The Ecampus Blog

LMS Data Portability

April 6th, 2009  |  elearning, lms  |    |  No Comments

Much of our growth over the last 12  months has been driven by companies moving to Ecampus from other Australian LMS vendors, whereas in the preceding years the majority of sales where typically driven by companies adopting their first elearning solution.

Working with these companies has been great experience; however, on numerous occasions our clients have run into problems when trying to get their existing data out of their old LMS… They can’t.

One way vendors prevent their clients from moving to ‘greener pastures’ is to ‘lock in’ their data so that the cost of migration makes changing vendors unappealing.

So what methods do some LMS vendors use to lock in your data?

1. SCORM ‘Enhancements’

• Exporting learning content and testing it in the ADL test suite for SCORM compliance.
• Creating some sample student assessment data and then trying to export it in a meaningful format (including student answers and text).
• Exporting student progress and completion data for learning modules undertaken.

SCORM is a universal interoperability standard used for developing elearning content. Love it or hate it, vendors and their clients need to deal with it. Content developed in LMS is often promised to be SCORM compliant when exported (designed to give the content owner some comfort that what they are developing does not have to stay tethered to that LMS forever). The reality is that this content is often useless once exported as it references ‘enhanced’ features and functionality that are native to the LMS, and as such will not be supported when exported to run in another LMS. Worse still is when the content is in a proprietary format that cannot be exported.

2. Student’s results data

Some LMS’ give users the ability to export reports and other data in Microsoft Excel or similar formats. However, often these exports do not provide all the information required to migrate systems and maintain accurate compliance records. For example, you may be able to download a report on student completion status for a course, but you will not be able to export a list of the questions answered and their subsequent responses. Essentially, that training data is locked in the LMS.

3. Student learning data

If student assessments incorporate short answer text answers, forum and text chat responses, they need to be kept in training records. Often this data is not available other than in the LMS system.

Protecting against vendor lock in

The best way to protect against vendor lock in is when purchasing a solution. You need to ask yourself if you were to no longer work with this vendor, what information would you need to take with you and then test the system to ensure that data is available.

Ecampus and your data

Customers of Ecampus can access their data in several ways. Data can be exported from the system by system administrators via a complete MySQL database dump. This essentially provides you with the complete database – every record collected.

All learning content can be exported in SCORM compliant (and verified) format and third-party learning content can be downloaded in the format in which it was uploaded. Ecampus’ XML API also provides access to user records and course data, and individual course level student assessment data can be downloaded in Microsoft Excel or CSV format.

Who do you need on your elearning team?

April 6th, 2009  |  elearning, lms  |    |  No Comments

Tags: elearning, flash, lms, multimedia