I read recently that the symbol Rx on every prescription dates back 5,000 years, to its use by ancient Egyptian pharmacists. What a strange thing it would be to work in an industry that has the marks of such a deep history!

By comparison, the web based eLearning market is absolutely new. It's about fifteen years old, in fact, as electronic and video learning migrated to the world wide web. Here at KMi, our roots were planted deep in these early efforts to put high-quality training on a convenient medium. 

In the past nine years of eLMS development, most of our features have been driven by client demand (and necessity!). For example: SCORM 1.2 and AICC compliance, sophisticated conference and live-event management, and our powerful assessment and survey tool were motivated by particular needs. 

But we realized that model, while it has made the eLMS very useful for a very diverse collection of users, will only keep us up-to-date. Our customers will always have excellent ideas, but we resolved to also look beyond the demand of the moment and make the eLMS the most versatile and adaptable online training system in the market. 

We may not make a mark that will last 5000 years, but we've been working on some good ideas. On this page we will be talking about some recent eLMS development - such as the Survey and Assessment tools. Just as important, though, we will give you a peek into the projects in progress (such as integrated blogging and RSS feeds). We will even discuss some that are still on the drawing board (mobile access, SCORM 2004 compliance, and many more).

You online learning platform has learners. It has content experts, administrators or various kinds, course providers...Who are all these people? 

Once upon a time, it didn't matter. You were using a very simple LMS. Your users got a link to a course, they took it, and they were finished. But the eLMS is different. If those platforms are 98-pound weaklings, the eLMS is a well-trained athlete. We've added features for interaction, like onsite blogging. Other projects in the works create blog space for easy communication between subject experts and learners. We're also integrating the eLMS to social networks like Facebook. And we have more ideas up our sleeves - ideas that will make the eLMS a learning community.

The problem is, if every user is anonymous, it isn't much of a community.

The solution, to us, is obvious: allow sophisticated user profiles for all the folks in the learning community. You can allow users, experts, and admins to add detail about themselves: their experience, qualifications, brief bios, and even photos. User profiles are optional, of course (your choice!), and the amount of information shared is up to you. This feature can be adapted perfectly to your privacy requirements, since we know every customer has a unique balance to strike between nifty features and privacy.

The advantages? The site features will be more personal. When implementing LMS features, we want to help bind your learners to the site with something more than just the raw content of the courses. A community is always a more interesting place to learn. And discussions flow more freely when the people talking have some sense of identity, and personality.

It also enhances the credibility of your experts and course providers. Book publishers have done this with dust jackets for generations: giving a photo and a short bio of the author. It lend credence to the author, and creates a familiarity that disposes one to take the person seriously - as an authority.

Online learning solutions have come a long way since the days of popping a CD into a dedicated computer, and printing out a report after the course was finished. You'll not only offer training, but you'll build a learning community that will multiply the value of your investment in courses. If you have any questions making the eLMS the best learning management system for your learners, contact us for a demonstration.

This month we released a handy dashboard tool. It gives you a nice snapshot of interesting metrics about your learners and their activity on the LMS. Our principle is: when implementing eLearning, you must have a simple, overall view of what's going on. You need to track your investment.

So we built a nice dashboard. But there is alwaysroom for improvement. How do we make a good thing better? We don't want to stand still - we're improving the tool already. In the next couple of months we'll strengthen and polish it with some additional features:

• More Metrics - user and registration information were a good start. Now we're adding a third tab of data: course evaluation responses. Every time your learner finishes a course, he fills out an eval. Soon on the dashboard: for each eval question, you'll see the number of responses, and the average score.
   
• Attribute Breakdown - right now you can see your metrics, like Number of completed course hours. You can filter by custom user attributes (like Region, Business Unit, Job Grade...). But soon we'll let you break down the total of each metric across all possible attribute values. You might have 830 completed hours, with 223 in North America, 301 in Europe, 151 in Australia....
   
• Drill-Down Detail - if you have a dashboard metric of 830 completed course hours, why not put a little icon next to it which opens up a chart of details? (which courses, for whom, and when...) This is a sensible marriage of a simple dashboard together with more details on the items that interest you.

These are some of the features we'll be adding to enhance the eLMS online learning platform. When you offer customized eLearning, you need dashboard tools like this to see, at a glance, how the project is going. By adding the course evaluation metric, you can also get a quick view of your learners' reaction to the material. 

Enhancing the dashboard is another way we're turning the eLMS into the best learning management system available. If you'd like to talk about its features, or test drive the product itself, contact us!

Your information is all over the place. You know things are happening.. you think things are happening.. but you can't really be sure without spending a lot of time looking and asking questions.

When you are in charge of implementing eLearning, you might spend a lot of time getting the course content ready for your users. But after all that is done.. how do you know what happens? KMi helps you measure your investment. Your LMS management begins with nice reporting. We offer more than thirty pre-written reports and exports, as well as a flexible ad-hoc system for creating your own. It's a powerful suite! 
  
But we also want to give you something simpler — to put all the information you want on one panel. This month we're releasing the first version of our client dashboard. It is a collection of useful metrics summarizing the activity on your eLearning platform. When you go to the page, you see thirteen metrics. They answer the questions you need to know, all in one chart: 

• Are my users accessing the learning?
• How many courses and hours of training are completed?
• How many in progress?
• What are the averages across users?

If you want to filter by user group, by start and end date, if you want to filter by user attributes (that you can define yourself!) ... the dashboard panel lets you do it, all on the same panel. This way you can tweak the parameters and fine-tune your view until you have exactly what you need. Click a button, and you can export to PDF, Excel, or Html.

1. Convenience — this information is available on the reports.. but its spread out over a lot of reports. Here you have the important conclusions, summarized in one place.
    
