[Reflection] learning MANAGEMENT system

'Is the LMS dead' (and if not, what future does it have) was a big debate in learning land the past year. You can find a good summary of the arguments and blog posts back and forth on the Internet Time Alliance blog. The debate also popped up at conferences like here and soon here. In this article, I want to add my 2 eurocents to the debate. I'm not going to take the angle of 'formal versus social' learning here, as many have done, but focus on what the LMS is good (or bad) at. What are our expectations of the good ol' (or bad ol') LMS?

Let's start by writing it right. A lot of the confusion and inflated expectations of LMS systems might originate in us calling it

LMS or Learning Management System

 when we should be writing it as

lMs or learning MANAGEMENT system

- Historic perspective
--Productivity of training processes management
The LMS was primarily introduced as a productivity tool for the administration of training processes. Before the LMS, companies had no idea how much they were spending in either time or money on training, let alone if that investment yielded anything or if it was allocated correctly or in line with business priorities. Furthermore, the training processes were mostly manual and at best tracked by various people at various levels in individual and obviously different spreadsheets. The LMS was a enormous productivity boost for the management of the training processes. It also allowed to actually get a baseline of the training activity in the company, by division and by professional. Combine that with the cult of 'you can only manage what you can measure', and you get a gist of what happened next...

--One LMS to rule them all
At that particular time the high investment in an LMS system only made sense if you did it at a central level. The biggest obstacles in early day LMS implementations were not the technology, but rather the politics that unleash when you centralize and track stuff that used to be owned as a semi-black box by people all over the organization chart. 

--New learning formats
Did the LMS do much for the productivity of learning? Well, it did enable a whole new range of learning activities, the ones with the 'e' in front of them. An LMS can deliver e-content. This makes access to learning more productive. I call this the typical 'anyX' value proposition. It is the any time, any place, (any device) promise that we largely fulfilled as a training industry.  But is that sufficient to claim the LMS did a world of good for the learning itself, defined as the magical thing that happens in our grey box? At best, the learning part inside LMS systems is 'pedagogically neutral' to reach the widest audience possible for the tool. (Moodle is a well known exception as it is rooted in social constructivism.) The LMS complies to standards that noone follows to the latest levels. Yes, we have SCORM 2004 standards that allow for deep personalisation of learning content, and branching and sequencing and all those other goodies that are happily ignored by the far majority of courses out there. So did the LMS do a world of good for supporting personal or team learning? Yes in access to content and yes in the potential to personalize courses, but the latter one that is a promise we did not fulfill as an industry.

-At present
--The fortress
At present the LMS is a fortress guarded by the training function, and the house of the 'approved' learning content, as opposed to the (occasionally despised) informal or social learning that is anywhere else. It is the house of the training 'that matters' because we all need to comply. (compliance tracking) It is the home of the one-size fits all content that followed the design principles of instructional designers, often made in an ADDIE process or bought in bulk quantity from courseware providers, compliant with standards and accessible for the disabled. We deeply know that one size is always the wrong size, but cost reasons drive us to create the least common denominator training content that fits for all, put our stamp of approval on it, and protect it from search agents behind the walls of the LMS. The LMS is where you go to for quality learning. The rest you have at your fingertips.

--The brand image
At the same time, our professionals (we call them learners too, reducing our workforce to only one dimension) feel cheated by the LMS and e-learning. They now need to find their own classes in a massive catalogue a cat couldn't find its kittens in and enroll themselves in what they hope is what they need. The brand promise of e-learning is close to: "you are on your own, have to do it on your own time, without access to experts, and in the end if you don't know your stuff it can only be because you are a dumb misfit in our organization culture".

My point : it is a learning MANAGEMENT system. The lMs is really about managing administrative processes for the learning function, and spitting out the corresponding reports and metrics. Nothing wrong with that. As a side-effect the lMs did a world of good to access to learning content.  It did not so much for the learning process, as the thing that happens in our grey box. But who were we kidding thinking it should or could? The real learning, I'm afraid, is under the 'management' of the (team of) learner(s).


-Strong and weak points
So let us have a look at what the LMS or lMs is good/bad at.

• Searching: not so good. If you want to find information, you'd better Google or use your intranet search function. Searching inside the LMS is not by far as mature as modern search engines, and to make things worse formal learning content is often stored in places where the search crawlers can't find them. Philosophical question: if you can't find a course, does it really exist?
• Tracking: splendid. The LMS was made for tracking. An LMS is essentially an application that fills in a database. It keeps track of who does what for how long and with what score. An LMS is the wet dream of the training manager who needs to get the metrics and dashboards in place. It also makes the LMS thé place to be for compliance training. What counts in compliance training is the check mark 'done' at the end. Let's not kid ourselves into believing anything beyond that.
• Hosting and delivering learning content: very good but not a monopoly. Yes, the LMS can host and deliver various e-activities such as e-learning courses, e-books, virtual classes, etc. But all those activities can be delivered outside the LMS just as good, or depending on the niche tool you use even better. Do we really need one system to host everything?
• Supporting learning: (the thing inside our heads) Mixed verdict. The LMS did some good, has the unfulfilled potential to do more good, and has at the same time disillusioned a generation of learners. We discussed this above. If it is any good at supporting learning, it is individual, not team learning.
• Security : very well. The LMS is a Chinese wall around the formal, approved learning and serves well in assuring only the worthy or needy get to it. But aren't we going too far with this? Do we really want such tight control? Why should management training only be available to actual managers and not to every potential manager (ie everyone)? Why should only the wise and true in the training club decide on making a course? At Google for example, the cloudcourse system allows anyone to set up a course.
• Scaling: bulls eye. The LMS has been used for its scale and scope effects to get to the intended productivity impact. It can provide a global workflow management for the training processes, maintain one catalog of training providers, track all training activities for everyone inside (or even outside) the company, and deliver e-content to the masses.

