Follow-on to Moodle Paper - Comments from Totara

Had some great feedback from the community about the corporate Moodle paper.

The following comment/response to our Moodle paper was submitted by Richard Wyles on Kineo's LinkedIn group ... thought it was worth adding here, together with my response ...

Richard Wyles • Thank-you for a timely and interesting read. I thought I'd add comment or two in my position as CEO of Totara, and also someone who has been heavily involved in various Moodle R&D efforts over the past 8 years, including the Moodle Networks and early scalability efforts cited in the paper that led to OU's successful adoption. In many ways the Totara distribution feels like a similar project to others I've led in that all of these initiatives have been designed to address recognised needs. The Totara distribution came was born from the collective experiences the founding partners had with customising Moodle to work in a corporate context. The gaps in functionality were obvious to us, and that repeating similar customisations for each corporate wanting to take the plunge, was wasteful of both their and our resources. It was also obvious that Moodle’s roadmap was focused quite rightly on the educational space. I first floated the idea of a corporate distribution of Moodle in a keynote speech as early as the first Canadian Moodlemoot in Edmonton in 2006.

I prefer to use the term distribution over hybrid as the latter might suggest to some that we've taken two disparate things and joined them. We haven't - we've extended Moodle's feature-set and through the depth of understanding we have within the Kineo Catalyst, and Totara development teams, we've been careful to develop the new functionality in a modular, "pluggable" way that adheres to Moodle's coding styles and standards. From my viewpoint this represents a significant investment into the broader Moodle community, from longtime Moodle contributors and solution vendors, to ensure that it meets the needs of a different market space. I sometimes think of Totara as simply Moodle's "Business Edition" although of course that is an unofficial moniker.

We agree with Elearnity that the LMS marketplace suffers from a "perception of poor user interfaces,overly complex workflows, and high costs for licensing, support and maintenance." We're also of the view that, given the inherent difference between an academic educational model and corporate training learning, then it is unsurprising that ‘out of the box’ Moodle is not widely used in corporate contexts. Our mission is to address those functionality gaps, offer much greater flexibility through the GPL, and offer an alternative that dramatically lowers the costs of ownership - in short a better product at a better price, and with built-in flexibility to go further.

It is early days, like the reports says, but within not much more than a year of launching we have over 150 clients supporting this move, 12 of whom have up to 50,000 users and 3 with up to 250,000 users. We need to get further case studies written up!

Thanks again for an interesting report.

Richard Wyles
CEO - Totara Learning Solutions 

... and my response ...

 

David Wilson • Thanks Richard for your comments. Very constructive and I think reinforcing some of the key points we were trying to make in our report.

Our research into Moodle in the corporate environment was started a few years ago, and part of it obviously pre-dates the existence of Totara (and some other corporate-focused Moodle variants). We see Totara as specifically trying to bridge the functional gaps to fit into corporate learning models and environments, and we will continue to track your progress with interest.

The main point here is that Moodle gets frequently described as a) an LMS, and b) a suitable corporate solution, without any real understanding of the context of these things. The reality is there are real questions with both parts of this.

Moodle has started to become extensively adopted in corporates, but not as a true LMS, more as an e-learning portal. It is also often used tactically for specific programmes rather than as the global enterprise-wide solution for all learning programmes.

That's fine, but organisations need to understand the difference. It's also interesting that (at least from our research to date), Moodle is rarely used inside corporates as a true VLE either - i.e. to support collaborative asynchronous blended learning programmes.

The second point of suitability is not just a functional issue, but also one of service, deployment and support. Suitability is actually more about the types of service partners supporting corporate customers, and their scope/capability to offer trans-national or global services and enterprise-class solution infrastructure and SLAs.

Overall, we want to help to make corporate buyers more aware of the realities of Moodle today, and to positively influence their approach to Moodle as an opportunity. We also want to continue to encourage and challenge the supply-side of the equation too; to help improve the value for corporates and decrease their risk.

Best regards,
David

A response to the supposed "Death of the LMS" question

It seems very trendy to ask this question currently, but in my view the debate is not very objective. Market pundits often link the discussion of potential demise of LMS to the growth in interest in informal and social learning, defining the LMS as a tool that's relevant only to formal. Other big advocates of the "no LMS" world are often vendors whose vested interests lie in alternative solutions. Neither of these is to my mind a convincing argument.

