January 27

2003

Strategies and Techniques for Designers, Developers, and Managers of eLearning

THIS WEEK DEVELOPMENT TECHNIQUES

In Tune With The Times: Berklee Medias Custom LMS

BY MARIA LEGGETT

rofessional musicians are creative, independent souls who must literally learn to play well with others. However, without support from any corporate day job they may have (or that they may have given up), musicians must pay for their learning out of their own pockets. In this sense, musicians experience a learning environment that other professionals are only now coming to know. When you are on your own, nobody else is going to pay to help you learn to improve your skills. This means that music

educators are already solving problems in online learning that other instructional designers may soon face. When Berklee College of Music decided to create an online extension school and career center for musicians, educators, and professionals, one of the trickiest parts turned out to be selection of a learning management system (LMS). While there are a lot of these systems on the market, Berklees development team found that too many of them include a plethora of features but yet do not offer enough functionality to support online music education. Vendor customization to overcome this paradox was difficult to obtain, and potentially

involved so much cost and time that it could well have stopped the project. Here is the story of what we learned, and how we solved our LMS problems by building our own system. Berklee College of Music is the worlds largest independent music college, but unless you are a musician you may not recognize the name. Berklee is widely considered to be the premier institution for the study of contemporary music and numbers many well-known artists, composers, and producers among its graduates. In the realworld school in Boston, 430 faculty members provide 3400 students with the comContinued on next page

Projects as ambitious as creating your own learning management system can be completed relatively quickly, given good tools and a wellcoordinated development team. Read how Berklee Media built an online extension school and career center, including an LMS, on a sixmonth time line using open-source software.
A publication of

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offer a directory of music professionals and services. In an online store, musicians could purchase books, instructional videos, and DVDs. Finally, an individualized home page feature available to anyone who registers, not just to Berklee students and alumni, would help to anchor individuals in the community. This would be the first online school, job site, and networking destination portal for the music industry. In 2002 Berklee Media, a division of the school, became the home for this initiative. Development of the web site, http://www.berkleemusic.com, was immediately started on a very tight schedule. The site architecture was based on an e-commerce storefront model that served to organize all of the elements: school, store, jobs, directory, discussion, and individual home pages. This familiar model would simplify development and facilitate usability. The total mission for Berklee Media includes delivery of online, print, and video products for all areas of contemporary music education. Within this overall vision, management developed a budget and staff expansion plan for the web portal under the leadership of Dave Kusek, Associate Vice President of Berklee Media. With a background of 15 years in the software application industry, his job was to develop the system from the ground up. Kusek brought on board a programming team with prior experience that included e-Learning and LMS development. As Kusek says, this was a group that wasnt afraid of embarking on a software development initiative. In addition to web programmers, the Berklee Media team included instructional designers, a video producer, editors, writers, and graphic designers. Business and marketing professionals and a customer service team rounded out the capabilities of the division.

plete learning experience required in order to master the challenges and opportunities of a career in the contemporary music industry. Berklees students in Boston generally are pursuing undergraduate degrees or certifications. Because music education emphasizes direct, personal instruction and collaboration between teacher and student and between students, the school had traditionally not offered distance-learning opportunities. Professional musicians, music educators, and alumni seeking personal learning or additional certifications found it difficult to reach their goals through Berklee unless they happened to live in or near Boston.

Building the school component of berkleemusic.com

Music education at Berklee has developed in particular ways since the schools founding in 1945. These characteristics are the differentiators that account for Berklees success, and they were to be incorporated into the design of the online school component of the portal. Key characteristics include: Classes led by highly qualified music educators, all of whom are talented and successful musicians in their own right; Teaching techniques centered on dialogue and questions in the case of

Berkleemusic.com: A portal for the music community

With the intent of reaching out to music professionals and educators, management at Berklee decided in 2002 to launch an online branch of the school. In addition to providing courses, tutorials, master classes, and access to expert advice, the online branch would help to build and maintain a global community of music professionals through discussion boards, job boards, and other networking features. It would also

