Every now and a again I get the grumps with the software industry, our industry. The term LMS is one I have been passionately niggled by for ages. If we called what is known as an LMS an LMF [learning management framework] I would be as happy as a clam!
The first thing is the term LMS – Learning Management Software is at best idealistic and at worse arrogant in my opinion, I am yet to see one that is more than a Learning Management Framework. Most are little more than a User Management mechanism to hold content and present it to the appropriate person, oh yes, and then try to do some assessment as well. Why am I grumpy then?
In my opinion to be called a Learning Management System or Software needs to be a complete student management system to start with. In Australia this requires reporting, compliance with processes and frameworks supported and extended – these need to be at the heart of the application not an add-on. An LMS needs to ‘be’ this whereas LMF [Learning Management Framework] would not.
Sadly the name sets the expectations for the great-unwashed, and really from my experience this includes most RTOs, however it is not just RTOs who don’t get it. In WA the State government has mandated an expensive hosted and student-unfriendly ‘LMS’ for RTOs which does not and I doubt will ever be integrated to a student management system. For the sake of everyone using the same solution it would appear the lowest common denominator is the very best they could hope for.
All RTOs beleive they ‘need’ an LMS, and they ‘need it now’ and often without enough though about how it fits with the long term development of their business. Around Australia RTOs are being approached by Trojan Horses called LMS Content Providers who will over time reduce the delivery of online training to a commodity, destroying the depth and breadth in training delivery to the absolute basic. How will that improve learning outcomes? If Online learning is that important … why are your trainers not writing the content? If students expect online delivery of training as a minimum standard then not to do so is NOT to be an RTO. Dare I say it developing online content shold be a part of an RTOs professional development and internal training. And it aint that hard!
My advice is to understand do the research and understand what online learning can do for your students, your learning outcomes and most importantly Your Business. Don’t give away your future, pick and chose from the options. JWGecko has its on VET LMS however we integrate with Moodle and others and do so in a way that treats them as a framework for your team and your student management system to use to improve productivity AND learning outcomes. We are open to work with any LMS to ensire it works for your business – that is after all our business.
* We would love to call our VET LMS product what it really is i.e. VET LMF and we do a lot of the time however, whoever heard of an LMF? The focus on the searches in Google is LMS and that means, to be visible to those who make decisions we have to use both.
