Nothing of course, but it is a question I get asked and surprisingly people get hot under the collar about it on occasions.
In my many demos and discussions with RTOs about eLearning products the questions below almost always come up and so I have decided to answer them here. I hope you find it helpful, however if you want more information, either add a comment here so I can amend the article or call me for a chat on 02 85967600.
Q1: Why does JWGecko have three eLearning products?
- A: We wish we didn’t need to! Read on…
As those of you who been been through our customer introduction process will already know we have three eLearning products;
1] Assignment Module: Allows the admin to associate an assignment with a programme. It includes marker management, resubmission, marking themes and a post assessment document archive. Coming soon are the option to associate assignments with a class or a week number of an occurrence.
2] Moodle Integration: Create a user in Moodle on enrolment on our VET Online enrolment engine, associate the new user with with the right learning pathway and send results [commenced, completed and score] back to VETtrak or other student record systems. Our Moodle integration is a relatively inexpensive add-on to our VET Campus product.
3] VET LMS: Our own LMS that is integrated with our VET Campus product.
Q2: But what’s VET Campus got to do with it?
- A: The VETtrak student management system makes a lot of the data stored about student and their training available via the Portals API to VET Campus. As standard there are three views to the data: student, trainer and employer.
The student is able to see their own information, the trainer their students information and the employer their employees information. The data includes a students profile, classes, occurrences, enrolments, progress against the units of competency, awards and attendances.
The employers view is an aggregated view of ‘their’ employees data
The trainer see an aggregated view of their students, their classes, events, occurrences and is able to make attendance and provide simple assessments.
The VET Campus includes a Document Management System in build and structured to match your VETtrak structure.
* The VET Campus is iPad friendly *
Q3: OK, I get that but what does that have to do with Moodle?
- Once upon a time we thought we would write VET Campus into Moodle so that on enrolment the student’s enrolment would be automatically in Moodle and their results would go back to VETtrak on completion [Tick]. We did that. In the process though we learned a lot we didn’t know about Moodle that lead us to building our own LMS [VET LMS]
1] Web Services: Our desired communication mechanism at the moment between application is web services – much of the required web services layer in Moodle doesn’t currently exist. As it was we had to write some new Moodle code to accomplish what we have done – to do more would be to commit to a years worth of development that could be rendered open source, we can’t afford that and anyway we are not sure it is possible or sustainable currently however perhaps that will change.
2] Version Compatibility: We are very careful at JWGecko to make sure any new releases or versions are backward compatible. Nothing upsets a client more than a ‘new feature’ they don’t want or need that breaks an existing business process. In our experience with updates and upgrades the differences in the Moodle code can mean a rewrite of code which adds significantly to the testing and staging process i.e. more work and more cost.
3] Code Bloat: An LMS is a bloating beast at the best of times and currently high up-time hosting is still quite expensive from hard drive storage perspective – Moodle is between 3 and 5 times the size of most comparable non-open source LMS products. This impacts on the speed of the application, i.e. the user experience, and also how soon you need to increase your hosting package or move to a new server.
4] Look and Feel: Any web designer or client trying to change the look and feel of one of the current crop of open source CMS or Moodle will discover that the front end (the look and feel) is difficult to restructure in terms of layout. The functionality is a part of the design and that is tough to change. As an example, we hired a top notch moodle expert to make our moodle site look like our demo site.
Moodle: http://moodle.jwgecko.com/login/index.php
Demo site: http://myrto.jwgecko.com/
That experiment cost $4k and is not quite there from our perspective.
5] Combining VET Campus and Moodle: Our intention initially was to pack all the Vettrak data into Moodle so that Moodle knew everything. We were excited about the Mark Book concept. Sadly, it lacks the web services to make it work properly for the type of assessments required in the VET space. Nor could we add face to face classes or events to Moodle in the same way we can with our integrated product. We were disappointed, we couldn’t do what our clients were asking for. If we had done something amazing and brilliant, being opensource, we would have to give it away for free. Sadly we can’t afford to do that.
6] Single Log on: When you give your clients a Moodle logon they need to go to a moodle website and log on. If they want to go to their vettrak data they need to go there to log on. Each of these and your websites will each have a different web address – yes THREE websites.
Q4: So are you saying we shouldn’t consider Moodle?
- A: No … We have spent a lot of time and money on Moodle development and there are lots of wonderful things about Moodle and some negatives we are open about with our own … let’s talk about VET LMS.
We developed the first version of our LMS three years ago and it first saw light on an Aus Industries funded project to deliver free online training to small businesses – it worked brilliantly. It was a basic stand alone LMS integrated with our website CMS. Later we added integration to VETtrak and then expanded it further to include the data available from VETtrak via the enrolment and portals API [VET Campus]
Q5: What is VET LMS good at, and where is it lacking?
- The major strengths in our product, integration with VETtrak and VET Campus and the rapidly increasing functionality are also our major weaknesses.
The tight integration makes the initial setup quite complete and regimented, not something VETtrak administrators are used to, however I would argue that one of the differences between the uni/tafe/school sector is that in the main courses are shorter and more repetitive in structure i.e. they benefit from automation of the learning and assessment pathways.
The rapid development of new features delivered at no extra charge to our customers is a real bonus as the LMS comes of age . Saying this, even with excellent customer support a new user interface, new features and the like can cause headaches at least in the initial stages.
These new features are exciting in themselves, we now support the latest two versions of scorm, not simply the current one. LTI is a few days away and we can also publish content and return results from Catapult and Futura content. You can add your own scorms and HTML content as well.
Question types and native content editing: We decided sometime ago that we would not try and compete with the larger LMS products in terms of content control, instead we provide a copy of Articulate Studio [~ $2,500] to our clients at no change AND we include Platinum support for a few reasons:
- We are VET Web developers not eLearning content editors and our customers need a high level of support, at least initially and;
- Like almost all content editing tools their output is currently Flash i.e. unable to be read by iPads and the Platinum support gains access to the new non-flash HTML 5 version due later in the year.
Q6: Are there any other negative we should know about?
- A: Yes, I guess a couple of things that are related. Our VET LMS is four times the price of our Moodle product and, while I am sure the total cost of ownership will at least match within the year, I still think we need to look at that. We are offering interest free payment terms for a smaller fee-for-service RTO in a ‘commodity’ area like first aid or fork lift we are too expensive – we need a cheaper integrated solution for this sector and we are working on it!
- The bottom line though about our LMS is that we are well and truly on the leading edge of development and our offering is already unique in the VET space. As we say to all our clients and prospecitve clients moving your RTO online is a journey not a destination and the same is true for us, our products will always be a journey of incemental improvement, kaizen!
Thanks for your time in reading this post, hopefully it will catch you at a time when the information is most useful,
Blended learning Rules!
John
