If your company does not have a technology backbone strategy in place for systems—one Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for all needs—then an integration project will be necessary.
A complete solution must be considered to ensure success. A complementary and diverse combination of resources with systems-expertise and project management is required, as no individual or team can create the entire product or solution in isolation. Many sub-project efforts may be required, with a comprehensive plan to link all of the sub-projects into the final architecture.
Understanding your organization's needs from a functional perspective will drive the e-learning architecture you put in place. To assure that your functional capabilities meet current and future needs, it is important to actually capture your understanding of these requirements in a detailed requirements document. It is critical to gain input and agreement on these requirements from the CLO level to the system administrator level. There are several areas to address in functional requirements definition, including, but not limited to: user experience, tracking and reporting requirements (see Chapter 6), organization structure, complexity of learning offerings, and accessibility.
This is an area that can easily be overlooked or delayed as you focus on systems implementation, but this is definitely not the approach to take for a successful implementation. It is essential to define your learning processes in the areas of demand forecasting, logistics management, learning management, and financial management. It is also critical to determine roles and responsibilities as you look at each of the newly defined processes.
Examples of process questions to ask include:
Are learners able to self-select learning, or is it management directed?
What is the relationship between learning and job performance assessment, compensation, or promotion?
How is the budget for learning managed? Are there charge back processes in place? Are they consistent through the enterprise?
Are there different HR models for learning?
Who approves e-learning attendance?
What are the requirements for tracking and reporting?
What current business processes are in place that must be supported by your technology solution?
If an LMS is in place, it will require underlying databases for recording and tracking activity.
The scale and mode of access will dictate whether these can be small local environments or high end, enterprise-class systems. User and course data also needs to be integrated into HR or ERP environments. For example, a training catalog and registration system managed through an LMS may contain cost information that needs to be passed on to internal financial systems, and user information will need to be integrated with HR systems. The LMS may also contain varying degrees of workflow and triggering functionality for managing registration and administration processes.
To simplify the detailed tracking of online courses, registrations, score results, and similar data, standards have been developed that ensure that the LMS can interact in a standard manner with the vendor e-learning modules you have selected, whether these are computer-based training (CBT) or Web-based training (WBT).
It is important to have a standardized definition of the components and architecture of learning systems, as well as standardized interfaces among them, to ensure that:
Re-usable content is of higher value, and greatly increases the incentive to develop educationally effective learning materials of professional quality.
Content developed for one learning management system can be ported seamlessly to another.
Limited or no restrictions exist with regard to compliance specifications for those companies who do large procurement of e-learning content.
These current standards are referred to as the AICC standards. (The Airline Industry CBT Consortium, formed in 1988 to standardize hardware used for training in the airline industry, has subsequently also moved into the standardization of learning management systems.)
New and more comprehensive standards are being developed by the IMS (Instructional Management System) project, a coalition of corporate, academic, and government partners originating from the 1997 EduCom National Learning Infrastructure Initiative. IMS' vision is to create a comprehensive open architecture and infrastructure for learning technologies (IMS 2000).
Another specification being widely used is Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) released on January 31, 2000. SCORM is a set of interrelated technical specifications built upon the work of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), AICC, IMS and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to create one unified content model.
Although all these technical specifications can be overwhelming, if tracking and reporting to stakeholders and learners is a business requirement, then a process for integrating or tracking the courseware must be established. Work with your Information Technology department to establish test platforms for new and existing content. Establish standard questions for vendors on their courseware, how it is developed, and the compliance they have achieved on AICC and SCORM. The technology infrastructure and system choices you have made will determine the specific focus of these questions.
If the content cannot be incorporated into an automated tracking process such as an LMS would provide, then establish a business process whereby the learner records and reports their results to learning administrators to register. If the content is hosted externally, then it will be necessary to explore what kind of tracking your vendor provides, and the types of reports that will be available about the use of the courseware as well as completions.