LMS Structure
EspritLMS has two main areas: The Administration
Area and the User Area. Only your LMS administrator
will have access to the Administration Area. That is
where you will set up corporations, cost centers, and
courses. It is also where you will go to customize the
LMS to use your terminology.LMS Administration
"The Admin Side"
The Administrative Area (yoursite.com/admin) is a
password protected area that only your LMS administrator
should have access to. Resource Engineering will
provide you with your login information and will walk you
through how to use the Administration area.LMS User Area
"The Corp Side"
This is
the area where you users will login and access the various
functions in EspritLMS including accessing courses, adding
and editing learners, administering cost centers, and
running learner activity reports.
LMS Credit
System
A key feature of EspritLMS
is the tracking of course credits. This is beneficial
if you are charging for your courses. Even if you are
using the LMS for internal training where there is not an
actual exchange of currency for your courses, you might want
to track usage for internal cross charging purposes.
On the other hand, some of our customers
have no need to track usage - no problem,
just don't use this feature :-)
Credit Charges for Courses
When you set up a course, you define
how many credits will be charged for that course. You
can charge to the tenth of a credit. For example, most
of the courses on QualityTrainingPortal "cost" one credit.
However, we offer an annual recertification "exam" for all
of our courses. The charge for the recertification is
0.10 credits. We charge $49 per credit for our
courses. So, a recertification exam ends up costing
$4.90. This credit system gives you a lot of
flexibility in how you will sell or charge for your courses.
Contracts - How credits are controlled and tracked
Contracts monitor and control credit
usage within a cost center and it's "parent" corporation.
When you set up a contract you assign a number of credits to
it along with a contract date beginning and expiration date.
Contracts are written at the
corporation level. In other words, if you have three
corporations, you cannot share one contract among the three
corporations. You would need to have at least one
contract for each corporation. However, you can have
several contracts within a corporation. Contracts are
assigned at the Cost Center Level. You can assign one
contract to multiple cost centers or each cost center can
have its own contract - the choice is yours.
To give you an example of the power of
the contract/credit system feature we can look at two
different types of customers that we have on
QualityTrainingPortal. One type of customer is a
Fortune 500 company that would purchase 500 credits at a
time. We would set up a contract for that company in
the LMS for 500 credits. Now, lets say that company
has 5 locations - each they want set up as a separate cost
center. In this case each cost center would be
assigned to the same contract.
Another type of customer that we have
at QualityTrainingPortal is what we call a workgroup.
A workgroup is usually one site of a company or a small
company with limited training needs. Typically
workgroups purchase between 10 and 100 credits. We
would not set the workgroup up as a corporation because the
credit purchase does not merit that much LMS functionality.
Instead we would set the workgroup up as a cost center in
our "workgroup corporation" where we put all of our
"workgroups." In this case we would set up a separate
contract for that workgroup and assign the contract to that
workgroup cost center. |
