Sunday, May 27, 2007

Evaluating a Learning Management System

When you begin to evaluate learning management systems remember to look for high availability, usability, scalability, interoperability, stability and security. Let’s quickly examine each of these issues and why they are critical to the function of any enterprise management system.

High availability: The LMS must be robust enough to serve the diverse needs of thousands of learners, administrators, content builders and instructors simultaneously.

Scalability: The infrastructure should be able to expand or scaleto meet future growth, both in terms of the volume of instruction and the size of the student body. It must also offer the ability for custom features to be added for your needs.

Usability: To support a host of automated and personalized services, such as self-paced and role-specific learning, the access, delivery and presentation of material must be easy-to-use and highly intuitive like surfing on the Web or shopping on Amazon.com.

Interoperability: To support content from different sources and multiple vendors’ hardware/software solutions, the LMS should be based on open industry standards for Web deployments (XML, SOAP or AQ) and support the major learning standards (SCORM).

Stability: The LMS infrastructure can reliably and effectively manage a large enterprise implementation running 24x7.

Security: As with any outward-facing collaborative solution, the LMS can selectively limit and control access to online content, resources and back-end functions, both internally and externally, for its diverse user community.

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