Who knows their stuff? Some help please

Jul 27, 2015

I am in the process of putting together a E-Learning program and think I will end up using Story Line 2. I have a couple of questions:

1. Can I use Story Line to create section where the students will be able to fill out information? i.e What sports do you play? Are they then able to type in the sports they play? If so will a LMS capture this information and be able to put it together on a one or two page document? I know I am able to test by using quiz's but I want people to be able to fill in information about themselves.

2. Following on from that what LMS should I be looking at? They all seem so expensive. I am offering training for a small price but when I include the cost of having 1000 plus users it means I am paying almost 3/4 to the LMS system. I do need something to capture the data of the people and their answers but that is all. I am only offering one course at this stage.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Regards

6 Replies

Steve Flowers

over 8 years ago07/28/15 at 12:04 am (UTC)

Hi Tim,

The SCORM data model operates with a narrow set of capabilities. There are some ways to get question answers into an LMS but most LMS systems don't do a fantastic job getting this data out in useful reports.

Are you hoping to provide these back to the user or to simply capture these for your own reporting?

If you're looking at a single course, you may want to look in the direction of a simpler and cheaper system. Many LMS are quite expensive (some more than others). The upside to this expense is the level of confidence that they'll work at scale.

If you're in the market for something a little more affordable but "self-configured and managed" you might want to check out the combination of LearnDash with Grassblade LRS. This would be a one time cost for the annual license (for Grassblade) and perpetual LearnDash of less than $300. Add hosting to that for $10 to $20 per month, if you've got the will to put things together yourself you can have a reasonable scale at a really reasonable price.

1000 users per month, as long as they aren't hitting the system all at once, could get it for you. Storyline will publish to xAPI / Tin Can. This will record screens and answers as well as provide a way to resume where folks left off. Using the LRS you could do a ton of really interesting things. There are ways you can use Storyline by itself, with a JavaScript trigger, to generate documents based on answers and variables.

tim carrington
Author

over 8 years ago07/28/15 at 12:27 am (UTC)

wow, thanks very much. To answer your question yes I want the answers to be able to be given back to the user. I have no problem keeping them but its more that they can take them away with them. I can come up with alternatives to that like sending them a form when they sign up. They are then able to fill that form out in their own time.

So if I went for the option of sending them a form so that I don't need to capture this information am I still better off using a different system to a LMS? I know for a fact that all the users won't be on at the same time but if it was going really well i'd like to think the # of users might be closer to 5-10K. No matter what the number is because my cost is so low the LMS systems don't ever seem to work out....and do I in fact need them?

Steve Flowers

over 8 years ago07/28/15 at 12:30 am (UTC)

Depends on what you want to be able to do. LMS can take care of eCommerce features and automate enrollments and other stuff including automated notifications. By calculating the time you would need to put into supporting 10,000 users, you might easily be able to justify the cost of a system to help ease your support workload.

The LMS also typically takes care of:

Persistence / restoration. So logging in from somewhere else, progress is restored. It's like a cookie from the server.
Analytics and reporting.
Permissions and roles.
Notification and access controls / "dripping" of content.