Thursday, February 25, 2010

Kineo Insights Webinar: Kronos Moodle Case Study

Today as part of the Kineo Insights webinar series – a conversation on open source.  The following are my notes from Part 2 of the webinar: Our Journey: Harnessing Moodle to Deliver Customer Training

kronos-logo Kronos – Scott Severn and Lynn Bennett – manage the customer training team for Kronos.  Kronos delivers products and services to customers managing workforce.

Scott and Lynn are with customer services group and deliver training to customers – through Moodle.

Today:

  • How we’re using Moodle from customer usability.
  • Why we chose Moodle as a platform.

Kronos had a vast library of elearning content to help customers betters use products.  A long list of courses that the user had to identify what was relevant learning.

6 months ago started working with Kineo to take new approach to subscription site.  Decided to stay with Moodle.  Now the system identifies relevant learning – put together a wizard to be much more supportive of audience. 

Users can now create a My Learning page to find the content they needed.

Vastly changed the Moodle’s look and feel.

A great place for customers to reinforce what getting in ILT, to help new hires on board, to enhance usability of Kronos products.

Why Moodle?

2 1/2 years ago – Knowledge Pass Subscription offering was first released on Moodle.  Compared it to a # of diff open source offerings as well as large commercial systems and smaller vendors as well.

  • Decided would rather spend money on support and implementation rather than licensing.  Low start up costs helped us out (no licensing fees; minimal server requirements).  Annual cost of hosting with a hosting vendor was cheaper than licensing options with commercial vendors.
  • Professional support available through numerous support vendors.
  • Easy to implement
  • Relatively easy to modify (use in house programmers to do simple changes to PHP codes – not a huge risk)

In January, did a redesign with Kineo.  But first did an analysis to see if should stay with Moodle.  Looked again at commercial LMS options, but chose to stay with Moodle. 

  • Kineo customizations gave granular security – customer A sees certain products, customer B sees different set of products.
  • Implemented Moodle’s Flash video module – created fabulous video experience.
  • Integrated Moodle’s mySQL database to integrate with Kronos’ internal reporting system –

Questions:

Does Moodle have support for competency based role analysis?  Out of box, Moodle doesn’t have competency or role based training.  But Kineo has done some customizations.  We’ve also taken that one step further to do a gap analysis.  This has become a common request from corporate customers.  Looking at how to use Moodle for more traditional HR functionalities…corporate world is taking open source much more seriously.

Did Kronos want open source or proprietary?  Kronos considered both, but Moodle won when weighing the pros and cons.

 Did Kronos use a score card?  How should we evaluate these tools?  Download Sakai and Moodle and try ‘em out!  It’s free.

You can access Part 1 of the webinar here: The Truth About Open Source: A conversation with  Michael Korcuska, Executive Director  of Sakai.

Join us for our next Kineo Insights webinar:

March 11, 2010: eLearning Insider: Challenges and Best Practices for Internal Development Teams

8:00 AM Pacific/10:00 AM Central/11:00 AM Eastern/4:00 PM UK

  • Rory Lawson, Instructional Design, Manager Learning Design, Learning HSBC Group Management Training College (UK)
  • Anne Marie Laures, Principal at Laures Consulting, former Director Learning Services at Walgreens
  • Ellen Wagner, Partner Sage Road Solutions, former Sr. Director Worldwide eLearning Adobe Systems

Click here to register.

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