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Leveraging Your Learning Management System With Your Assessment Management System
by Charles de la Motte
BACKGROUND
A Learning Management System (LMS) stores many
results, but the results are by-and-large at a summary level.
For example, a result might be that Sandy Green completed
training on March 12, 2007 and received a grade of B. When
an LMS uses an Assessment Management System (AMS) to launch
an exam the result stored in the LMS might be that Sandy completed
the exam on March 18, 2007 and got a score of 88%. This is
still a crude summary of what Sandy knows (or, more importantly,
what Sandy doesn’t know).
An AMS, by its nature, is built to fully manage
and track the assessment process. LMS’s are more general
tools, delivering and tracking learning activities of all
kinds. For example, an AMS can easily define one or more retries
for a given exam. The exam can be taken multiple times, or
a set of varied retests can be defined. If you are so inclined,
you can specify that no questions from the original test will
appear in the retest (assuming the item pool is large enough).
Every attempt along the way can have built-in time delays
so that coaching can be built into the process.
In addition, an AMS has a mechanism for analyzing
the difficulty and effectiveness of a question or a set of
questions so that trainers can optimize training programs
with confidence. Also, an AMS can automatically move an employee
from one group to another based on the level of knowledge
demonstrated in a sequence of exams.
Simply put, an AMS is a powerful, self-contained,
easy-to-use system for measuring knowledge, opinions and skills.
WORKING TOGETHER
Every LMS has a simple program to import student
results from the “outside world”. This is important
when the LMS is first purchased, because it helps the administrator
store each individual’s prior training history as part
of that individual’s transcript, and it enables the
LMS to continue to track and record ongoing, external, learning
activities.
Since the AMS is external to the LMS it can
take advantage of the same mechanism to export its results
to the LMS import program in the form of summary-level information
(i.e. date assessment taken, “status,” score).
Meanwhile, authors, administrators and employees can use the
power and control of the AMS to launch and sequence exams
and view detailed results down to the question level.
The diagram above illustrates how an AMS and
an LMS can communicate. The List of Results
will have the Student’s ID and the Exam Title,
along with summary information such as elapsed time, status
and score.
CONCLUSION
Today’s Learning Management Systems are
quite sophisticated. They track learning experiences, manage
talent, help with succession planning, facilitate performance
management and have built-in authoring systems in the form
of Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS’s). An
AMS can complement the LMS by:
- Permitting rapid assessment
development
- Enabling robust and
flexible exam deployment
- Making question-level
analysis easily available
- Facilitating question
and exam versioning and auditing
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