Author tool, LMS, LXP: what are the differences?
Let's say your company is looking to implement an e-learning solution to facilitateOnboarding of your employees, keep your salespeople up to date on the product or simply better meet your compliance obligations pa. The first question that will be asked to you: what type of tool do you need? At this stage, you will quickly be drowned in concepts that are not always understandable: LMS, LXP, authoring tool...
At Didask, we'll be the first to admit it: it's easy to get lost, especially since marketing terms (the” Machine learning ”: Adaptive learning, collaborative learning) are often added to the types of tools. In addition, there is no market consensus on definitions and dividing lines: thus, the term LXP began as marketing, before aligning with the reality of a growing separation of platform offerings between administrative and training experience. However, there are many fundamental differences, and behind them, strategic choices to be made: how many tools to take, and which to give priority to?
We could summarize the key terms schematically as follows:
In other words: the LMS is the movie theater; the LXP is the movie; the author tool, the production studio. These tools can be combined into one or specialized as required. We can imagine an LMS that would only welcome external content, for example via the interoperability standard known as SCORM (market standard). It's the empty shell model: the LMS focuses on administration, content is managed by external tools. Likewise, there are author tools whose sole role is to create content to be exported to other LMSs: the Articulate suite is the best known example. Finally, some LXPs (this is the case of online course platforms like Udemy) only offer off-the-shelf content; others have their integrated authoring tool in order to facilitate the internalization of production.
As in other industries, there may be good reasons to integrate, or on the contrary, to separate tools.
Let's take the scenario of combining an LMS (to facilitate monitoring) with an authoring tool (to ensure the creation of internal training courses). At first glance, separation seems to bring the benefit of specialization and comparative advantage. Some tools are better for administration, others for content. It also allows you to maintain a certain flexibility, for example you can change your management solution, while maintaining your training courses.
This approach, which is arguably the most common, is often the most unfortunate. In most cases, you're not only piling up costs, but you're also depriving yourself of a truly qualitative learning experience.
This is due to the standard interoperability standard that makes it possible to integrate elearning content created on an authoring tool into the LMS: SCORM. Don't be intimidated by its name, which seems straight out of a sci-fi movie — SCORM is not a format that could be described as futuristic. Its most recent version dates from the presidency of Jacques Chirac. Its unique characteristics: a static file, which must be reloaded for each micro-modification, and which only returns a completion and success rate.
If your objective is to effectively digitize your training courses, several key functionalities are missing from SCORM to give full satisfaction:
Because SCORM is a static format, a set of high value-added educational formats becomes unusable. For example, it is impossible to offer a positioning test at the level of a training course to adapt the sequencing of modules to the learner profile. It is also impossible to offer fully personalized activities, such as an AI tutor who provides feedback to the learner in real time (imagine a virtual coach who would help customer support to better write emails to customers). The result is content that is less engaging and less effective in terms of increasing skills: you limit yourself to the most basic and repetitive formats.
By separating LMS and authoring tools, you must link relaunch and monitoring functionalities to content that was designed in a completely different context, and which represents a kind of black box for your tool. However, in daily practice, administration and training experience are intrinsically linked. Concretely, if your SCORM is rather long (a training course of several hours, as can sometimes be the case with compliance), the LMS does not know what is going on inside. Thus, it cannot offer intelligent sequencing for locking and unlocking content (example: chapter 2 opens 30 days after chapter 1). This limitation pushes you to split your SCORM into as many files as there are micro-modules, which can quickly become a hell to manage for you as well as for the learner. Instead of thinking of real training programs with a seamless experience, you end up packing files that don't fit together.
The only statistic for classical SCORM is an overall completion and success rate at the file level. However, if you know the content on the LMS, you can go much further, and in particular offer intelligent granular statistics giving you visibility on the mistakes made most frequently, combined with suggestions for improvement.
As mentioned above, each modification of your content, even if it is a simple typo, requires reloading the entire SCORM file, as if you were releasing a new version of the training; a rigid operation that is more reminiscent of the world of paper publishing than that of web applications.
The last two missing functionalities are more advanced and emerging on the tools on the market, but potentially represent an immense source of value:
As we know, one of the recurring problems of the LMS is the initial commitment of learners according to their needs: how, among a plethoric catalog, can we offer the training adapted to a given learner? So, rather than pushing irrelevant content to your salespeople, you could detect that one of them is having difficulties during the closing phases, and offer them the appropriate content. In order to allow such an adaptive approach, it would be necessary to be able to read the content of the training courses. However, SCORM simply provides metadata: we are back to a logic of “tags” (“sale”, “negotiation”...), too crude to reflect the fineness of individual needs. Too bad, especially in an age where conversational AIs would allow you to hope for much better!
Alas, it's all too often the poor parent of training. However, most of the long-term impact of training depends on what happens after the training: after onboarding, the employee is expected to put into practice in order to make continuous progress. Whether it's flashcards to anchor concepts in memory, micro-challenges to be applied in the field, or regular coaching sessions, none of this can fit into a SCORM. This too restrictive format therefore pushes you to abandon the field of informal training, where more flexible tools could, for example, connect directly to your business tools to support your employees at the workstation.
If there is one thing in common between all these functionalities, it is the coherence of the overall training experience. An integrated solution allows you to think of complete paths rather than an assembly of disparate bricks, with a better return on investment in the end.
To qualify the above, let's assume that there are formats other than SCORM, based on connectors, that would maintain the best of both worlds, in other words, “plugging” a personalized learning experience into a third-party LMS. It is therefore possible, in theory, to decorrelate the LMS/tool separation responsible for the choice of the use of the SCORM standard. However, these formats that create more value for the end user also involve running a learning engine for each learner, making them more expensive. Depending on your budget, it may therefore be more rational to pool the tools to only pay for one block of licenses per learner.
At this stage, you could probably say: yes, but how do you find an LMS that facilitates creation and offers engaging and effective learning? Is this only realistic in view of the numerous management requirements? To do this, we invite you to a reversal of perspective: rather than considering the LMS as an administrative shell whose learning would be a simple appendage, it is preferable to choose the LMS according to its ability to ensure an effective increase in skills throughout the chain, from content creation to the learning experience.
Our belief is that “learning” should be the core business of online learning platforms. This is what tools like Didask strive to offer, by integrating into The LMS 1/ one Educational AI that allows any business expert to create an effective e-learning 2/ a fully personalized learning experience in a few hours, all 3/ without neglecting the administrative work you need. While considerations may vary by business, we believe intelligent integration is the quickest way to reduce your costs, reduce the time spent creating training, and increase the return on investment all at the same time.
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