tarynshae

A Learner Management System (LMS) is essentially a high level strategic solution for planing, delivering and managing the learning events of an organisation. Learning events includes face-to-face and instructor led classroom learning as well as e-learning and virtual classroom learning. The main aim of an LMS is to track and monitor performance and training levels throughout an organisation e.g. tracking attendance, monitoring competency and booking training activities. The main focus of an LMS is to manage learners and to keep track of their progess and performance across all types of learning activities. An LMS is mainly administrative focus and is not used to create course and learning content.

A Learning Content Management System (LCMS) is alternatively focussed on learning content by providing the means to create e-learning content efficiently and effectively. The main aim of an LCMS is to create content to meet the needs of learners when they need it. It generally contains reusable chunks of training information and learning content. The fact that it duplicates this information means that it can be output much quicker.

While my current organisation does not use an LMS or LCMS and does not, in my belief, need one at this point in time, my previous organisation had recently launched an LMS using the SAP system. It was long overdue and was many years in the planning. The main aim of its introduction was to give users more control over their own learning by allowing them to search for and book their own learning activities and find and complete online training courses. For back end users, the LMS gave us much greater control and tracking capabilities and also allows much more scope for reporting. Training attendance could be monitored and recorded much more easily and all information relating to training could be stored in the one repository, as opposed to many locations such as spreadsheets and physical attendance registers. The LMS that was introduced definitely met the needs of the organisation, however further development and capability was definitely needed in the Phase 2 introduction. I have had no experience with an LCMS in any organisational context and cannot see its relevance or need at this point in time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under eLearning Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.