Assignment 3: Designing Curriculum for Your LMS

QUESTION ONE

When comparing proprietary LMS, there are 3 top vendors in the market namely; Litmos, Learn Upon and TalentLMS. However, when looking at the best LMS an organization would consider using, Litmos is the right choice to consider. This is because Litmos unifies learning management, extended enterprise and content management systems to meet organization training needs (Noe et al. 2016). It also lets users build logical learning paths, send messages and notifications and track corporate compliance. It supports Tin Can and SCORM content, mobile access and many third-party applications.

For an organization looking to use an open access LMS, Moodle is without doubt one of the best. It features multimedia support, dashboards and learner tracking (McGill et al. 2015). It also gives a user the ability to create mobile friendly online courses and integrate third party add-ons. Moodle stands out because of its ‘user community’ tool which unlike many other open source solutions helps you get answers almost immediately by accessing the online support database and downloading pre-made eLearning courses thus saving you the time and trouble of creating them from scratch.

QUESTION TWO

Looking at Moodle, its feature in multimedia support, dashboard and learner tracking make it one of the best open source LMS one can rely on. It however may be a little complicated for new users, and this gives their rivals an advantage over them. Creating an open source license is free since no cost is incurred when joining this plan. That’s an opportunity that saves the organization money and attracts more customers to join the plan. The major threat to Moodle as an open source LSM is that the system may a little more complicated compared to those of PLM’s and that makes it hard for new users to familiarize with the system. That threatens the popularity of the system since new users are unlikely to use it if it’s going to give them a hard time.

The benefits of using Litmos as a Proprietary Learning Management System compared to other rivals is that it lets users build logical learning paths, send messages and notifications and track corporate compliance (Dougiamas et al. 2013). Although despite that, it still has a weakness. Its systems cannot be used to train customers, students, partners or employees and can’t be customized to one’s own needs. However, it still supports Tin Can and SCORM content and also mobile access and some other third-party applications. The organization can use that as an opportunity to attract more customers. There’s also access to a range of added premium features which are not available to clients who choose open source systems.

QUESTION THREE

Based on this analysis, the proprietary LMS would support the organization’s needs much better than the open source. The organization may incur costs setting up one but despite that, there’s a lot the organization would gain from using choosing to use it over the open source. With a 24-hour customer service and support, there will be a high customer satisfaction rate and that will most likely elevate their brand reputation. Open source systems may be free but still one may incur costs (Cole et al. 2017). For example, if the organization decided to adopt Moodle, the software may cause nothing. However, they would still have to purchase servers to host it and they would also have to hire or train people to run the servers and optimize the software to work effectively.

References

Cole, J., & Foster, H. (2017). Using Moodle: Teaching with the popular open source course management system. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".

Dougiamas, M., & Taylor, P. (2013). Moodle: Using learning communities to create an open source course management system. In EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology (pp. 171-178). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

McGill, T. J., & Klobas, J. E. (2015). A task–technology fit view of learning management system impact. Computers & Education, 52(2), 496-508.

Noe, R., Hollenbeck, J., Gerhart, B., & Wright, P. (2016). Human Resources Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, Tenth Global Edition. McGraw-Hill Education.