At Orion 21, we like to talk a lot about power of content in support of delivering your message. A humorous video, an entertaining game activity, an engaging slide show; these are all forms of content that can effectively make the pitch or communicate a concept.
When it comes to the learning needs of your business, church, or school, content is absolutely critical to the success of your learning audience. If your learners don't connect with the content, no learning will take place and your message will be lost.
In a learning environment, there is another factor that is equally critical: content delivery. No matter how effective the content may be, it is useless if it is never presented to your learners.
When planning for an online learning presentation, make sure you take into consideration these important aspects of delivery:
- How will learners discover the availability of your presentation or course?
- How will learners register their intention of participating, or how do you ensure that they have acknowledged required participation?
- Where will learners go to view the presentation, whether online or in a classroom?
- How will you track each learners' progress and ensure they have consumed the entire presentation?
- Do learners need to be quizzed on what they learned in order to gauge their retention of the information presented?
- If so, what were the results for each, and what steps should be taken those with lower quiz scores?
- Should the content be restricted in any way? Is it proprietary?
As you might conclude from the foregoing questions, figuring out how to deliver the content is often as challenging as producing the content itself.
Fortunately, there are products and services that provide solutions to the delivery aspects listed above: these fall under the category of Learning Management Systems, or LMS for short.
An LMS can be an off-the-shelf software package that you install on a server, or it can be a hosted service that you purchase online. The acquisition cost of an LMS can range dramatically, from thousands of dollars for industry behemoth Blackboard to zero dollars for the open source Moodle system. The variance in the cost range is not just a byproduct of feature set, but also of the amount of assistance and on-going support involved in setting up and maintaining the LMS.
Once in place, you provide information to the LMS that describes the content you will deliver, how it will be delivered, and who it can be delivered to.
For example, a church minister who is seeking to deliver sermons online would log into the LMS as an administrator and add the following information:
- A list of sermons
- Upload the content for each sermon, i.e. video, slides, and perhaps a quiz or questionnaire
- Any information on restrictions, i.e. whether the sermon is for married couples only, or perhaps a time frame on when the sermon is available
Once this information is loaded into the LMS, the system manages learner interaction. Learners can go to the LMS Web site and log in, then consume the content.
Following the scenario above, a congregant might interact with the system in this way:
- Visits the learning site; if it's the first visit, creates their own account with a user name, password, and other relevant profile information
- Registers for a sermon they want to view
- Initiates the sermon, i.e. starts the presentation and reviews the content at their own pace
- Responds to any quiz or questionnaire
As learners consume the courses, administrators can track the progress of each, or view summary reports indicating the aggregate response to courses being taken.
Administrators can also set up courses to link to each other depending on the performance of the learner. For example, if a learner performs poorly on a quiz for a particular course, the LMS can then require the learner to take a more basic course to strengthen fundamental concepts.
An LMS is not only a useful management tool for presenting content, it is absolutely vital in support of a learning environment. If you're preparing to teach or train, we can provide hosted LMS services for your organization and help you get your curriculum set up and ready to present. Please visit our Contact page to get started.
