7.8: Implementation Issues

Some of the factors you need to take into consideration when implementing an LMS are:

1. Change management: Implementing an LMS is a major change. In a corporate environment almost everyone will be exposed to it as it becomes part of the intranet portal. The change management issues—the marketing, communication, and training initiatives that will need to be put into place to gain acceptance and appropriate use—are of paramount importance. In an educational institution, the impact will be less widespread, but change management is still important for all the instructors and students who will be accessing the system.
2. Timelines: How long will it take to conduct a needs assessment, to run a pilot test, to build a user community within the organization, to build the appropriate infrastructure to support it, etc.?
3. Cost: Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO); not just the cost of the software but the complete implementation and maintenance costs.
4. Customization: Will you want to brand the system or change it to make it conform to the way you do things? Doing this can be more expensive than the initial licensing and can delay the implementation process significantly.
5. Internal or external hosting of the application:
   • In-house hosting requires hardware (e.g., servers for application, database, data storage, backup systems), infrastructure (e.g., high-bandwidth connectivity, uninterrupted power supply in case of power outage), and staffing (e.g., technical support staff, training, and user support staff) to maintain the LMS. In some cases, in-house hosting can provide your organization with greater flexibility, security and responsiveness than a third-party hosting facility.
   • With the supplier or a third party hosting it for you, it is more expensive, but you do not have to provide all of the IT support. In most cases, however, you will still need to designate or hire an in-house support person to support instructors and learners, and to be the point of contact with the hosting group. Implementation of externally hosted LMSs can be quicker. It may, however, take longer to make changes in the system after it is up and running.
   • With open-source systems, it may be possible for you to contract with a company to host and maintain the LMS for you but the usual scenario for these will be in-house hosting.
6. Integration with other systems, e.g., registration, student information systems, library or data management systems, and/or human resources systems
7. What kind of support will the supplier or community (for open-source solutions) provide during implementation? For example, training, customization, trouble shooting, help desk, etc.
8. Training for instructors and students
9. Software updates
10. Conversion of existing or third-party courseware to run properly on your new LMS.
11. Are there other initiatives happening in your organization which your LMS initiative can support so that mutual success can be achieved?

Case Studies

Telus case study and e-learning success story: it's about access

Telus Communications is western Canada’s major telecommunications provider and the second largest in the country. It has approximately 25,000 employees across the country. Between 1995 and 1998, BC Tel (prior to the merger with Telus) developed an extensive intranet which became a great information tool for employees. Several internal websites were developed to augment the training courses offered by Learning Services. In 1998, BC Tel contracted with SkillSoft for about 20 of its generic, self-directed sales and communications courses to complement its manager training curriculum. The initial licence was for 2,000 participants. The interest was much greater than expected. Many employees at all levels of the organization and in all divisions discovered the courses and used the opportunity because they were “free”. Within six months, the licence had to be increased to 3,500. Then additional courses were licensed for other subject areas including information technology (IT) from Smartforce and NETg.

One reason for the success of these courses is that upper management had implemented a policy that all employees would maintain a personal development portfolio, and demonstrate steps towards their goals. Because the e-learning courses were free and available to everyone, they became very popular. It is always good to have an e-learning initiative tied to other organizational objectives and initiatives. People are often hungry to get training to improve their skills and advance their careers, but they don’t always get the opportunity. E-learning made it accessible.

Telus management was interested in developing some of their own proprietary courses, so an extensive review of available course authoring tools was made. Click2Learn ToolBook software was selected for this purpose. The plan was to enable more than 100 people throughout the organization to create courses using this tool, so ease of use was an important criterion. A training program was put into place to train those people. The tool was found to be useful particularly for training on new products and services. Telus typically introduces several new products and services each month, and traditional training approaches were simply too slow to address this. One of the first courses developed was on a new feature for telephones called “Talking Call Waiting”. The course was made available to sales and customer service people. In this case e-learning made it possible to distribute training to everyone who needed it much more quickly than could have been done by traditional methods.

Another course on ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line high-speed Internet connection) was made available to everyone and had more than 1,000 hits in the first few days.

Up to this point, only very simple management tools had been used to track the results, and a good deal of work was done manually. Telus then did a study of LMSs and decided that they would build their own system because they had an extensive and skilled IT staff that had developed parts of such a system for individual departments.

In 2004, Telus reported that it had developed 300 custom courses for its employees and there were a total of 100,000 course completions for both custom and generic courses. E-learning is now a way of life for Telus.

San Francisco state university case study: an open source solution

by Kevin Kelly, Online Teaching and Learning Coordinator

In Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan (2006) describes double-loop learning, or a process by which organizations go beyond simple behavioural changes to reach goals. They do this by questioning the way they normally do things in an effort to improve. The decision process to move from one learning management system to another might be considered an example of double-loop learning.

San Francisco State University (SFSU) began this process after experiencing some technical difficulties with a commercial LMS. The campus had experienced a number of issues related to an upgrade, including intermittent performance issues and a thirteen-hour outage during finals week. While the vendor worked hard to alleviate the problems, the campus began to discuss the future. Based on feedback from faculty focus groups, the campus decided to investigate alternative LMS solutions.

To begin, academic technology staff members looked at several commercial and open source solutions. During the focus groups, the faculty members provided a simple requirement: “We can’t go backward.” In other words, any alternative had to have the same capabilities as the existing LMS. After setting up mock courses in more than ten environments, the academic technology team found that Moodle provided the flexibility to meet faculty and student needs quickly, as well as a nearly parallel set of features for online teaching and learning.

After selecting Moodle, the team created the LMS investigation roadmap. At each stoplight on the roadmap, the campus would evaluate the project status. If Moodle was not meeting teaching and learning needs, then the campus would start over with another tool. If faculty and students gave a “green light”, then the investigation would continue.

In Fall 2004, SFSU began an alpha test with five instructors and 300 students. One instructor with more than 100 students in the alpha test liked it so much for her large class that she moved several large sections totaling 850 students to Moodle for the beta test. In Spring 2005, the campus ran a beta test with 25 instructors and 1,500 students. The academic technology team performed extensive outreach to get faculty in all nine colleges to participate in order to evaluate the needs of different disciplines. An Associate Vice President requested scalability tests in Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 with over 100 instructors and 6,000+ students and 9,000+ students respectively. At each stage, the campus used the roadmap test to verify that it was on the right track.

At the same time, the Academic Technology team worked with the Disability Programs and Resource Center to conduct accessibility testing. This involved more than running a web-based verification program. To make sure that the accessibility testing would address real needs, the campus asked students with disabilities to help test the LMS with assistive technology such as JAWS, a screen reader application, and Dragon Naturally Speaking, a voice recognition program. Similarly, the Academic Technology team worked with an SF State faculty member and a UC Berkeley graduate student in a usability related course to facilitate usability testing with Moodle.

The faculty-run Educational Technology Advisory Committee worked with the team throughout the process and, at the end, made a recommendation to move exclusively to Moodle as the online teaching and learning environment. The recommendations included a list of items for the campus academic technology unit to address, such as improving the grade book and creating a list of frequently asked questions for support. Based on this recommendation, the Provost announced that the campus would use Moodle exclusively when the vendor contract expires in Summer 2007.

While the original drivers were technological, the campus also received equivalent pedagogical and administrative benefits. Instructors have been changing the way they teach, and writing articles about the scholarship of teaching and learning. As Moodle is open source software, the campus has created a consortium of regional two-year and four-year colleges and universities to create economies of scale related to software development, training and support, and other forms of collaboration. More is yet to come.