As more and more companies and educational institutions move towards an electronic, hybrid, or distance learning model for delivering information media to their learners they run into the issue of how to select the right system to fit their needs. There are hundreds of Learning Management Systems (LMS) on the market today, each with a particular range of features and functionality in relation to price. In order for a company to achieve the highest efficiency possible from their LMS, they first need to clearly identify what their learning objectives are. From there, the company can narrow down their selection before moving into the acquisition of the product.
In the blog article by Godfrey Parkin entitled “The LMS selection process in a nutshell” (Parkin, 2005), he states that the intuition needs to form a selection team made up of all parties who will be involved with the use and implementation of the LMS. This includes information technology staff, content creation managers, and perhaps an outside consultant. This team must identify what they want the LMS to do, how they plan to integrate it, and who will manage the system once it is implemented. Parkins suggests that the team form a list of “critical success factors” (2005), or the features that absolutely need to be available in order for the system to be an effective solution for the companies training needs. These could include compatibility with human resource management systems, or other legacy systems that the company has in place. Other factors may be the need for a multilingual system, assessment and tracking needs, the need for content compliancy across multiple platforms, point-of-sale or monetary management functionality, hosted or in-house system administration, as well as system support needs.
The next step for the team is to request information from LMS vendors and create a list of systems that meet all of their critical success needs. If the team has several systems that meet their critical needs, they can begin to further narrow the list based on additional features or price factors. Once the team has a handful of potential systems that meet all of their needs, they can contact representatives from each of the LMS companies for demonstrations on the software. The LMS selection team can then start evaluating each system from the perspectives of the LMS administration, support-staff, and the end-user. This will allow the team to see the performance of such a system in practical scenarios, and the software vendor can illustrate how their system can meet the prospective buyer’s needs.
This leads to the stage where the selection team must create a Request for Proposal (RFP). The RFP is a document designed to alert the service vendor to the needs of the proposing company. The RFP should establish all of the constructs that the software vendor must meet to be considered. These include the project’s scope, functionality requirements based on critical needs, other desirable features, proposed budget, and the projects time-line. This way the service vendor can prepare a portfolio containing the features, functionalities, and prices of a system that will fit the proposing company critical needs. Once the selection team has received proposals from all of the vendors they sent the RFP to, they should have enough information to distinguish their top three picks.
Now the team can further research each of the top three systems by having their users try out each system, and provide the team with feedback of their concerns. The team can also request that other companies write a recommendation on their satisfaction with the particular system. The team can often negotiate with the vendors in order to achieve the best price in relation to the competition. At this point the team should be armed with all of the information they need to make their decision. Now they can install the system and begin the implementation process.
Parkin, G. (2005, April 30). The LMS selection process in a nutshell. Parkin’s Lot. Retrieved from http://parkinslot.blogspot.com/2005/04/lms-selection-process-in-nutshell.html
Justin,
ReplyDeleteI think you really hit on a great point when you quoted Godfrey Parkin's 2005 statement that institutions should look for "critical success factors". Considering how complex these systems can be, it is again important for organizations looking to deploy such a system to really examine what functionalities would be most important.
As I've watched two institutions go through this process (from the sidelines mind you), it was quite often that each time a new LMS or CMS was discovered, someone on the search committee would exclaim, "This one does everything".
I think if we read the marketing and product literature from any of these vendors, we'd be awed at the power of their technology and the accessibility afforded by their proprietary platform. However, from my personal experience in the software world, while lots of products do a variety of chores quite well, within the audio spectrum at least, each of the main products available actually excels at only a few specific feature sets. Choosing a software based recording platform has nothing to do with which product is "best", but rather, which one is going to best suit your needs?
In that respect, you've really synthesized the process that someone or some group should undergo in order to find the most appropriate platforms that best meets their immediate needs. And, you very aptly pointed out that experimenting and using the products is a critical step that I think can often be overlooked. While some hold the perspective that "software is software", there really are significant differences in how different products function and interact at the user interface level.
Well done.