Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton-Jan

CIL2010: LMS: What’s Out There & How to Decide

The hashtag for the session is #lms if you want to follow what was said on Twitter about the session.

Lori Reed started the session. Lori works for the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County and needed to find a way to provide online training and manage overall learning for her library’s staff. Lori’s current LMS was working fairly well, but did not include eLearning. You could look at the roster all printed out. There is a centralized number that people can call to cancel if they’re unable to attend. They have mandatory customer service training and Lori can run a report to see who has and has not attended.

They decided to move from an LMS (Learning Management System) to an LCMS (Learning Content Management System) called Luminex. An LCMS allows you to reuse content. It lets learning developers crate, store, reuse, and manage. It lets you deliver small units of learning content and assets called learning objects. The system provides a WYSIWYG editor letting you develop content, images, text, allow comments, and organize the class in a hierarchical manner.

To implement an LMS or LCMS, develop a team. Start by talking with IT & the other stakeholders. Talk to the target audience for your learning – what do they want? Narrow your focus, conduct research, and contact vendors. You’ll most likely need to prep an RFP, select finalists, hold demos, test systems over and over, negotiate for pricing and terms, and make a final selection. You will need to decide what your goals are — are you wanting to provide eLearning or just track training? Make sure that you have a valid “business case” that you can present to managers. Decide what your must-have items are: a portal, branding, mobile options, adaptive, assessments, or the ability to create your own content. Find out if IT can host and support your project or if you need to pay for outside hosting. Lori recommends that people who need info about learning systems should join the ALA Learning Roundtable listserv (you don’t need to be a member to join).
Mistakes not to make:

• Don’t underestimate the politics involved
• Keep the steps in the process straight
• Don’t underestimate the resources needed to run an LMS
• Don’t confuse content authoring tool selection with LMS selection
• Involve stakeholders early in the decision
• Fully test the product in the learner environment — not just “your computer”

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Chad Mairn then presented on some of the techie things you can do to make your class pages in the LMS more interactive and interesting for the learners.

Conduct a search for content, which builds a feed for that search with Feed2JS, then copy the RSS URL into a website so people can see what’s new in a particular field or subject. A lot of LMSs allow for search alerts too.

If you have a specific resource you want to link to, make sure that you copy the persistent link (usually somewhere on the webpage itself), and add the link to the online course.

Include Meebo widgets in your LMS class pages too.

With a mashup, you can use Yahoo Pipes to combine several different feeds into one RSS-generated display.

Create generic course accounts in different database vendors. Then he saves a list of articles & resources for that particular course, and gives the log-in information to students so they can log-in and automatically see that resources list.

Add a proactive chat window that pops up on any webpage after a set amount of time (e.g. 60 seconds). They use their statewide virtual reference system for this.

Provide multiple contact points: Google Voice, Skype, Google Talk, Twitter DM, Meebo, Vivox Voice on Facebook.

Use computer/desktop sharing!@ Use web-based software like Yuuguu or LogMeIn Express to screen-share and control a student desktop. On your end you log in and create a session, then give the session URL to the student to click on to start the session.

Create screencasts with tools like Screentoaster, Jing, Screencast-o-matic, CaptureFox (a Firefox add-on).

Chad’s library uses Angel, which was just bought out by Blackboard. His library also uses LibGuides.

In any LMS, you can request to be an authenticated guest in a course.

Chad recommends creating a library repository which includes course e-reserves.

Someone asked about using Moodle and Lori answered that Moodle does have to be installed on a server. She used the library’s GoDaddy account, which has a one-click installation for Moodle and gives you a log-in and password to start with. But with Moodle you have to build the LMS from the ground up – there’s no automatic shell yet.

cil2010, computers in libraries