-It is about scaling.
My point is that you can decide what an LMS needs to do today by taking the argument of scaling. An LMS as a technology allows for scale and scope effects. So what scales well and needs to scale well?

• Administrative processes. The processes like enrollment, class cancellation, attendance lists, satisfaction, trainer and room allocation, certificates management, etc all scale very well. You do well to have a system to support this workflow. Should that be a central system for the globe? Maybe. Like stock exchanges fluctuate in cyclic movements from despair to euphoria, company structures tend to alternate between centralization and decentralization. If you have a globally integrated company like I do, it makes sense to unify it to a global level. You may even outsource these processes, with system and all.
• Tracking/reporting. Reporting works better if it is on a unified system and database, as opposed to when the data is fragmented allover the place in different formats. While you can counter the need for a central tracking system (Did I say LMS? No I didn't, see below.) with a currently still prohibitively expensive and time consuming business intelligence initiative, you do well to stick with one central tracking system with the current state of technology.
• For all the rest, scale is not needed anymore, or not possible. Technically speaking we don't need to opt for a monolithic system to deliver training content. We have clouds now, and single-function apps, and people that are able to use more than one single tool to achieve a result. 

- Suggestions for 2011 and beyond
I do not own a crystal ball (and if I did, I wouldn't tell you.) so I can't predict how LMS systems will evolve and if they have a future and if so, which one. But a boy can dream, so here are my suggestions for 2011 and beyond.

-- Suggestion 1: Do NOT go back to the dark ages

You need the automated workflow support for the formal training you offer. Whether your training workflow process support is done by an LMS or integrated in the systems that do similar productivity goodness or workflow for other processes is a typical tool selection question. The answer lies in the technology fit with your IT, your current ERP and other tools, what you want to do and how good tools are at that, the cost of it all, the support you get for the tool and the likelihood the tool will exist next year, etc. Should that process management tool be owned by a central global learning function? Let your organization culture decide on that. Ask yourself this: how do meeting rooms get booked at your organization? You probably don't have a 'meeting department' that is in charge of organizing proper meetings. (You do own a training department paradoxically.) Maybe you don't have an application for it, but you need to put a post-it 'room booked' or ask the secretary. That is the unproductive way, similar to the spreadsheet age of training management. I hope you can access a central room booking application, either for your location or world wide. Maybe that is your own application, maybe it is integrated in your Outlook or Lotus Notes calendar... Maybe it is an outsourced application. All that can apply to the 'training process management' system as well.

-- Suggestion 2: Separate tracking from delivery

Separate the delivery and the tracking of learning competence building activities.You do NOT need one single integrated system for AND learning delivery AND training process workflow management AND tracking/reporting AND collaboration AND .... In fact that is countra-productive as it triggers gatekeepers to decide what goes and what doesn't go, and triggers all the outcasts to find ways to have it anyway. (Like the occasional departmental Moodle server onder the desk.) A core, well working and scalable capability of your LMS is to track learning activities. It is one of its most used and valuable features. So have a system in place tracking everything, but let none of that be stored 'inside' the system. One of the HoCo concept sites on my drawing table is 'doneNdone'. From anywhere you can link to this system and track you've done it, maybe by doing a small survey or writing down personal reflections or what you intend to do with it. It just tracks from all sources, but leaves the competence building activities where they are best, and that is not necessarily inside an LMS. And yes, I'm writing competence building activity, not just 'learning'. Get blurry on your definition of learning, and allow to track experience, endorsements from other people, coaching conversations, activity in social spaces, and anything that adds evidence of your development and performance.

-- Suggestion 3: Let learning go back where it belongs

Learning, as the thing that happens in our grey box, is more likely to happen in the proper context of work than in the entertaining comfort of a classroom. As I'm in favor of separating the tracking from the content/delivery/activity I am pleading both for a central tracking system, and a decentral, spectrum of competence building content and activities where they belong best. Let it go to all devices and clouds. Let the learning go back to the tons of applications that are not designed specifically for learning, but have it as a by-product. Let it go back to the business units where they belong, back to the subject experts and their communities of peers. Let it go back to the work and the daily workflow. Let it go back to where it can be found by search agents, and integrated in your social tools. Let it go back to the professional worker of the network age.

[This must be one of the longest blog posts I've written so far. I'm tired now. I'll do the spell check another time. :-)]