General overview of an elearning system
May 03, 2016
Hallo there.
I am a web developer but i am new in elearening. I am considering to start an elearning project. I have been studying about elearning for 2-3 days now and i am really comfused. So many terms that i ve never had herd before....Could you please provide me some info about general schema for a eleraning system?
Let me write it down and please comment or correct me if i am wrong.
-first of all i need an authoring tool to build the courses. Storyline maybe?
- second, i need a platform to host the courses. I was thinking to build my own. Do you think it is a good idea? I found out that those systems have a name. LMSs. There are some relevant themes i could use in theforestthemes i could use for the front-end. About the back end i could manage to built it.
- i found out that i need a way to accomplish communication between the courses and the platform. There are standards called SCORM or Xapi. I never understood the necessity of those. I understand that they track the learners activity. I could do that myself by coding using jquery, ajax and other technology. Do i really need them? In the general schema i understand that i must add an LRS in case i choose the tin can api.
Is that all?
4 Replies
That's a pretty good overview of the classic (and still most popular) approach, yes.
While new tools/platforms are trying to blend things together, you generally want to think in terms of authoring content and deploying content as two distinct pieces of the e-learning world. Some people specialize in one or the other, and some play in both.
Regarding the communications protocols.... If you know how to code in ajax, etc then you certainly understand the advantages of a standard protocol. SCORM et al simply make it easier and less problematic to pass information between the content and the LMS. While you can do this other ways, you should note that most authoring tools have SCORM or TinCan api standards built right into their publishing feature and LMSs accept those standards natively. Makes it much much easier.
Thank you very much for your answer.
do you have any comments about building my own LMS? It is a platform that hosts the lessons. isn t it?
Why would you want to build your own? It's an awful lot of effort to go through to replicate stuff folks have already done. You might be better off picking up an open source or inexpensive platform and customizing the presentation and workflow to fit your needs. I've left a message in response to your query in the Adapt community. This contains a few links you might want to investigate.
I'd second what Steve has said. Start with an open source LMS and then tweak it to suit your needs this way you save a huge amount of time.
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