If you work in a medium-to-large organisation, you’ve probably come across tactical, online learning solutions designed to meet a specific need at a specific moment in time.
Examples might include:
- driver awareness training
- bribery and corruption training
- sales training
- diversity training
Often this is provided by means of a special website, sometimes from an external supplier.
It looks easy. You get a list of the people who need to do the training, they do it and then you get a list back of who’s done it.
It’s usually slightly more complicated than that!
How will you ensure everyone can log in OK?
How would you ensure that everyone, including new starters, knows they have to do it?
Who’s going to keep track of the results? How often? And where will those results be stored?
Use your LMS
You’re likely to already have a system that manages who does what learning. People will already have a login and it’s already got somewhere to capture and report on who has done what.
It’s called a learning management system.
So how can I make use of that centralised functionality, while still allowing for best of breed tactical Solutions?
That’s where LTI (or Learning Tools Interoperability) comes in.
Learning Tools Interoperability
LTI is a standard that allows a user to login to the LMS, launch an external resource, and get a results sent back to the LMS with no separate setting up of users in the external system and no separate login for those users.
This technique is already used widely in the Education world but not yet in Corporate L&D. Hardly any corporate LMS support LTI and similarly not many of the available tactical solutions. However, there is a way to get started with LTI quickly…
If you are a supplier of a tactical learning solution and you already use Moodle or Totara then LTI has been baked in from Moodle 3.1 onwards. Any course, or any activity within the course, can be published as a learning tool to be used by any LTI-compliant LMS.
You just need to give your customer the secret key for that published tool.
And, if you’re already using Moodle or Totara as your LMS you can already use any LTI compliant tool from within it.
So, next time you procure another tactical learning solution why not ask if they support LTI. It’ll make your life, and that of your employees, so much simpler.
Editor’s note
This post was created in half the time using Speechpad - a free, web-based text to speech tool.
Posted: 20 June 2017
Tags: Supplier selection Content management Solutions architecture
Related articles
- How to buy software
- Moodle initial configuration
- PowerBI and Moodle lessons learned
- How to integrate systems
- Standards based learning content
- Introduction to elearning standards
Learning Technology Connections newsletter
Sign up now for information, ideas, tools and techniques - sent monthly