So what's the reality? We do a lot of research in FTSE100 companies and similar organisations. The reality is that the major business drivers for an LMS within these companies are not just intact, they are increasing. Regulatory and compliance pressure has increased not decreased. Pressure on efficient operational processes has increased not decreased. The importance of talent and capability has increased not decreased. All of these drivers reinforce the need for coherent and automated management processes for learning, and therefore the need for an LMS.

The pressure in most corporates is actually to consolidate their LMSs, as most of them have multiple solutions in different units and geographies, and to better align the processes of the LMS to a 21st century learning model. That means more than just classroom training and click-and-turn e-learning content. The majority of our clients want to adopt informal learning, but this is an add-on, not a replacement for their formal learning. Of course some existing formal courses can get replaced by more efficient and effective informal approaches, but the majority cannot and will not.

The other argument that gets raised against the LMS is that of "tracking". The view seems to be that when a course was formal we wanted to track and report it, but if its informal we don't. If we don't want to track it, we don't need an LMS. Or at least that's the argument. Personally, I think this is rubbish. The entire Internet is tracked. Doesn't matter whether its a PDF, a youtube video, a page of html or an entry in a discussion forum, its always tracked.

The question is not one of tracking at all - its really about purpose of tracking. It is right to say that the purpose of tracking is different between an informal learning resource and a formal course. But it was different anyway between a classroom event and an e-learning module. With informal learning, the purpose of tracking is to ensure relevance, to rate its value, and to sometimes to pay for it if its someone else's IP. These patterns of relevance and value help connect informal and formal learning. After all, this a continuum or ecosystem of learning, not completely separate worlds. All of these approaches have a place together, and ultimately LMS's have to adapt to this new reality, just as they had to adapt to e-learning and virtual classrooms.

Organisations will still need their LMS and the LMS vendors aren't going away - in fact despite the mergers and acquisitions, there are still probably more LMS companies now that ever. The needs of an LMS are changing though to reflect the change nature of learning. Whilst certain vendors may want you to think otherwise, the reality is different.

SAP, Sharepoint or specialist LMS?

The following is a response I recently posted to a question on the LSG discussion site concerning the use of SAP or Sharepoint as an LMS versus "well-known" LMS products (in the case of the question, he cited Moodle and Kallidus). Thought the response might be of interest to a broader community ...

The short answer is "depends on what you want to do with your LMS"! Or "horses for courses" as the saying goes.

In our experience, the selection of an ERP LMS solution (SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft) tends to be driven by strategic IT issues rather than functional fit or the needs of learners or L&D. Whilst the SAP Enterprise Learning platform continues to improve in functionality, there is still a functional gap vs best of breed platforms. There is also a tendancy for ERP platforms to be positioned as "effectively free" as the organisation has already committed to the HR platform. This is highly misleading as there is typically an incremental license for the LMS (e.g. for SAP EL over and above SAP HR), and the implementation costs for the ERP LMS are typically larger than best of breed alternatives.

There is a lot of interest in portal-led learning solutions currently, and the integration of LMS functionality into Sharepoint is becoming a common question. Currently we would not consider either the SLK or Sharepoint LMS as an enterprise class option. That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider them, just that you need to be very clear they will meet your specific tactical requirements as they are unlikely to meet the common requirements of a corporate standard LMS platform. Our concern currently is that a corporates will get sucked into creating custom LMS solutions in Sharepoint; a strategy we certainly wouldn't recommend (with any portal platform).

Interestingly you then refer to well-known LMSs such as Moodle or Kallidus. Kallidus is clearly a corporate LMS that has historically been successful in mid-tier companies, and is increasingly winning business in larger enterprises as well.

Moodle is not however really an LMS. It is (in academic speak) a Virtual Learning Environment or Course Management System. We have recently completed specific research on the relevance of Moodle to the corporate market (results to hopefully be published in the new year). Whilst Moodle can provide an effective e-learning launch and track platform, it needs significant customisation or add-on functionality to fulfil the role of a corporate LMS. A number of companies (e.g. Aardpress, Kineo, Remote Learner etc.) have developed extensions to do this, but in our research through corporate Moodle adopters, we really struggled to find good examples of companies using Moodle as an enterprise LMS.

Hope this is helpful. Happy to discuss further offline if you want to email me (davidw@elearnity.com).

Regards, David.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): the Impact on Learning & Talent Systems

A Webinar featuring David Wilson, of Elearnity, will explore how investing in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based talent management solutions is helping organisations increase productivity and ensure high performers are engaged, developed, connected and retained – while also lowering costs. The complimentary session, sponsored by Cornerstone OnDemand, is entitled “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): the Impact on Learning & Talent Systems” and is scheduled for Thursday, 14th May from 3pm to 4pm GMT.