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Publisher David Holcombe Editorial Director Heidi Fisk Editor Bill Brandon Copy Editor Charles Holcombe Design Director Nancy Marland The eLearning Guild Advisory Board Ruth Clark, Conrad Gottfredson, John Hartnett, Bill Horton, Kevin Moore, Eric Parks, Marc Rosenberg, Allison Rossett

online learning, this meant learners would not be simply reading text screens and doing self-checks; Actual recording of compositions and performances, and critique from professors and from other students; A collaborative culture, in a setting in which half of the students are international. Berklee is a fully-accredited institution of higher learning, and offers recognized academic degrees. Because of this, the learning portal would need to be capable of supporting instruction in areas other than music particularly in business and in traditional academic disciplines. Initially, however, the intent was to focus on what was termed personal learning. This included not-for-credit courses for musicians and music educators whose goals were not simply to acquire another degree, but who were seeking to expand their performance, writing, production, education and business skills. The courses would have to be engaging, interactive, and appealing to a worldwide audience that expects to learn a lot in return for their investment. In this situation, the selection of an LMS was a very critical decision for the management team. In the final analysis, there were several non-negotiable requirements that any learning management system would have to meet. To be adopted for the online school, an LMS would have to be flexible, it would have to be scalable, and it would have to be:

A system that supported continuing music education needs (collaboration, networking, courses, tutorials, master classes, experts); A system that supported e-commerce; and A system that facilitated courseware development as a collaboration between expert music educators and expert designers of online instruction. The pilot program and testing Most instructional designers have seen them... the advertisements, the PowerPoint presentations, and the promises of technological wonders offered in Company XYZs learning management system. Our first challenge was to navigate through the confusing maze of learning management systems. Our plan was to develop and refine a pilot system first and to do a test launch of the online school, using an audience selected from Berklee alumni, professional musicians, and buyers of Berklee Publications books. Given good results, we would apply what we learned to refine the system for the public launch in September, 2002. We researched several LMS options for the test launch. These systems included BlackBoard, WebCT, eCollege and IntraLearn. In the end, we selected a vendor with what we deemed to be one of the most customizable learning management systems available. This LMS was a turnkey

Copyright 2003. The eLearning Developers Journal. Compilation copyright by The eLearning Guild 2003. All rights reserved. Please contact The eLearning Guild for reprint permission. The eLearning Developers Journal is published weekly by The eLearning Guild, 525 College Avenue, Suite 215, Santa Rosa, CA 95404. Phone: 707.566.8990. The eLearning Guild is an operating unit of Focuszone Media, Inc., 1030 Beatrice Street, Eagan, MN 55121. The Journal is distributed to all Guild members free of charge.To join the Guild go to www.eLearningGuild.com.

The eLearning Developers Journal is designed to serve the industry as a catalyst for innovation and as a vehicle for the dissemination of new and practical strategies and techniques for e-Learning designers, developers and managers. The Journal is not intended to be the definitive authority. Rather, it is intended to be a medium through which e-Learning practitioners can share their knowledge, expertise and experience with others for the general betterment of the industry. As in any profession, there are many different perspectives about the best strategies, techniques and tools one can employ to accomplish a specific objective. This Journal will share these different perspectives and does not position any one as the right way, but rather we position each article as one of the right ways for accomplishing a goal. We assume that readers will evaluate the merits of each article and use the ideas they contain in a manner appropriate for their specific situation. We encourage discussion and debate about articles and provide an Online Discussion board for each article. The articles contained in the Journal are all written by people who are actively engaged in this profession at one level or another not by paid journalists or writers. Submissions are always welcome at any time, as are suggestions for articles and future topics. To learn more about how to submit articles and/or ideas, please refer to the directions in the sidebar on page 6 or visit www.eLearningGuild.com.

THE ELEARNING DEVELOPERS JOURNAL / JANUARY 27, 2003

FIGURE 1 Chart of the new system navigation vs. the pilot programs navigation.

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product? Because of these limitations with the vendor solution, rather than force the content to fit the system, we reviewed the requirements for managing online learning and decided to develop our own custom LMS. The effort was justified in a number of important ways having to do with meeting Berklee Medias mission, with supporting a proper learning environment for the online school at berkleemusic.com, and with the economics of the situation. Added to this was the realization that the system would have to support future enhancements and adapt to changing technology that deeply affects how our students will create, perform, produce, and teach music. As Dave Kusek observes, This was definitely the best long-term solution for us.

