Posted by Ryan Hutchcroft on January 4th, 2011

Upgrades to our CLMS (custom learning management system) were released this week. Our guest blogger is Ryan Hutchcroft, a programmer at CustomGuide, and he describes these changes below.

This week marks the release of four important changes to our custom learning management system (CLMS). In response to customer feedback, we have spent the last few weeks simplifying the way courses are delivered, adding the ability to control when users receive certificates and retake assessments, updating the Course Status screen, and completely redesigning our reports. We hope these changes make the CLMS easier for users and administrators to use.

1. New Course Delivery Options Administrators now have a few more options on how to deliver a course to their users: Assessment Only, Tutorials Only, and Complete Course.

• Assessment Only course mode delivers assessments without tutorials. This mode can be used to evaluate user skills before learning takes place, or as a separate assessment after course tutorials have been delivered.
• Tutorials Only course mode allows users to focus on learning without pre or post assessments. This mode is for administrators who want users to focus on learning via CustomGuide’s interactive training simulations without assessing user progress.
• Complete Course mode is the entire tutorial and assessment package. First, CustomGuide’s interactive assessments determine the user’s existing skill levels. The results are used to provide personalized courses that only cover unfamiliar topics for that user. Finally, a follow up assessment determines that the desired skills are acquired.

2. Assessment Retries and Percent Correct requirement In addition to the new course delivery options, administrators can set the number of times users can attempt to answer assessment questions. Also, administrators can set the percentage of assessments users need to get correct in order to receive a certificate for a course.

3. Updated Course Status Screen The Course Status screen has been redesigned to reflect the new course delivery options. The Course Status screen now divides pre and post assessments into two columns. It also shows the number of times the user has attempted each assessment. New graphics identify the status of each tutorial and assessment, helping users know exactly where they are in a course.

4. Redesigned Reports Every online learning report has been redesigned in the CLMS. The new reports are designed so that an administrator can drill down from any report into a corresponding report while keeping the same filtering options. The reports also have new layouts and the ability to sort columns by clicking headers. This lends consistency to both the look of the reports and the corresponding data.

We hope that these changes reflect our customers’ needs and make the CLMS easier to use for both administrators and users. Stay tuned for further updates as we continue to make improvements to the CLMS and implement our vision of the future of online learning.