According to analyst firm Gartner, the global enterprise market for SaaS will rise by nearly 22 percent in 2009, as companies turn to Web-based applications as a way to reduce costs during the economic downturn. This includes increased adoption of on-demand human capital management applications by organisations seeking economical yet effective ways for managing and developing employees.

David Wilson, Elearnity’s founder and Managing Director, commented, “SaaS is having a significant impact on the learning and talent systems market, both for enterprise customers, as well as the mid-tier market. We also see it as being particularly attractive in the current economic climate.”

Learning and human resources (HR) leaders participating in Thursday’s Webinar will:

• Discover why leading organisations are turning to SaaS to accelerate change and deliver more value for the business from their learning and talent systems
  
  
• Explore specific HR business drivers – including cost/time savings, scalability and flexibility – that make SaaS a superior technology option
  
  
• Learn the key questions to ask when considering potential SaaS-based learning and talent solutions

During the session, Wilson will preview analysis and recommendations from Elearnity’s latest research. Elearnity’s research and analysis focuses on the key innovations challenging corporate learning organisations, including e-learning and blended learning, learning management strategy and systems, the impact of learning and increasing value-add, and integrating learning with human capital and performance. Elearnity’s research process is designed to develop deeper insights into corporate realities and best practice, and an independent understanding of vendor capabilities and performance.

To register for the Webinar, visit: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=127366&sessionid=1&key=CCF502FDC19380DB30AA8825ED3B21B8&sourcepage=register

Impact of SaaS on Learning & Talent Systems

On 14th May, David will be previewing a new Elearnity research paper on the impact of Software-as-a-Service on Learning & Talent Systems at a Webinar hosted by Cornerstone OnDemand.

Click here for more information and to register for the event. The paper will be made available after the webinar.

Learning Technologies on the Rise

The Learning Technologies conference and exhibition still continues to be the best learning technology and e-learning event to attend in the UK. Hosted at Olympia in London last week, the conference was the largest yet, and the exhibition was sold out and seemed pretty consistently busy (at least whenever I was on the floor).

Here is a link to trainingzone's view of the conference, and Training Journal's view of the show overall.

LT is always a busy event for us and this year was no exception with a number of meetings and vendor briefing updates, plus the usual time hunting out new companies and products. Overall, I think it was a good show and it was heartening (especially for the vendors) to see the level of activity and interest despite the current economic doom and gloom!

My session in the conference on LMS 2.0 subtitled "Does the LMS have a place in a web 2.0 world?" seemed to be received positively, and I have already had a few requests for our animoto remix of Daniel Siddle's "Meet Charlotte". The slides have just been uploaded onto our knowledge centre.

PS. The LMS 2.0 topic is an area of ongoing research for us and happy to receive any thoughts or ideas, or links to relevant research or product information. Please email us at our incoming news feed news@elearnity.com.

Who wants to see an LMS anyway?

If you put me on the rack and asked me whether most large corporates need a Learning Management System (LMS) then I’d have to say yes. If you are a large enterprise that needs to organise and track formal learning activity then it’s practically a given.

The problem for most LMSs in corporate environments is that actually they are usually at least three clicks away from when they are most needed by the user, and even then, a learner isn’t usually that interested in the fact they’ve accessed the LMS. It’s part of the journey, but not necessarily the chosen destination. What they are really after is the right learning, at the right time, with the right context with the right impact to make a difference. Most of the time they want to be looking at the learning content, in whatever form, that comes. Not the LMS.

Alternatively, if they are interested in development planning – they want to be analysing development paths, getting insight into their unique attributes, their potential and creating the roadmap that will deliver their aspirations. Again, they are interested in the destination not the mechanism.

And for corporate learning technology managers this is a problem, because without making the outcome the most visible part of the development journey, rather than the system that co-ordinates it, there will always be an extra barrier to LMSs delivering their maximum value.

One way around this is to use portals and deep linking to, in effect, make the LMS invisible. These are inherently more user focussed. The LMS is still there, but doing its job in the background, rather than obviously in the foreground.

Afterall, with the exception of the LMS vendor and the team who put it in, who really wants to see an LMS anyway....?

Is LMS a corporate competency?

I've recently had a number of conversations with some corporate L&D leaders where we've been debating the ability of large organisations to effectively implement and manage enterprise LMSs. I say debate, but most of the time they have been lamenting their organisations inability to "do LMS things properly". That's not to say that they weren't serious about it - they were very earnest in their procurement processes with requirements documents and business cases coming out of their ears. In fact, to mix my metaphors, they were struggling to see the woods for the trees (or at least the printed ITT responses!).

