Standards are a tough thing to moderate. The most difficult part, I suspect, is getting enough people and
industry leaders behind the ideas your proposed standards espouse.
Fortunately, in the word of
learning content development providers and
LMS management, these standards are more or less already in place for us! SCORM 1.2, AICC and SCORM 2.4 are the industry standard for LMS platforms. These standards promote interoperability, accessibility, adaptability, affordablity, durability and re-usability.
All of this is great, but what I want to focus on today is
interoperability. This means, that content created via the standards mentioned above, should also work on any system that uses the same standards.
KMi takes this to heart. Yes - beyond providing a
world class LMS, KMi also provides
incredible content creation services. But we recognize that sometimes, our services for custom courses, isn't exactly what your company wants or needs. Sometimes, all you need is a generic course about burn treatment or general
netiquette. In these instances, a third party,
bulk (versus custom) content provider, such as Skillsoft, is all you really need.
How then, can you take Skillsoft's courses (and I don't mean to favor Skillsoft as there are lots of generic content providers, Skillsoft is simply one of the largets) and list them in your eLMS implementation? Easy! Interoperability!
Because
KMi takes the industry standards to heart, when we developer and enhance
our LMS, we take care to ensure these practices are included. This means, that courses purchased from an external provider, will
easily work in
KMi's eLMS. We exploit the idea of interoperability to increase the value eLMS can provide by listing and hosting any content created to the AICC or SCORM standard - ultimately,
saving you and your company money and time.
On top of all that (and this is really just an added bonus), many systems will require that you individually upload the 100 courses you just purchased from an external provider. Not
KMi! We provide an admin accessible bulk upload interface. In fact, later this week, I'll be uploading, to
KMi's eLMS, 60+ courses that were purchased from an external provider. Because these courses are AICC, I know
KMi's eLMS will handle them and with the bulk upload tool we provide, it won't take more than a few minutes to add many times more hours of new learning to
this client's instance of eLMS!
P.S. I'm happy to be back on the blogging track! Look for more eLMS on the Ground posts to come!