A Learning Content Management System, or LCMS, might seem like an unnecessary add-on to a Learning Management System (LMS). After all, why not just store all of your learning objects inside the LMS? If your current workflow doesn’t include an LCMS, it might be hard to imagine what life could be like with one.

But an LCMS isn’t just a storage box for learning objects. It’s a solution that assures the quality of your learning objects and gives your learners the opportunity to find what they need when they need it.

If that sounds too good to be true, read on.

Discoverability

Picture this: you have a student who’s looking for a particular reading in PDF format. They know it’s somewhere in the LMS, but there are stacks of new readings to download every week, and they can’t remember what week it was assigned in. 

Enter the LCMS.

With an LCMS, the student can search for keywords they remember from the reading and filter by file type to make sure they only see PDFs, making it easy to find exactly what they need, when they need it.

For the course designer, the LCMS automatically picks up the file’s content when they drag and drop it into the LCMS. The metadata is auto-filled so they don’t have to spend time tagging every possible combination of keywords, and their students can find the content quickly and easily by searching.

Quality

Back to our student: their teacher uploaded a new version of the reading they were looking for, so now there are two readings with very similar information—but one of them is out of date.

With an LCMS, this problem just doesn’t exist. Every time a file is updated, the most recent version will appear in the search, so students will only see the most up to date information. Course designers can see the version history and detailed metadata, and can review and access earlier versions of the content if necessary.

Life Cycle Management

In this time of rapid change, it’s important that learners are always getting the most recent, up to date information. When you’re managing learning objects manually, it’s difficult to know how long objects have been in use, who owns them, and when the last time they were reviewed were without lots of tedious documentation.

An LCMS solves this problem by adding lifecycle management metadata to learning objects with metadata fields such as

• Owner
• Expiry date
• Review period

With metadata captured into these fields, an LCMS can remind owners and content administrators of learning objects that are close to expiring, and hide objects that are beyond their review date if desired (for example in a professional advice context). This assures the quality of your content and that they never see out of date material.

AndroLCMS - Androgogic’s LCMS Solution

Here at Androgogic, we recognised the need for a quality, secure LCMS that prioritises the discoverability, quality, and life cycle of your learning objects. So, we built the AndroLCMS, a superior LCMS solution to meet and exceed the needs of our client-partners.

Built from the powerful Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System and then extended with education sector features, AndroLCMS offers you the ability to store, organise, audit, maintain, update, and report on a wide variety of learning object types.

Andresco - Androgogic’s LMS-LCMS repository plug-in suite provides a seamless integration of the LCMS into the Totara Learn and Moodle LMS offering drag-and-drop functionality, automatic metadata extraction and context-based defaults, granular permissions, full version stack history, and a reporting engine allowing you to see every access by each user of every document by date and time, and the corresponding version that was available at the time.

Want to learn more? Why not get in touch with a friendly Androgogue today?