FIGURE 2 Course drag and drop quiz using Flash MX. Students drag the microphone to the current position on the mixer. solution with a simple interface that looked like it could be customized. The system had course tracking, assessment, and collaboration tools consisting of a Discussion Board, Chat, and email. Since this was a completely new venture for the college, the packaged solution appeared to be a costeffective vehicle that would be easy to implement for the initial one to two year phase. We developed pilot courses on Finale, Digidesign Pro Tools, desktop music production, and music theory. We enrolled our test audience in April 2002. Unfortunately, the live tests demonstrated that the selected system was not a match to the needs of the online school. The pilot test provided valuable feedback about what learners really wanted, and it revealed several usability issues that inhibited the online learning experience. One of the major issues was lack of a seamless learning environment for users. When a learner wanted to take a lesson quiz or to use one of the collaborative tools such as the Discussion Board or Chat, the system launched another browser window which forced users to leave the course area. With multiple pop-up windows and no book-marking feature, users found navigation difficult. They had trouble getting back to where they left off in a course. Since collaborative activities are the key learning method in Berklees approach, the learning platform must support the exchange of feedback and assignment files between the students and instructor, and there were more problems in this area. The Discussion Board could not organize the discussion threads by lesson topic and it did not support file upload to the discussion area. In addition, the Chat tool did not work on a Macintosh platform. On the development side, the course structure was very limited. Lessons could not be broken down into subtopic levels. This meant that course content was only presented as one long page per topic. Since the quizzes and Discussion Board were not tied into the lesson navigation, additional prompts in the course material were required to direct users to the correct areas. Furthermore, there was no way to differentiate between lesson content and a lesson activity such as a quiz or assignment on the course syllabus. In a separate issue, the online course developers could not preview live course content while they were creating course material. Finally, the system did not support course versions or multiple course sections. This would have had a serious economic impact on the online school because when a course section was full we could not add another section to take additional enrollments. As if these issues were not enough, there were also software bugs and errors that the vendor would not address. While the vendor did offer some customization services, we had serious reservations about whether this would be the most costeffective option with the shortest time-toimplementation. More importantly, would the vendor continue to provide support for this customized version of their standard

Specifying the system we needed According to Mike Serio, Technology Manager at Berklee Media, The real challenge of developing a system is figuring out what you want to build. The downside is that you usually have to build it once before you know exactly what you really want. After studying the shortcomings of the pilot system, the Berklee Media programming team began designing the prototype of the next system. Using the pilot project as a point of departure, the team could determine what features the first system had executed well and what features the programming team could adapt and improve on. Prior to the start of the development, the information architect on the programming team outlined all the essential specifications and charted the system navigation design as part of a design and requirements document. For the sake of comparison, the navigation design from the vendors system used in the pilot was included in the chart. (See Figure 1 on page 3.) The design requirements document listed not only the essential feature requirements but also the nice-to-haves. The essential feature requirements of the learning system were: A database, to relate course content to class sections and to support version control during course development. A course development environment that allows course developers to form courses by importing topics and activities in existing HTML or multimedia formats. A course delivery and navigation structure that allows students to navigate course content, discussion board feedback, and

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assignment posts. A discussion board with file-upload capability for each course section. User registration, section enrollment, and administrative features in an integrated administrative control panel that supports both the school and the portal. Announcement features supporting both course-section-specific and schoolwide announcements. Designated user roles for the system: Course developer, course instructor, course author/editor, and course administrator with specific functionality for each role. Quiz/assessment activities for each course. The nice-to-have features were: A course content authoring environment that uses a content management system with XML functionality. Student accounts with profile and file sharing features. Grading functionality in which an instructor could assign course grades online as well as keep a virtual grade book for that course. Indexed searching of course content A course Resource library Book marking features in course content pointing out where a student left off in a course. A course glossary A course section calendar system, which would enable date-aware lesson features, such as designating assignment due dates and go-live releases for course content. Note-taking/annotation features in the course. Based on the design criteria and system specifications, the team determined an implementation strategy in order to meet the launch schedule. At this point, prototypes of the ideal student experience and course development environment were created. The most important aspect of the design was implementing the essential features while leaving a clear path for future development. The system could then be improved in an incremental fashion. Building the system we needed Development time was very tight. There were only six months to go at this point before public launch of berkleemusic.com. The implementation schedule required that we have a working prototype of the course development environment by the end of month four. We also wanted to have all the required features that supported the basic

student experience in place at that time. Running an in-house test on a three-lesson course was set for month five, after which the programming team would have a month to incorporate feedback and make appropriate improvements. Throughout this time, the programming team was also developing prototypes to test and scope out possible system features. The main consideration was determining how the environment could scale to support more users and courses. Using an open-source toolkit, OpenACS 4.5, as the framework of the system design immensely facilitated meeting the develop-

ment schedule. (Editors Note: OpenACS 4.6 is the current version online at http://openacs.org.) OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is designed for building scalable, communityoriented web applications. The OpenACS has thousands of registered users, including a number of high-profile sites. This is a solid, proven system for developing enterprise-level web applications, and in our case it saved us about six months of development time. As open-source software, it is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). If you are not familiar with the GPL and

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FIGURE 3 An assignment activity page with link for students to post their assignments.

