I received an interesting question from someone who is working on providing content to a remote sales force of about 40 people on topics such as selling process, products and selling skills. They currently provide some podcasts and video casts, but would like to track the new content that is being developed now.
It seems like this should be an obvious question. You can put the audio or video inside a SCORM course and load it into an LMS. Given the small audience and limited scope, likely a Rapid Learning Management System would make a lot of sense if that was the direction. I’d have to think a bit more to have a specific suggestion on the course authoring tool for this, but should be easy enough to do this.
However, in this case the sales force is used to accessing this as MP3 and MP4 files available for download into their iPods, iPhones, etc. They are not used to connecting via an LMS. Likely the sales force is not going to be happy about:
- The extra clicks and complexity to access - Does a Learner WANT an LMS?
- Not playing it back on their disconnected mobile device.
This is a fairly common use case. Certainly, I’m missing something. So, asked my various networks about this and got back few responses.
Peter Casebow via twitter:
@tonykarrer got to ask how does it help org to count or know who's had access unless for compliance reasons. What will you do with data?
They do want to track this for helping to make sure that the sales force gets through the content. I.e., follow-up notifications. However, they might be able to get away with putting the core content out the same way they do today and only put the assessments into the LMS. The tracking would only be that they did a portion. This is a change to What Goes in the LMS?
Of course, that assumes that they don’t need to track going through the content and that there are assessments. I’m pretty sure that neither is true.
Is there a better way to do this?
