February 25th, 2010 by Robin Green

When shopping around for a learning management system that perfectly fits the needs of your organization, you might consider seeking the help of an LMS consultant. Consultants can help you sort out all the nitty gritty in your decision-making process, bringing years of experience in the LMS industry to your aid.

They are able to determine your company’s requirements for the system and review proposals and demonstrations of each vendor. Consultants can cut down on the amount of effort you’ll need to spend and can show you how each vendor meets or doesn’t meet your LMS requirements. They are able to highlight concerns and issues that might otherwise go unidentified.

Of course, whether or not you choose to hire a learning management system consultant, your first step to securing the perfect LMS is to decide on your organization’s needs. Consider a few different issues. First, determine the scale. How many students and other users will you be catering to? Consider the number of learners, courses, trainers, sessions, and administrators involved.

Second, what do you need your LMS to do? What do you need to track? These might be courses, grades, attendance and so on. Find out whether or not you need your LMS to be standards compliant (SCORM, IMS, etc.).

Third, consider your distribution plan. Will you be using your LMS only internally, or will you want it to have e-commerve capabilities? Will you need automatic billing?

Get straight on all the details before choosing an LMS. Learning management systems come in all sizes and meet a variety of requirements, so ensure that you have one in mind that covers all the bases you see fit.

A fourth consideration: should your LMS be connected to other systems within your company? Should it be able to export data to other systems?

The fifth issue is a critical one. What kind of support will you need? Does your organization have a strong IT department which will be able to meet any tech-related issues that may arise while using the LMS? And finally, does LMS you are considering provide reliable and 24-hour support to users?

Sixth, take into account your organizational needs in respect to organizing the training. LMSs have evolved to provide not only online education and training, but also to meet organizations’ planning and procedural needs. Ensure that these functions will be sustainable throughout the development of your organization.

Oftentimes, choosing an LMS forces companies to take a hard look at their approach to corporate training. For example, you may discover that you need to redefine some of your business processes, or even redesign your course delivery methods.

A learning management system should be both flexible and scalable. Too often organizations implement a LMS that works for a while, but as the organization grows, the LMS no longer meets its needs. LMSs should help you grow, so be sure to select an LMS that will grow with you.

Having a handle on what each LMS offers is a clear first step in deciding on which one you would like to employ. A consultant can help you answer the questions, “Does this LMS provide all the features we need?” Different LMSs offer a wide variety of functions including video, text, audio, assessment and quiz, gaming, podcast, and other tools to make your online training effective and interactive.

However, beyond making sure that your chosen LMS has everything you need, you should also consider any function the system provides that you actually won’t need. In many cases, you’re paying for all those extra features in addition to the actually useful ones. Of course, neat extra features might seem cool to have, but do you really need them? In order to prevent paying more for your LMS than you need to, it’s wise not to choose on an LMS with lots of bells and whistles that you will never actually employ.

But do check out the unique tools and functionalities offered by each LMS, and contact a few vendors to ask them to demo their LMS. Be sure that the learning management system has everything you need, and that the demo is able to illustrate your company’s requirements.

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Coggno.com offers premier online education.

February 23rd, 2010 by Robin Green

The Learning Management System is currently taking the lead in helping over a thousand companies to use in their application processes. There are some who find it a relief to acquire such program and there are a lot of people who commends the computer based training program as convenient and user-friendly. Here are some more reasons why it is very important to acquire this type of software for your organization.

First of the advantages that Learning Management System can provide is that it has a comprehendible course management feature. Anyone or people who are not that equipped with such knowledge regarding high end technologies can easily comprehend every single detail of the process being assessed as the system can sort and organize courses and lessons.

You may have noticed a lot of companies have already adapted this kind of system online. It is just in your discretion on which one has caught your interest or which system provides you better outputs. However, it does not matter what company you select. Comparing it to traditional ways of learning programs, it is better by a mile. Your stressful task has just been solved through these types of programs.

These programs are generated through hard works of the best programmers and developers in the world. They were able to come up with various courses from a set of fields ranging from health, education, computer courses or accounting and other. An organization has the option to choose the specific field they are interested to deal with in this type of technique.

Learning Management System also manages to have a systematic compilation and organized documentation of ever course and lecture a company or an organization has, which makes it easier to understand. Not only that, it is more convenient for people as they can allocate time by considering their pacing in understanding the course. Bid farewell to piles of lecture notes as Learning Management System do everything for you by not compensating the knowledge you would be getting from the program.

With the best things Learning Management System could provide, it just proves why it is leading the current trend of computer based training programs that companies and organizations love to use.

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Coggno.com is a leading provider of high-quality online training.

February 8th, 2010 by Robin Green

Although there’s no denying that the education trend (not only online learning via learning management systems, but non-virtual learning as well) has shifted toward an independent, self-guided mode, people still require incentives to learn just about anything. For this reason and others, monitoring trainees’ learning processes is critical.

Despite the widespread pedagogical pressure to believe the contrary, intentional learning doesn’t happen for most people. Or perhaps it does in some areas, but not for all kinds of content. Of course, anyone can get excited about learning a particular skill or topic that interests them. There’s no need to keep tabs on a teenager’s learning of their new video game, for example. The intention already exists.

But the hard truth is that although company training certainly can be fun and engaging, it’s often not centered around the most exciting topics trainees can imagine.

At its core, learning is about always wanting something. For people in a classroom setting, that something may be good grades. In a company training session or learning management system (LMS) course, the desired objective may include rewards for good performance, or simple verbal encouragement and acclaim.