FIGURE 4 Assignment post with attachment file.

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tem was evaluated by the entire Berklee Media team. This kept them abreast of the system status and also allowed for their feedback regarding additional needs for system improvement. Timely input from the course instructors, students and online course developers frequently drove revisions to the development and administrative environments. This continues to be true, even with the system running live courses. As a result, the programming team stays on top of revision needs. The best part is that everything in the system can be changed or customized, says Serio.

Reviewing the finished product

The berkleemusic.com site launched in September, 2002 and courses began delivery online in October. Although not all the nice-to-have features were implemented in the initial launch of the school, the programming team has been able to begin implementation of these features on the live system while maintaining the functionality of the current system. As stated earlier, the non-negotiable elements of the online education application included support for a collaborative education environment, support for e-commerce (registration and payment online), and support for a collaborative development process. Here is a quick look at how we did on each of these. Support for a collaborative education environment Of the three elements, this is the one that most clearly stamped the online school as Berklee professional, collaborative, and able to handle the demands of delivering contemporary music education at a distance. This element comprises everything in the learners interface apart from registration: course features, lesson activities, discussion activities, quizzes and questionnaires, and course navigation. The Flash! course demonstration at http://www.berkleemusic.com/school will show you the learners interface.
Course features

FIGURE 5 Course Syllabus open-source software, this means that all versions of OpenACS are available to developers as follows (quoting license information on the OpenACS website): Anyone can use this software for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. Anyone can modify this software in any desired way for private use, without redistributing any code. This means you can use and customize OpenACS to run any web site, commercial or non-commercial, without any requirement to contribute your modifications back to other OpenACS users. Of course, such contributions are welcome, but by no means required. Anyone can redistribute this software, in its original form or modified, as long as the distributed product comes with full source code and is also licensed under the GPL. Your web site content and the data contained in OpenACS database tables are not covered within this license, which means that they are yours to do whatever you wish with, and you are under no obligation to make this data available to anyone. In addition to a framework that will speed up your web development, the OpenACS also includes a large set of pre-packaged and ready-to-use applications that are building blocks for many other purposes of interest to e-Learning developers in a variety of settings (including content management system, content repository, e-commerce, news, calendar, etc.). OpenACS also turned out to be the most appropriate approach to meeting the needs of the music education environment, where the emphasis is on supporting user interaction. The biggest advantage of developing an in-house system with open-source software is that customization can be done rather quickly. However, close coordination between teams is essential. In our case, this meant the course developers had access to both the system and the programming team throughout the application development process. We used the OpenACS Ticket Tracker system (also opensource and substantially customized by the programming team) so that the course developers were able to log bugs and issues online as they encountered them while inputting course content. Ticket Tracker also kept everyone informed about the progress of application development. As development moved forward, the sys-

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Each online course has lessons made up of topics and activities. Topics contain the HTML pages with course content as well as graphics and Flash! media used for quizzes and animations. Each course section has its own discussion board, which we labeled Discussion. Only students enrolled in that section may read and post to that discussion board,

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and they may continue to view discussion board threads for thirty days after the end date of a course section. The course section is archived in the system database along with all discussion board postings and assignment file uploads. The archives are always available to faculty members for review, and are typically accessed when a course is being revised or updated.
Lesson activities

Lesson activities consist of assignments, exercises, discussion board posts, quizzes, and questionnaires. The assignment and discussion activities have similar architectures: a discussion board area with discussion posts and the ability to reply to a specific thread. However each activity has its own special view of the thread structure. All activities have a calendar feature in which a due date can be assigned that appears on the activity page. The lessons are often designed with interactive Flash! animations and quizzes, and with audio examples (see Figure 2 on page 4). Classroom interactivity is achieved through posting messages, feedback and assignments to the course discussion board and Chat sessions. Successful course completion for a student is weighted heavily on a students virtual classroom participation. For an assignment activity, a student uploads a file (such as a song or text file) for the instructor to view by clicking the Post your assignment link at the bottom of the assignment page (see Figure 3 on page 5). Once a student has posted an assignment, it is available for viewing by the entire class. This creates the interactive nature of the courses by allowing students to view and exchange files with other students (see Figure 4 on page 5).
Discussion activities

FIGURE 6 Course Home page

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FIGURE 7 Registrar panel: Early Spring 2003 section of Music Theory.

