Creating a Course Database

Aug 09, 2019

My team is looking at a better way to track course information for reference and future course updates. We have a large number of courses we create and need a way to search for specific information for all courses. Some information cannot be contained in our LMS, so we are currently looking at an Excel spreadsheet to contain information like authoring tool, if videos are included, source file location, customer, audience, course code, previous name of course, etc. 

My question is, are any of you already doing this and have any recommendations or tips?

6 Replies
Gerry Wasiluk

I always worry about Excel-based based solutions should the file either not get updated by users or gets accidentally deleted.  I also like it if all the info is stored in one place and as opposed to all over the place.  YMMV.  :)

Some LMS's have custom fields that can be turned on or off in various forms and which can have custom labels.  Often, data entry in these fields can be required or not.

You might want to see if yours support that, like in the form where you import the course into the LMS.

Then you just need a custom LMS report to pull out that info when needed.

Chris Martin

Hi Nicole, thanks for asking. We've had issues in the past with needing to know which courses contained videos and there being no documentation of which courses have videos linked or embedded. Same for when we needed to switch from SWF based courses to HTML5. We've also built courses for internal customers and years later need to follow up with the customer and not knowing who the contact person was. 

Kevin Hayes

One option might be to use the Notes Page (perhaps on the first screen) to record key information about the file (owner, author, customer and key files?).  Advantage is you have this recorded in the Storyline File and not on a distant and possibly not updated database.

That being said database that stores key data about each online training package does not sound like a bad idea...

Kevin Hayes

It probably goes without saying but there's a trade-off here between recording everything about a online training course in the database and being practical. 

Whilst recording every video, link and document contained within (or linked to) a course in a database seems like a good idea in practice it's highly likely that it won't be updated or 100% accurate. 

I'd never trust the database record over looking at each page and making sure there isn't a video or a link that was missed and not recorded.

The database would be much better focusing on CRM type data (customer, key contacts, author, date created and so on) rather than listing all the assets within the package

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