A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Learning Management System (Part 7)

  By the time you complete this step in the process, you'll be very close to making your new learning management system available to learners. So far in this series: 

• Part 1: The importance of a structured approach to setting up a learning management system. Also: "Consider Your Learners"
• Part 2: "Perform a Content Inventory Audit"
• Part 3: "Establish Who Needs What Content"
• Part 4: "Define Administrative Roles and Create Admin Accounts"
• Part 5: "Create Learner Groups and Placeholders for Identifiers"
• Part 6: Import, Configure, and Test Content

STEP 7: Create Curricula/Learning Paths If you’re only making individual courses available to learners, then you’ll be able to skip this step altogether. If, on the other hand, you plan to make curricula/learning paths available, you’ll need to create those course groupings. Once again, the course inventory audit document you created in Step 3: Establish Who Needs What Content, will make this step much easier. Simply looking down a user group column will identify the content each group requires. If it makes sense to you to bundle those courses into a curriculum, go ahead and do so. In bundling courses into a curriculum/learning path, you’ll need to decide:

• Do the courses need to be completed in a specific order
• Do courses issue individual certificates or does the learner receive a certificate for completing a curriculum
• Does the learner need to complete all the courses or only some courses in the curriculum

TIP: If you have high-priority courses many learners will need to take, consider investing the time and effort into presenting this content in different formats. You could, for example, present the material through:

• A self-paced online course
• A virtual classroom session
• A face-to-face session in a physical classroom

If your LMS supports course equivalency and the option to complete some, but not all the courses in a curriculum, your learners will appreciate the ability to take courses in the formats they prefer.

In the example below, the learner must take the course titled "Welcome" but can choose between a self-paced or a Webinar-based version of the course called "Safe Handling and Transportation."