People of all ages–both children and adults–are typically responsive to simple words of encouragement from a respected superior. Along with a user-friendly training program with its own system of points and rewards, employees benefit greatly from human motivation. A leader who motivates trainees not only facilitates the learning process, but instills a sense of team unity, which improves work relationships.

But beyond encouragement from a supervisor or training leader, another way to aid effective training is to monitor student progress. Some LMSs have features like the Activities monitor, which helps solve a problem all too prevalent in online training. The Activities tool makes simple the administrative responsibility of overseeing and guiding students in their learning process. It provides training administrators with a simple tool to track, in real time, the online course activities of students through a tab in the LMS interface.

The Activities feature serves a practical purpose. Using the feature, administrators can track student activities to find out where each one is exceeding, and in what areas extra attention may be required.

Monitoring trainees with the aid of a feature like Activities helps ensure that students are actually absorbing the content they are learning. Why is this important? First of all, ensuring training effectiveness saves organizations and educators valuable time and energy. In what ways? Many–and each depending on the kind of training you’re delivering.

On the other hand, some kinds of training may not necessarily benefit from such a feature. For example, training material given to new employees, teaching them the ins and outs of their new position, may not cry for a feature that monitors student progress in such an active way. After all, newcomers to an organization are typically excited about their new job–they want to learn. They are intentional learners.

With compliance training, however, that story changes. Here organizations save money in the long run if they ensure successful training. Conflict can be avoided, and employees can be protected. And of course, productivity is always increased when employees are well educated on workplace issues which are meant to facilitate communication and prevent conflict.

Automated tracking of learning allows trainers and educators to concentrate on teaching and administering content. Trainers can focus on the content and guiding student interaction with the material, rather than actively keeping tabs on them.

However, the most effective way to ensure that learning is taking place is the existence of a strong and engaging training course. It’s not enough to create satisfactory content, get it out there, and expect students to eat it up. A complete and flexible learning management system which provides a variety of robust features is the best way to create content that entices all learners to become intentional ones.

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Coggno.com is a leading provider of world-class online training.

February 4th, 2010 by Robin Green

It may be an understatement to say that for distance learning and online training, a big hefty tool like a learning management system (LMS) is the most efficient and cost-effective means of delivery. In fact, online tools may be the only method to deliver training for companies with distance learning requirements. As extended networks of employees become the norm, with employees working in Singapore, London or New York, an LMS becomes vital to manage online training.  It not only delivers learning content, but companies can use an LMS to keep track of employee achievements and ensure that the training delivered is really effective.

Of course, managing a distance learning classroom or training program is simply too much for one person or even a group of people to handle.  An LMS takes care of content management, collaboration techniques, agendas and announcements, assignment and coursework management, and learning path development, among other things. It allows for online classrooms to be organized internationally, linking a company LMS to its various human resources departments and ERP systems, to perform long distance, cost-effective, and efficient training.

Collaboration is the newest wave of our increasingly service-oriented business world, and therefore a must in training. Oftentimes, both in training and product development, collaborative groups are composed of a loose group of individuals working together to achieve a common goal. These may be a group of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, education and languages. For collaborative learning, an LMS serves a crucial role in its ability to track members’ individual and collective progress in an online course.

One way that collaboration may be utilized to benefit a company is in introducing a new product or service. For example, if the employees in training are in customer service or sales, a company could introduce the new product, delivering training on the product through the LMS, and prompt trainees to work together to develop strategies and solutions to given situations when dealing with customers, etc.

For this, companies that have been experimenting with virtual worlds like Second Life to provide trainees with a 3D meeting space and collaborative educational space have experienced mixed results. Educational software like Second Life still has many challenges to face in offering an efficient and robust learning experience.

Training for a role in a service team is something easily charged to an LMS, with video tools, simulations, and audio tools like those used by Coggno, to create situations where an employee must deal with a customer. Some systems are even multi-lingual, providing a number of built-in languages to personalize each employee’s training.

Distance learning collaboration isn’t always easy, of course. We’ve all experienced the frustration of technical problems with the very same tools intended to facilitate group collaboration. Inevitably, a conference call is interrupted by technical problems, or one or two team members aren’t familiar with how to use a new technology. Web 2.0 tools like conferencing may sidetrack members and draw them into a distracting cycle of tool experimentation. Some tools may take hours for users to get the hang of, and ultimately may not even function efficiently.

Although some tools like virtual worlds can help virtual teams achieve goals, introducing these technologies can also impose distractions which waste valuable time. A slick new piece of technology is only as effective as the effects it produces.

An LMS is able to automate many training processes that would otherwise cost organizations a great deal of time and money. Learners all over the world are able to access online training via an LMS any time, without complicated plug-in software. Learning management systems take care of staff orientation and induction programs, reaching out to employees from all around the world.

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Coggno.com offers premier LMS platforms.

August 21st, 2008 by Robin Green

Fed up with intricate, confusing text editors? The Coggno LMS Text Editor is a simple yet comprehensive tool for you to manage your text. Unique features allow you to build e-learning content. These are only a few:

•One-click text editing
•Add notes, references, etc. to your text
•Draw and import images, photo and graphic (JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG), in bulk from your library, right from your desktop; resize, drag, shape, all at the same time
•Vector graphics support
•Create a table of contents, chapters, sub-chapters, etc.
•Easily incorporate quizzes and surveys right from the text editor into your module
•Version control
•Auto save functionality

In case any doubts should arise, LMS instruction videos are always available, right on the Authors page.  To find out more about the Coggno LMS system, please visit our homepage.