This prompted me back to some research we did a couple of years ago, when we questioned the approaches and skills/expertise that many large organisations were applying to their enterprise LMS projects. (click here for the original article). In this we highlighted a number of common failings, many of which are still true today.

• Large corporates, particularly in the UK and Europe, are generally too slow in embracing LMSs and too limited in their aspiration for them. For large organisations, LMSs are fundamental to enabling a viable and sustainable future for corporate learning.
  
  
• Many corporate LMS implementations are too focused on reducing the admin burden and not sufficiently focused on enabling the business to meet its future challenges.
  
  
• LMS decisions are often plagued by corporate politics, poor organisational alignment and a lack of strategic understanding and vision, resulting in long and expensive procurement processes with a limited chance of delivering real value.
  
  
• Corporates struggle with a lack of skilled implementation resources and poor support , focusing too heavily on technology, and insufficiently on process and cultural change.

How many of them would you recognise from your organisation or customers today???

Learning Content Management Research

We've just announced the results of our recent research into Learning Content Management which you might find interesting.

We believe the research strong indicates that large organisations need coherent strategies for producing and managing learning content that are geared to the needs and structure of their business ... and that, currently, they generally don't have them.

A copy of the exec paper can be downloaded from here.

I'm interested in your comments ...

Putting the Service in LMS

What proportion of corporate LMS projects fail because of issues with the way they are implemented or run, rather than inadequacies in the underlying LMS application?

This is a key question we have been exploring for some time in our LMS research and it seems to me to really challenge some of the vendor market messaging, and the corporate mindset on LMS procurement. Our historic research tends to point to the view that many LMS projects fail (or at least fail to meet their original expectations) because of poor ... insert your choice of ... implementation, customisation, integration, support, operations, administration, etc. In other words, poor service.

Many of the "lessons learnt" from our roundtables relate more to the services around the LMS, than the LMS itself. These can include: poor architecture design and performance, problematic HR integration, excess customisation and failure to upgrade, no change management inside L&D, lack of long term direction, poor expectation management. These are all largely indicative of "service" failure rather than application failure.

Sure, application choice has an impact on how these services are performed, and how difficult it is to achieve the outcome. I'm not saying it isn't important, just that it is not the only thing that is important. Maybe choosing the best implementation partner is more important than choosing the best application? And surely even choosing the LMS is itself a service proposition (clarifying strategy, building the business case, understanding requirements, shortlisting potential products, planning, negotiating the contract etc.).

We have doing quite a lot of thinking about the service proposition of LMS, but I would be interested in your thoughts on the matter.

DAVID

Moodle for Corporate Learning?

A few weeks ago I put a question out to the Moodle community regarding the appropriateness and usage of Moodle in the corporate learning environment. I have to say, so far I have underwhelmed by the level of response and interest, with only a few prviate responses so far.

Elearnity is very interested in the potential for open source learning solutions in a corporate context, but frankly, we currently are skeptical at the degree of corporate fit and focus they have today. We know of some organisations who have been doing some successful work with Moodle in particular in the corporate arena, but would be keen to here from many more.

I am also happy to provide a summary of our research view to people making a good contribution to me/us. Happy to start a discussion here, or for more sensitive inputs please email me directly.

DAVID

The future of LMS

Tony Karrer has put a post about the future directions of LMS.

It's funny because we've been working on some thinking similar to this internally within Elearnity. Some recent corporate discussions together with some of our futures research has also pointed us towards rethinking the model underlying the LMS, but to be honest, not necessarily many of the drivers for wanting an LMS.

Its interesing about you and Lee likening it to Google Analytics. Our current thinking is that the LMS will become like Google - a diversified mix of services and interfaces - anarchic but inherently with underlying structure and connectively. Systems that can optimise our experience of it are critical, but so are systems that can optimise how the connections work behind the scene. This is potentially what the LMS will become.

... an interesting discussion ...

DAVID

SaaS for Enterprise Learning?

I have long though that there was a significant potential role for ASP or Software-as-a-Service learning solutions for large enterprise organisations, but I'm not sure whether the vendors really see this (beyond those that SaaS is their main offering anyway). Yes they get the fact that SaaS is a good approach to sub-Enterprise customers (mid-tier etc), and that it is a useful tactical tool for accelerating enterprise customers. But they don't seem to see it as the long term platform of choice for them, believing that privately hosted or behind the firewall are the likely options.

