7.7: Needs Assessment
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Choosing an LMS is not a technology decision. It is primarily a leadership and change management decision. No matter what system you adopt, it will change the way you do things. Even if you adopt a system that supports your basic learning model, procedures will change. This is a major decision that calls for a careful assessment of your needs.
Before you even talk to LMS vendors or open-source LMS community members, form an expert committee of people consisting of educational leaders and administrators and instructors—people who understand how online learning works. Be sure to include some IT personnel to enlist their ideas and support and their understanding of the technology.
Consult with end users, both instructors and students, by questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and/or focus groups to determine their needs, desires, willingness, and abilities. They can identify the desirable features of the system, and give some indication of the change management factors that need to be addressed. Be careful of scope creep. When asking people what they would like to see, they will tend to ask for everything. Distinguish between the things that are truly needed and the “nice-to-haves”.
Consult with people in other organizations like yours that have already gone through the process. Find out what they are using and how they like it. Read the literature and attend conferences.
Are you looking at an LMS to initiate e-learning? You may not actually need to do this. Online courses are just a collection of web pages that do not require an LMS to run them. The primary purpose of an LMS is to provide a working platform and administration for tracking the results. If you don’t need to track the results, or if instructors will do it manually, then you don’t need an LMS.
LMSs tend to constrain people to do things in certain ways. Some instructors and designers are frustrated by the constraints (both technical and learning) of using these systems and would prefer more dynamic learning support systems such as student weblogs and learning wikis, and even just email or newsgroups. You may prefer to give them more creative freedom. Wikis and blogs don’t require an LMS but they are hard to track. Instructors can track activity manually and assign grades but it limits the analysis you can do, for example to find out to what degree students participate, how students perform on individual questions, etc. Wikis and blogs can be altered easily, so are not ideal for formal assignments (other than perhaps a team assignment to build a wiki). Individual and team essay assignments are probably best submitted to instructors via direct email messages and attachments. This would still not require an LMS to track as the instructors would be marking and tracking such assignments manually.
Tip
Obtaining an LMS will change the way you work. Choosing one is not a technology decision. It is about leadership and change.
Steps in The Needs Assessment Process
Conduct primary research
Survey, interview and conduct focus groups among your expert committee, instructors, and students to determine the primary needs of your system. Don’t ask general questions like, “What do you need?” or you will get a wish list that may not be practical. See Appendix F, Needs Assessment Questions, for suggestions about questions to ask.
Conduct secondary research
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What LMSs are other organizations using?
- Is the organization similar to your own, or have similar needs?
- What made them choose that particular solution?
- How satisfied are they with it?
- What features do they like and not like?
- What feedback have they had from students and instructors?
- What does the literature say?
If you are looking for an education LMS, a good source of information is the website of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications: Online Educational Delivery Applications: A Web Tool for Comparative Analysis ( http://www.edutools.info/ ). This website contains reviews and comparative data on a large number of education learning management systems.
You may also wish to attend conferences where LMS are featured and profiled.
Good corporate conferences are:
- Learning 2007 (formerly TechLearn) (www.learn ing2007.com/)
- Training ( http://www.trainingconference.com/ )
- American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) (astd2007.astd.org/)
- International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) (www.ispi.org/ac2008/)
- Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) ( http://www.aect.org/events/ )
- ED-MEDIA (Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education—AACE) (www.aace .org/conf/)
- Association for Media and Technology in Canada (AMTEC)/Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE) (www.cade-aced.ca/conferences /2007/)
- Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE) (www.cauce2007.ca)
You can expedite the process by attending virtual trade shows and online demonstrations. Check out the possibilities at www.virtualtechfair.com/ and vendors’ websites.
Tip
For reviews of education LMS software, check out www.edutools.com.
If you are looking for a corporate LMS, you can check out the reports by Brandon Hall at www.brandon -hall.com, Bersin & Associates at www.bersin .com/ or by using the comparison tool at http:// learning-management.technologyevaluation.com/.
Other good sources of information include the eLearning Guild ( http://www.elearningguild.com/ ) and Chief Learning Officer magazine (www.clomedia .com/).
Once you have determined your requirements and have documented them carefully, prioritize them to determine the critical needs.
Tip
Be careful of scope creep. When asking people what they would like to see, they will tend to ask for everything. Distinguish between the things that are truly needed and the “nice-to-haves”.
System selection
Now you can begin to research vendors and/or open-source solutions. Looking at different products can open up new possibilities, but, again, be careful of scope creep, and of being sold something just because it is the latest hot item.
Use your documented requirements and priorities to identify a manageable list of solutions (perhaps 10) from the more than 100 vendors. An evolving, fairly complete list of such vendors can be found at www.trimeritus .com/vendors.pdf.
Request for proposal (RFP)
Requests for proposals (RFP) follow fairly standard industry forms. At www.geolearning.com/rfp there is a template specifically for LMS selection but be careful about templates that are just lists of features. Include only those features that you really require. Use your documented requirements and develop use case scenarios and scripts to paint a clear picture of your LMS vision so that a vendor can provide a proposal focused on your specific environment/culture. Include reporting functions in your scenarios. Poor reporting capability is a great source of customer dissatisfaction. Be sure to ask questions about post implementation customer service because it is also a key factor in customer satisfaction.
Ask vendors for references especially those for organizations similar to your own. Ask the vendors from your list to submit proposals. When you contact vendors, the more clearly you have identified your requirements, the more attention you will get from suppliers—they will see you as a qualified prospect. A full formal RFP process may not be practical in all situations unless it is required by your organization.
Review the proposals
Develop a rubric for scoring the proposals you receive from vendors. Make a short list of the top three to ten vendors to be invited to provide demonstrations.
Schedule meetings and demonstrations
Ask your short list of vendors or open-source community representatives (who may be members of your own organization) to demonstrate their products either at your location or online. Ask them to demo directly to the use case scenarios and demonstration scripts you developed in the RFP. Invite students, instructors, and IT people to the demos, as well as members of your core committee.
Most vendors will have pre-packaged online demonstrations of their products, but remember that these are mostly designed to show off the good features of the product that may not be relevant in your situation.
Use your rubric to have each participant evaluate the solutions. At the meetings, discuss specific details about how the vendor provides service, maintenance, etc. Try to arrange for a free, in-house trial. If possible, run a small pilot program with a small sample before rolling a solution out to the entire organization.
Note that the needs assessment and selection strategies are also part of your change management strategy. The more input people have in the decision, the more likely they will adopt it.
Make the selection
Meet with your review team to consolidate the rubrics and make a selection. The bottom line is selecting the LMS that meets your needs.
“The average company doesn’t get excited about buying an LMS; it gets excited about managing learning. It doesn’t get excited about buying a new e-learning course; it gets excited about changing an employee’s performance.” (Elliott Masie as quoted by Ellis, 2004)