Quizzes and questionnaires

In a discussion activity students must post their answers and feedback to the Discussion board. The discussion activity creates a discussion thread with the lesson number, activity number, and assignment name at the bottom of the activity page. Students post their responses to the discussion question by clicking a link at the bottom of the page. Students may view other students discussion posts and download other students completed assignments.

At any time in the lesson, a quiz activity may be presented to test students on course material. Questions are presented in either a true/false or multiple-choice format and feedback can be given for both correct and incorrect answers. A quiz can be partially completed. Students can save questions answered so far; answers will be saved and will be available for a student upon returning to complete the quiz. Questionnaires work much like the quizzes but they also calculate the totals of all student responses and display the results.
Course navigation

A persistent navigation bar is available throughout the course lessons. Using the

syllabus, students can navigate to other lessons or topics (see Figure 5 on page 6). The syllabus displays the table of contents for a course. Any lesson activities such as assignments or quizzes are denoted in the syllabus as an Activity. The course bookmark feature, denoted by an orange arrow, displays what lesson and topic a student last viewed. All activities that require feedback or assignment submission are denoted with due date next to the activity name. The Course Home link brings students to the Announcements page where instructors can post any important information for the class to view. The Course Home also displays a link of where a student last left off in the course with easy access back to that

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drop or add students to the class roster. Through the registrar panel, a course section can progress through the following states: Hidden The section is created but does not appear in the course catalog for enrollment. Visible The section appears in the course catalog but is not open for enrollment. This could be used for a course that Berklee would like to advertise for upcoming sections, even though it is not currently being offered. Open Course section is open for enrollment Full Course section is full Complete Course is finished Cancel Course was canceled. At any time during a live course section, a course version can be swapped with a different course version through the Edit Version link in the Registrar Control Panel. Because course section discussion posts and assignments are stored separate from the course content material in the database, the integrity of the course interaction via discussion posts and assignments is preserved when a course version change is made. A students course transcript and enrollment record can be viewed by clicking their name under the Students class list. Figure 8 shows the transcript of a student enrolled in the Music Theory course. Through the student transcript, staff can confirm a students enrollment by choosing the Enroll link. That will generate an email to the student informing them that they are currently enrolled for the course. Staff can contact students via email by clicking the New Message link, send them a form letter template about their book order, or address requests by clicking the Form Letter link. Staff can select from a pre-populated template list or create a new template to email to the student. Support for collaborative development: Course Development Control panel Online course developers can add and manage course content and assets through a Course Developer Administrative Control panel. This panel allows course developers to form courses by importing topic content and activities in existing HTML or multimedia formats such as Flash! and QuickTime. In this panel, the course developer may assign roles to individuals for viewing course content. A course developer may

FIGURE 8 Course transcript of a student.

FIGURE 9 Lesson view in Course Development Panel. topic. Any students currently logged into the course will have their names displayed at the bottom of the Course Home (see Figure 6 on page 7). Clicking the Discussion link in the course navigation bar on the Course Home page will take students to the discussion board home. The discussion board home is a central repository for all lesson activity threads and general discussion threads for that course. By clicking one of the discussion threads, students are taken to the standard discussion thread page for that activity or discussion. Support for e-commerce: Registrar Control Panel Another important system component is the integration of e-commerce capabilities within the LMS. Berkleemusic.com is a portal to the set of Berklee branded Internet services described earlier: the online music courses, music community discussion boards, music book store and a career development network. Students have the ability to not only register and enroll in courses, but also to buy course books and additional learning materials online. While it appears seamless to the student, the enrollment process is automatically tied into the class list for a course. Through the Registrar Control Panel, a Berklee staff member acting in administrative role can manage student course enrollment as well as the customer experience for students. The basic application architecture maintains the e-commerce storefront model, with a catalog that allows students to select course sections that are currently open for enrollment and to pay for them. Through the Registrar Control Panel, course sections can be opened or closed, students can be rearranged between sections if necessary, and the course version can be changed at any time. Tuition fee and class size can also be altered in this control panel. Each section of a course in the control panel (see Figure 7 on page 7) lists the current instructor, students currently enrolled, and their enrollment status either as an active student or lurking as a course audit participant. The names of active students enrolled in a course section will appear in the class list; auditors are able to observe a class without appearing on the class roster. The panel allows staff administrators to change the course status and

