Tracking vendor eLearning w/ limited licenses in internal LMS

Feb 04, 2016

Kyle Paruszkiewicz
By Kyle Paruszkiewicz

Not quite an Articulate question, but I figured this is the best group of people to get some ideas from.

One of our business partners recently bought 150 licenses to eLearning hosted on an external site. Our current process is:

1- interested people must contact L&D to get a user name and password

2- Once they receive user name and password they can access the external site and complete eLearning

3- L&D is manually adding them as a learner in internal LMS

4- L&D has to request reports from the vendor to see completion status

5- L&D manually updated completion status

 

How do others deal with limiting the amount of manual work necessary in a situation like this? In addition to annoying manual aspect of the process, we also have to deal with the confusion of having the courses listed in our internal LMS so we can track, but people don't understand why they can't just launch the course from the LMS.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

2 Replies
Bob S
8 years ago02/04/16 at 10:46 pm (UTC)

Working from the last question first.... Most LMS's have the ability to allow visibility of courses to selected groups.  Depending on your set up, this can be done at the course level, learner groups, job profiles, etc.   But that should address the issue of "seeing" courses they can't take.

With that addressed... I have to ask if there isn't a reason the vendor wouldn't allow YOU to host the course for your folks in your internal LMS. Then you can provide THEM with reporting on who's completed it.  That would solve a host of issues.

If this isn't possible, another options might include some combination of the following:

  • Have the external hosting a do "registration" based on a generic ID.  Many LMS's allow up to X number of seats off of a registration type code and the user must put in key information either in free field or from pull downs.
  • Have the external courseware issue a "completion code" at the end of the course. Then create a 1page shell course in your LMS where the user enters their completion code.
  • If volume is high enough, consider a real-time API between the systems
  • Or perhaps the most elegant (beyond hosting the content directly)....   Create a shell course in your LMS that creates the access code and can launch directly out to the remote content. Could even include a quiz in your shell course that tracks completion via that way.

Hope some of these ideas help.

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