A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Learning Management System (Part 9)

Break out the party hats and noise makers! The LMS we've been setting up throughout this series will now be going live. We've accomplished a lot 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
• Part 7: Create Curricula/Learning Paths
• Part 8: Create Enrollment Rules or Course Assignments

STEP 9: Add Learners In some systems, your LMS will be "live" as soon learners are added to the system. Learners will be automatically informed of their login information as soon as their learner accounts are created. Also, the enrollment rules or automatic course assignments you've created in step eight may now be triggered, which will inform learners that they are now enrolled into courses. If you're risk averse, you may want to do a partial roll-out to just one group of learners to see how things unfold before going live with all learners. If you're fearless, you may just want to go live for everyone. There are four common ways to create learner accounts:

• Integration with an HR system or other enterprise application. (See this document describing common ways learning management systems can be integrated with other applications.)
• Learner self-registration
• Import learner information contained within spreadsheets
• Create individual learner accounts

Integration with an HR system is fast and efficient but will likely only create learner records for internal employees. You'll still need to figure out how to get external learners into your system. Learner self-registration can be a great option, but you need to ensure that you're somehow capturing the identifying characteristics you'll need, such as learner group, job title, etc. during registration. You'll also need a way to ensure all the learners you need to serve have actually registered. Importing learner data from spreadsheets can be an efficient way to get started. You'll need to get access to the data and will need to make sure that the columns in your spreadsheets map to the learner record fields Creating individual learner accounts isn't an option for anything but the smallest learner initiatives. The time and effort is just too high.