Implementation Of A Learner Management System In A University

1.Conduct a probing interview with your client to gather information on:

• Current operational practices
• Business goals and objectives
• Strategic mission of the organisation
• The Current technology used in the organisation
• The process flow of the organisation

2.Create a report on the scenario provided above and include the following information

• Vision and strategic mission of the organisation
• Key stakeholders and their requirements
• Business objective
• Define the Technical requirements, consider the following:

1.You are required to develop a gap report to compare the current operational practices against the reviewed strategic plan. In you report include the following:

• the limitations and improvement opportunities
• advantages and disadvantages of the current and proposed system
• determine the required changes, objectives and implications of the changes

Create an action plan to implement the required changes that you have identified in your gap report created in assessment task 2. In you action plan include the following information for each component of the system:

• Standards
• Targets
• Implementation Methods

1.What are the principles of writing an action plan?

2.Define three (3) real benefits of planning.

3.Detail three (3) different activities and interventions you could implement to assist with change management process.

4.What is meant by Risk Analysis

5.What should you consider when creating an action plan (the action planning model)?

Describe the steps you would take when preparing an action plan

Task One - Written Report

Current operational practice: Presently the digital educational material is stored in a scattered manner in different device and drives.  All the services and facilities provided by the college or the university is managed manually by using dedicated human resources. They use different drives in order store the different types of teaching materials such as video, doc files and other different types content.  

Business goals and objectives: The main objective of university is to enhance the learning procedure. This includes, automate and centralized administration of the different daily procedures. Implementing self-guided and self-service. Assemble and deliver learning content rapidly to the students. Consolidate training initiatives on a scalable web-based platform.  Support portability and international standards. Personalize content and enable knowledge reuse for the students.

Strategic mission: Some of the strategic missions of the university are enhancing the accessibility of the users (students, faculty and administrators). It is observed that students learn at various rates, and learner management system give the adaptability expected to meet their interesting adapting needs. They can go back and audit content as required according to their needs, or invest extra energy investigating a point of intrigue. This self-coordinated learning gives understudies more control over their training

Key stakeholders and requirements: The stakeholders and their requirements for learner management system is given below,

Students/learners: They utilize the implemented system for their education process. The learners are the fundamental or the primary stakeholders of LMS.

Lecturers/tutors: The teachers or the professors are the collaborators who utilize the LMS to direct, help and assess the learners.

Administrators: The administrators can take the support of the considerable number of clients of the framework to keep a mind the appropriate working status.

Technical requirements: As the university may have students from different regions of country or world thus according to the top level management it is proposed that the system will be a wweb based one.

Current technology used: Presently the architecture is in-house based learning management system that requires a student to go to the university access the database by utilizing the credentials provided by the university to them.     

Process flow: The new system will help in quick registration for the students to their desired courses, the certifications for the courses will be automated the periodical reports will be easily available for the administrators to check the performance of the lecturers and the learners  in order to improve or add functionalities to the existing system.      

Quality requirements: As it is determined that, the proposed system will be web based  system thus, in order to provide better services to the learners and professors it is important to have less amount of down time for the services  even though it   is due to the routine maintenance of the system.     

Opportunity:  use of the LMS will create the opportunity for the university to server more number of student at the same time, by providing the educational content through online medium.

Limitations and improvement opportunities: The implementation of LMS may lead to the lack of control over the total learning process. The reason behind this can be stated the use of the learning material by the learners cannot be controlled by them after they have uploaded them to the system.  

Task Two - Written Report

Lack of influence and personal interaction: even though the online learning system helps the learners to have access to the educational content from anywhere and anytime, but it cannot  provide the  experience of personal interaction with  the lecturers.    

Advantage of the system: Following are the advantages of the learner management system,

By the use of correct learning strategies, LMS will be helpful in increasing the motivation of learners, encourage interaction, promote learning, getting feedback and support in a easy way during the total learning process.

 A LMS supports content in various formats, e.g. multimedia, video, and text. Thus will reduce the requirement of large amount of storage devices and their maintenance.   

Disadvantages

As the trainers having weak computer and information technology skills and lack the related  skills needed to successfully use a LMS to support their teaching, hence will lead to increased cost to train them for the new system.

Again, according to some researchers, they suggested that online teaching which the part of the LMS is may lead to an increased workload on the teachers or the lecturers.  

Action plan for required changes for implementing LMS

Detailed Planning:  The planning is critical, not exactly at the beginning of the project, but rather all through. As the project continues, unspecified needs and difficulties will develop. The team should persistently grow and refine the planning. It is important to have qualified project manager in order to have better execution of LMS execution.

Determining LMS configuration: The configuration of the LMS will need to make involve (a) an understanding of data types and level of operations, (b) a thoughtful consideration about the system’s data fields, different functionality its capabilities and so on.

Implementation and monitoring of the LMS:  After the configuration for the LMS is determined, this will be implemented for use by the different stakeholders. After this it will be important for the university to have a monitoring mechanism in order enhance the performance of the system.   

Some of the mostly used principles in planning for developing systems includes following,

 The developed plan must enhance the productivity of the workers or the stakeholders who are using the completely developed plan.

 It is important to align all the stakeholders who are involved in the action plan and make clear responsibilities listed in the action plan.

Focus should be on the most important and critical tasks that must be completed in-order to complete an undertaken project.

The first benefit is planning process facilitates top management by determining the objectives. It also helps in the achievement of the desired business goals and competitive advantage while controlling the execution of different business processes. Second, Planning helps the managers to find and have the opportunities of suggesting different ways which can be used to improve performance of a system or an organization.  Lastly, planning process also helps to avoid the recourse wastage by selecting and implementing optimal usage of the resources which will contribute in achievement of the business objective of a project team or organization

Three of the most important activities that may assist in the change management process clear identification of the goals of change management process, plan and communicate for the change, allocation of proper resources and use of data for the evaluation of the change.

In most of the cases the change management process is implemented in order to achieve a goal, thus it is important to goals for the process and resources required for the change management process.          

Risk analysis is considered as a systematic study or examination of different risks and uncertainties that a project team or organization may encounter in their project or business, in developing public policies and different other areas.  Risk analysts tries to find out different possible risks faced by a business unit or a project team, estimate and understand when and how they may be confronted, impact (adverse effects) of those risks either on  financial or organizational level.  This process also includes, detailed investigation of the risk, evaluation of the risk and risk management alternatives (such as transfer the risk, avoid the risk or mitigate the risk), and performed to understand the nature of the risk.

 While creating an action plan it is important to consider the following factors,

Completeness of the plan: It ensures that the action plan will consist of steps or changes that are important to implement the desired change.

Clearness of the plan: The plan should briefly describe different tasks that are important to complete and the individuals assigned to complete the tasks.

 Reflection of current work:  It is important that the action plan should reflect on improvement of the current operations and processes.

While preparing an action plan, the total plan must be depicted as a series of tasks or actions to achieve some specific goals.

For each task or goal timeline for completion should be explicitly mentioned.

Defining allocation of resources in order to complete different task and its related goals.

Identification of probable issues, risks in achieving goals.

Defining mechanisms to monitor the progress of a project.  

Assigning tasks to different individuals/groups to get the things done.