In my recent post on What is the future of the LMS? I wrote:
"It is clear that for many L&D professionals, tracking and reporting is a key feature of a LMS, and probably the main reason why they spend a large proportion of their training budget on such a system. But you don't need a hammer to crack a nut(!), as this recent posting on SANA Easybloggers points out, Is Google Analytics the next LMS?! In other words, there are simpler, cost-effective ways of tracking and reporting usage of content."
Yesterday the author of that posting commented as follows. I am reproducing it here to ensure it gets a wider viewing.
Many thanks to all those contributing to the LMS Debate."Jane, thanks for picking up our blogpost on Google Analytics as substitute of a LMS. We have seen it in the amount of visitors. But the variety of reactions on your post triggered me to comment as well... The reason why we wrote this post was that people came to us asking for an LMS, but if we asked why they really needed it, it appeared to be just for overall user statistics. Especially in Germany for example the privacy rules are so tight that companies most of the times prohibit results related to named users.
Therefore we came up with the idea to use Analytics, that is enough for what they want. And I agree to those that see the LMS more and more as a location to learn somewhere in the intranet rather than to a system with ongoing implementation projects, test users etc.
We did get some reactions from readers that want to go for the "Analytics LMS" but still want to know who passed the course. A solution for this is also easily fixed, a description of this can now also be found on our blog http://easybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/is-google-analytics-the-next-lms-continued/ Hope this answers some questions again."