2. Comparisons — with the filters on the same panel, you can compare groups and time ranges against each other easily. Experimenting with the parameters, you can see which strategies work: are the nifty courses you released in February attracting users? Do you see an uptick in 'in progress' or 'completions' when you send out reminders or announce incentives for learners?
    
3. Simplicity — a lesser online education platform will have you exporting your data to an expensive stand-alone dashboard and analysis program. Ours is built right in, and perfectly adapted to track your investment in eLearning
    

You have two great tools: eLMS and Adobe Connect. Each is a first-class online learning platform. But they have two different purposes. 

The eLMS can do many, many useful things for you. It can host both online content and 'live events'. Those can be anything from full multi-session conferences to a single one-time meeting. But you can't actually hold your conference on the eLMS. It needs a complementary technology

Adobe Connect is a terrific tool to host online seminars and conferences. We've been recommending it to clients for years. It's an excellent balance of simplicity, intuitiveness, and a full range of functionality. It can even be used to create simple media-rich courses. But Adobe Connect is at heart an online workspace and presentation tool. It's not an LMS. 

For a long time, we've bridged the two applications manually. We'd created a web conference course record on the eLMS - a type of live event course. When it was time for the seminar to begin, users would have to switch to the other application. It worked okay. But the biggest problem was tracking. How would the eLMS know a user showed up to the seminar, and should be marked as 'completed'? We had to rely on admins keeping records, and clicking each user afterwards...bleagh.

Our solution was to create a seamless integration between eLMS and Adobe Connect. An eLMS admin creates a session, and it automatically appears in Connect. When the proper time comes, a user clicks a link in the eLMS, and he is logged into the Connect session, with his user information (such as name). When the Connect session is over, the eLMS knows which users showed up and whether they stayed to the end. It marks them as 'complete' or assigns them a post-assessment (it is your option). 

This integration can add a lot of value to your web based eLearning. It takes the confusion, disconnection, and tedious manual administration out of connecting the tools. When you want to offer customized eLearning to your people through web conferencing, you don't want to get hung up on implementation... you just want it to work. That's our ethos at KMi - when we promise you the best learning management system, we give you the features you need, and banish the tedium that's so long been a part of the training process.

In the future, we'll be looking at integrations to other web conference software, such as GoToMeeting and WebEx. If any of this interests you, and you'd like to hear more about our plans, drop us a note!

Why should there be limits on what online content you can add to your LMS? 

You want a powerful online learning platform. And you don't want to be told what we can't do to help you. So we've been thinking ahead, beyond what clients are asking for right now, to anticipate what you might need in the future.

So, what happens if you have some AICC** courses you want to add to the site? We could recommend you convert them to SCORM. The eLMS, after all, is a terrific SCORM platform. But... sometimes that can't be done. You might not have access to the source files. They might belong to somebody else, and you only have a license to use them, not to modify. And why should you have to use SCORM, anyway? AICC is just as good!

Here is a real-world example. You might want to mix some Skillsoft content with the courses we build for you. Skillsoft provides their courses in AICC and in SCORM. But - choosing the AICC option is a better long-term choice. Why? Because every time they update the course, your users will get that latest version, directly from their servers. SCORM, by contrast, must be sent on a disk and loaded locally on the eLMS. 

Early in 2010, the eLMS will be able to launch AICC content. It will be as easy to link to AICC as it is to any other kind of course. You'll be able to launch AICC courses on a remote site (like with Skillsoft), or AICC content you add to the eLMS itself.

At KMi, we don't want to tell you about limitations. We want to give you every useful tool, and ensure the eLMS is the best Learning Management System for your needs.



** In case you're not familiar with AICC and SCORM - they are industry standard specs for online content. AICC, however, often resides on a remote server, while SCORM courses must be loaded directly into your LMS.

Computers have a hard time talking to each other. Humans speak thousands of languages and dialects, and so do our IT systems. Considering how often people misunderstand each other, even using the same language, it isn't surprising that computers find it challenging.
 
When implementing eLearning, we face this problem, because your learners and their data are already on other servers. Some examples... sometimes you want to send your users to our site without making them login, and then you may want their training history moved back to your site. Maybe your HR department wants to track online compliance courses, or some other online training solutions. Reporting on it on our site is great (and I mean great! ask for a tour!) but there are times where our computer needs to talk directly with your computers.

Over the years we tried a few solutions. It seems like the dumbest one is also the most popular. That is: the exchange of flat data files over ftp. By 'dumb' I don't (just) mean it's a bad choice, but also that such an integration is by nature brittle. It's prone to failure. What if the ftp is down? Okay, write a bunch of code to keep trying, and notify of the failure. What if the file generates errors when parsed? Write some more code to trap errors and send notifications to developers... This is 2009, and we have better tools! So, while we'll do this with a client, our preference is to approach ftp-file exchange like a doctor approaches an outbreak of the plague.

We unified most of our integrations into a common integration interface using a better technology: web services, with SOAP and XML. This interface is easy to program. It's intelligent enough to deal with problems. It has well-defined data types. It's defined in a cute, simple XML document called a WSDL**. Of all the eLearning development tools we've used, this is the easiest to put together, and simplest to maintain.

Our web services API currently allows a client to retrieve this kind of information: their users, course portfolio, and course registration history. We're now extending it to allow a client to add and edit their user data.  This will make user account maintenance a breeze. We're also making more information available on the API, such as login activity and the results of our Survey and Assessment tools.

Don't spread the FTP/flat file plague... hook yourself up with eLMS web services!


** Say "wizz-dill", shout "WIZZZDILL!!", entertain your friends and family... much better that whining "EffTeePeeeee".