LMS Integrations

Typical LMS Behavior - Course Organization

• Courses - types & versions
  • Digital Courses, ILT, Events, Curriculum etc
  • Courses are a collection of different assets
    • videos, scorm, ppts etc
  • Courses can be versioned
    • Multiple versions of courses can be active at the same time
• Courses are organized into Catalogs
  • Each catalog is assigned to a specific user group
  • A course can be part of multiple catalogs

Typical LMS Behavior - Transcripts

• Enrollments
  • Different users could be assigned to different versions of the same course
  • Users can enroll by themselves, or by administrators
  • Users can complete, pass or fail a course based on the course type
  • Enrollments have deadlines (due dates)
  • Enrollments have time tracking (start & end date)
  • Completions & Assignments (Enrollments) typically are at a version level
• Re-enrollments
  • A user can have the same version of the training reassigned to them (on a recurring basis) or a new version of the same course might be assigned to them

LXP - as it is designed today

• LXP represents each item (course, curriculum, event, material etc.) as “Content / Card” against a course
  • No versioning
  • No nested structure to capture the included assets (like videos, presentations etc.) - a card boils
    down to a URL
• Assignments and Completions are tracked at card level
  • Assignments and completions are deleted if the card is archived
  • There can only be one assignment stored per user per card in the LXP
• Integration Source Configurations allow contents fetched from a particular source to be restricted to specific groups

Integration Challenges – Catalog & Transcripts

• Archival
  • Content that gets archived will lose any assignments or completions in the LXP
  • Luckily, this data will be preserved IF and after the LRS is enabled for that organization
  • Recommendation: LRS should be enabled for all organizations to avoid this issue
• Launch URL
  • LMS’es that do version level assignments typically also give version level launch URLs
  • This can be confusing to learners who see multiple cards (related to multiple versions) and they do
    not know which “card” to launch
• Versioning
  • Since cards do not have versioning, each version creates a new card leading to confusing user
    experience – from a user perspective – finding duplicate content
• Explosion of cards
  • Older versions that are no longer used are still “active” in the LXP – since in LMS you do not
    necessarily need to deactivate old versions
• Content Reassignment:
  • Content within the LMS can be re-assigned to users but the LXP cannot hold multiple completions
    or multiple assignments of the same card for the same user

Integration Challenges – Technical

• Most of these LMSes do not have rich API set leading to many issues
  • In terms of catalog data, api to access the catalog, getting transcripts (assignments &
    completions) - including withdrawals etc.
• API throttling issues – cannot fetch as fast as we should be
• No “Delta” APIs – that give the data created or modified in the specified time period
  • Leading to trying to sync the whole catalog
  • Large catalogs or transcripts – can take more than a day to two to synchronize
  • So we end up doing such updates on a weekly basis – which might break the user experience

Integration Principles for Enterprise LMS

• We will create “cards” in the LXP at the course level and not maintain versions
• We will track assignments, completions at the course level
• We will create launch URLs that are at a course level
  • The LMS should resolve internally to direct user to the right version of the course
• We would strongly recommend that we make use of the delta catalog and delta assignments – either through APIs or CSVs – to keep the data synchronous on a frequent basis