendor. This article also discusses how to use your PDMs to select from among a handful of finalist vendors that you’re considering, and how applying PDMs at that stage in the process can make a significant difference in the vendor that you select.
The second article, which will appear in Learning Solutions Magazine next month, focuses on the use of PDMs in the integration and implementation process as a guide and a link between yourself and your Information Systems group. PDMs can also be used as a guide to preparing other documentation for integrators or developers of middleware. This is important because middleware may be needed to make the implementation successful in supporting all of the learning functions in your organization.
First, decide who’s in charge
But before we get into the steps and the “why’s” and “wherefores,” let’s discuss two of the most important things we’ve learned over the past few years. First, the manager or instructional professional in charge of creating, selecting and implementing the LMS must be very involved in the nitty gritty details. Even if you bring in a consultant, you need to know and understand that you are in charge of the process The consultant works for you and under your direction, as opposed to being the one in control of the selection and implementation process. The consultant is accountable for specific deliverables and must follow the road map that you have set up. But if you’re going to be successful, you must be into the detail. You can’t delegate it to a junior level person or any other part of the organization. Committees can be used in an advisory capacity, but you must be responsible for the day-to-day progress. There’s no way to get around it if you’re going to have a system that truly meets your organization’s needs. There should be one or two people who are the kingpins that hold all of this information together.
The second thing that we’ve learned is that instructional designers DO have the necessary skillset to do this. We may think that we’re not left brained, but if we’ve designed flow charts, storyboards and screen interfaces, or done task analysis and needs assessment, we can direct the selection, integration, and implementation of a LMS. Know that there will be times that the ambiguity of it all will stretch your sanity, but trust yourself to have the skills to bring order from chaos because that’s what instructional designers and multimedia training developers do.
So, if you trust yourself, if you look at the skills that you have, take the responsibility and “own” the project, you can, by using the process outlined in these articles, have a successful LMS selection and implementation!
Learn from different models
Like most instructional design projects, the process of selecting, integrating and extending a LMS, although it may follow a linear step-by-step scenario, is in reality an elaborative process. In other words, you will go through a process at one level of detail and then go through a similar process at a finer level of detail and then through the process again and again at increasing levels of detail.
Elaboration and LMS selection: Overview
Figure 1 illustrates how LMS selection is an elaborative process, involving four phases. The first phase, where you select an initial slate of LMS software candidates, is merely the core, or the beginning of the cycle. In the next phase, you repeat some of the same questions and the same process, but at the end you will have chosen the final software vendor (or vendors). You’re just adding additional levels of detail. After you have selected your final software vendor(s) you look again, as you design your integration documents in an even greater level of detail, at the learning delivery process you’re trying to support. Finally, the last layer is where you would make alpha and beta testing revisions.
Figure 1 LMS selection, integration, and extension are supported by an iterative process.
An elaborative process, one that loops through and builds to greater levels of detail, makes life a little easier. You must understand that you’re going to have to go back and revisit things throughout the process. If you feel like you’re going in circles, it’s because you are. But each time you go around that circle, you get additional levels of detail and refinement.
As you are about to see, iteration is an important feature of many development process models. The problem may be that often the diagrams used to explain the models do not include the iterative bits. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Some familiar development models
There are many “life cycle” models, based on general systems theory or problem-solving paradigms, and these models tend to look a lot alike. Using these models requires a certain amount of discipline. Each project is, by definition, a different problem, and requires a unique solution. There aren’t any shortcuts, and we recommend that you beware of templates and “rapid development” models that attempt to take such shortcuts.
A development model that most instructional designers are familiar with is usually referred to simply as “ADDIE.” (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2 Two systematic development models
You would go through the steps in this model while in the proof of concept phase, again in the integration phase, and then again in the alpha and beta test phases. Once again, it’s elaborative. ADDIE provides an excellent perspective, even though currently there is a trend to devalue it, along with all versions of the formal Instructional Systems Design (ISD) process. Alternatives usually suggest using templates or abbreviated instructional processes that leave the learner to fill in the gaps.
A similar model comes out of the software engineering world (refer to Figure 2 again). The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) guides many software development efforts. Just as with ADDIE, the trend in many organizations is to try to cut corners.
Because selecting and integrating a LMS is in many ways a systems development process, it makes a lot of sense to view LMS projects in terms of such models. But each organization has unique needs and configurations, so LMS integrations CANNOT be heavily templated nor can end-users be expected to fill in detail. We need to look at each LMS initiative as a custom project. ADDIE, traditional ISD, and the systems development model can be valuable aids to understanding how to select, integrate, and extend a learning management system.
The LMS selection, integration, and extension process
By incorporating elements from the two process models just described, plus elaboration cycles, we have created a nine-step road map that guides LMS implementation initiatives. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3 The LMS selection, integration, and extension process
When you get right down to it, this process really isn’t such a mystery. We may not know the exact twists and turns on the road, but we know the general direction and, as multimedia producers, we’ve spent a lot of time on similar paths.
In this article, we will talk about the five blue boxes that begin this road map. These parts of the process will help identify the needs within the organization, the scope of the implementation, and the general features desired. The next article will address the last four steps of the process, shown in the last four boxes.
There are many articles that deal with the “basic blue” issues. These basic steps are just the kernel, the core, the starting place for LMS selection and implementation. One of the things that we discovered as we got into this process is that this is where most articles and presentations on LMS selection stop. But in reality, this is where the process is just getting started.