I'm not sure I agree. Tactical platforms have a habit of being more long term than originally envisaged - especially given the challenge with the strategic ducks lined up! I'm also unconvinced that the perceived cost of SaaS over the longer term is disadvantageous compared with fully-costed internal or externally hosted solutions. And you would seem to get much greater flexibility with SaaS, both in terms of commitment, and in terms of flexibility of service, compared with the detailed terms and conditions that a hosting service or internal IT department wants to impose.

I'm interested to know what you think ...

Corporate e-learning trends - headlines for Europe

I know it seems a bit early to start the "what's the trends for 2007" stories, but someone just asked me for such a view based on our corporate research. Thought you might also be interested in the answer. As always, happy for feedback.

For 2007, we expect the key developments for corporates to be around a) reconstructing and expanding the e-learning supply chain, b) reengineering and integrating learning management processes, and c) a diversifcation of e-learning content including experimentation with alternative delivery approaches.

A big part of a) is adoption of rapid e-learning inside corporates, and we expect most organisations to acquire tools and grow activities (if they haven't done so already). But we expect corporates to also start to realise the limitations of the rapid model, not least, the challenges for managing quality, educational value, and technical assurance. Whilst we are advocates of rapid e-learning, we also believe it is significantly over-hyped currently, and more sophisticated approaches are required. In addition, we also expect to see more changes in the ways corporates use external custom e-learning developers with increasing pressures for lower-cost, more rapid external solutions as well, and for self-maintenance.

b) Many corporates are reevaluating their LMS strategy going forward, and now increasingly interested in integrated talent and performance management. Although consistent with the grand ERP/HRMS story, and often the overall direction for extending use of their ERP platform, the HR sub-functions are sceptical of the fit of these products to their specific functional needs. We expect to see tactical successes for the LMS vendors in the performance and talent space, although longer term we still expect to see pressure from IT for a single integrated HR/ERP solution.

c) Although Wikis and podcasting maybe very trendy currently, most corporates are not really using them. We expect to see more experimentation in 2007, and some very interesting project successes, but we do not expect this to become truly mainstream in corporate usage. We also expect to see a shift away from traditional large e-learning course-based content towards smaller, more granular just-in-time e-content and performance support. We also expect to see referenceware growing in popularity relative to traditional e-learning courses, and greater adoption of virtual meeting/classroom technologies, which have now matured and are more widely available.

Across all of the above we expect to see more externalising of the infrastructure to deliver it, i.e. further growth in ASP or Software as a Service delivered infrastructure and solutions.

Key corporate drivers: immediate solutions, lower cost, more flexibility, more connected/aligned, bypassing internal constraints

The LMS M&A Drag Factor

We all know there has been (and still is) a lot of mergers & acquisition activity in the LMS market, with plenty of consolidation going on. But although we've seen a lot of vendor consolidation, how much consolidation of products have we actually been.

Whilst some of the vendors have been very focused on trying to consolidate market share, they seem to be struggling to actually consolidate the customer bases underneath them. For example, Click2Learn and Docent merged to form SumTotal Systems. SumTotal then buys Pathlore, who itself had fairly recently bought DK Systems, and Pathlore still had quite a lot of old Registrar customers that still hadn't moved off that platform. Now SumTotal may have a large user base, but user base for what? Certainly not the current SumTotal platform - yet. And SumTotal is not unique by any stretch of imagination. We even see this is smaller regional providers that have been playing the M&A game. Most of the LMS vendors have at least some of this kind of historical consolidation challenge.

One key reason for this is because many of the major customers just upgrade to the latest release of their old product to maximise their support window. They then sit and wait to see how things evolve with the new company. So it takes a while, often more than two years plus to see how a given customer base will react to the acquisition of its vendor, sometimes longer. We're also seeing the same thing happening (but with even longer timescales) in the HR systems space following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. This isn't so much a function of size, but of perceived effort versus value to move sooner.

Elearnity has been tracking and analysing these vendors for many years. But one new strategic consideration that we're now factoring in is what I call the "LMS M&A Drag Factor". Its all full well and good having a large user base, but you have to be able to service it and move it forward. That's tough to do in the LMS world with multiple platforms and technology bases. The more diverse this is, the more effort needed to leverage it yourself, and the bigger your investment sometimes needed to create something more compelling to move everyone forward with you, rather than jumping ship with someone else. I think the LMS M&A Drag Factor will have quite an influence on individual companies performances in 2007/8.

David