Can I rant for a moment?
Oct 23, 2012
Hi there:
Hoping my fellow designers here that also may administer and LMS will lend me their ear. I just spent the last several weeks torturing myself to get our yearly mandatory training out. Mandatory training is never fun so each year I do try to make the courses better.
One fix this year was that I modified one of our more laborious courses and mixed the quizing through out the material instead of one large quiz at the end. There was great feedback to this set up in other courses, so I tried this method.
Of course is worked on my computer, it works on my home computer, it works on my friend's computer, it works on my test environment computers. It crashes on a few of the 3700 staff that need to take the course (maybe 1 in 30).
I can only chalk it up to my unstable LMS environment (won't mention it as each LMS has it's flaws), our network capabilities, user error, something. But it's not the course. The course functions as it should.
Have you encountered this frustration? How do you handle it? Do you tell the learner "it happens", "it's the system", "sorry, but you'll have to take it again"? Do you rework the course until it does function properly for 100%?
I'm thinking....to save myself the grief or trying to explain the unexplainable....the quizzing aspect, is reluctantly getting pulled out ,and stuck at the end again.
3 Replies
Hey Tracy,
This happens to us all the time - we have our internal courses and courses we get from the vendors. Luckily for us our internally made courses work all of the time (we do have some trouble with the LMS marking them complete, which is no big deal to manually change it for the few instances that happens).
To help my team members troubleshoot their issues, i first find out which class it is - if it is one of mine, I can get it fixed for them right away, if it is from an outside vendor, we have to wait. Once we find out what exactly the issue is, I fix it if it is LMS/an internally developed class, out IT dept. fixes it if it is a computer issue, or we let the vendor know to get their class fixed.
My go-to response for this is 'We have been made aware of the issue, and are working with VENDOR NAME to get it fixed' and then I make sure I respond back to everyone who experienced the issue when it has been fixed.
It is challenging because I just want to be able to fix all issues when they are brought to my attention, but because of IT Restrictions, things only vendors can set up, LMS quarkiness, or a class that needs to be reworked that is not always the case.
-Eric
Just a thought...
If it works okay in your test environments, and it works okay for the majority of users, I'd say that's a pretty strong case that niether the course nor the LMS is at fault.
Can you find what the users who have issues have in common... like what browser they're using? Are popups blocked, or something of the like?
Eric. That's great. I was recently thinking about that "comment" and using it for all sorts of situations.
"Thanks, we are aware of this issue ....
or
"Thanks for the feedback....
.....we'll be looking at ways to address this in the near future."
Extra chatter here has lead us to realize that the course is identical to last year, save an extra module, so there is something extra in the works that is causing the grief We're now going to try to zoom in and see if the staff are all using the same computer and having issues. They do seem to be clustered.
Thanks for the feedback both Eric and Dave. Glad to know here in the Community, You're Never Alone.
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