Creating a Course Database
Aug 09, 2019
By
Chris Martin
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
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.
Hi Chris,
That's a really interesting question, thanks for bringing that up! I was starting to think of solutions but before that I thought I'd just ask...
Why do you need to pull up that information, and how often do you need to do so? Who needs access to that info, and also who will keep it up to date?
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.
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...
As far as I know there isn't really a tool out there that does this, so your best bet probably is to create a Doc or Spreadsheet that has all the information you need to track. The only problem them becomes maintaining and keeping that spreadsheet/information up to date....
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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