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give an instructor or course editor Preview access to view the most up-to-date development content. Additional course developers may be assigned to a course with the role Devel-oper. This role allows a user to add and delete course content as well as create new course sections and versions. Berklee Media has developed some unique functionality for course developers. One of the most important features addresses the growth of the online school: multiple sections of each online course. This was achieved by storing content in the database in a section-independent manner. With this feature, several sections of one course can run at the same time with different instructors. Content is maintained per section for each course including instructor announcements, discussion content, and assignment file uploads. Since the courses at berkleemusic.com are constantly evolving to incorporate new technology and content, it is vital that a versioning process be in place. The course versioning feature we developed stores a snapshot of the most recent course content and this can be assigned to different sections. With this feature, the online course developers can develop and house course revisions in the LMS while simultaneously running a live version of the same course online. This ensures that there is no downtime when switching between course versions while giving developers the ability to preview materials before release. The online course developers have complete control of the course layout through page-level navigation. Each topic and activity may have multiple pages and the course navigation displays down to the page level (see Figure 9 on page 8). New topics and activities can be created and positioned anywhere in a lesson structure. Multiple course topics and pages can be imported through a bulk load panel feature. Since many of the courses have graphics and media elements, these items are stored in a database asset manager. This asset manager is accessible from all courses. It allows course developers to store and categorize course media according to media type and lesson. In this way all of the graphic and media content is reusable across all of the courses. Course developers can establish a folder structure for course assets to organize content The asset manager also supports storing and distributing video content. The asset manager can store multiple video streams and load the streams into a Flash! video

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FIGURE 10 Flash! Video Player. player as needed to be viewed online (see Figure 10). The video content is linked to its position in the asset manager database. This creates a lightweight video player that downloads and plays video on demand. future, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) will be used for all content storage through an XML editor built into the course development control panel. Currently, the system has the ability to export course content as XML to fit into the current e-Learning standards such as SCORM and AICC. This is one of several anticipated improvements. The future Our future plans include working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to make the Berklee Media LMS OKI-compliant (Open Knowledge Initiative). The Open Knowledge Initiative is a consortium of universities and organizations working together to define open architecture specifications that will support an extensible platform for building innovative educational applications.

Conclusion
Work on berkleemusic.coms education module is not finished, and development will continue for some time. In addition to the need to be scalable to accommodate more students and courses, the school application was designed to adhere to present e-Learning standards. With the standards for e-Learning still evolving, the system is also flexible enough to accommodate multiple formats. For the data model, the Berklee development team looked at the current SCORM standards. In the

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proper funding was a key ingredient. Another crucial element for Berklee Medias development success was having experienced programmers on board. The programming team already had prior experience in LMS development. Granted, adds Serio, some problems were a lot harder than we thought they would be, but having an experienced team, we were able to find solutions. While the cost of hiring a good development team is not cheap, neither is repairing the damage of a poorly developed solution. Take the time to do it right the first time. Launching a defective system is problematic not only in its operation and support, but then there is the additional burden of designing an improvement and then migrating the existing users over to the new system. Always have a model in mind and prototype the possibilities. During the development process, the Berklee team spent a full month prototyping. Having a reference system is important. Serio says, When you look at a LMS, what you see is only 10% of the functionality on the front-end. There is so much backend administration not visible to the users. You cant determine the functionality of the system from a demo or sales pitch. PowerPoint presentations cant substitute for seeing how the real system works. Another strategy for success was implementing the system in stages. Berklee Media planned the development in an incremental, phased approach. In order to deliver projects, I think of what I can deliver in six to eight weeks, says Serio. For the programming team, following general project management practices helped keep the project on-track. Any radical scope change from development to standards in course creation could have changed the whole system. Always keeping the key requirements for the system in mind helps guide the development, and always think ahead ten times bigger when developing. Finally, the Berklee Media course development team provided invaluable feedback during the entire development process. Serio adds, Listen to your users. Some of the most valuable information came from the user testing. The users gave us tremendous feedback. Make time available to conduct lots of usability testing. Embarking on a custom system development may not be an option for every organization. Having the right combination for success with appropriate funding, knowledge and expertise, and executive support made the decision to develop in-house easier. For Berklee having an inflexible system that did not address its business requirements was unacceptable. Having a custom-built, scalable solution that meets 100 percent of their needs was well worth the risk taken in development.

Future system enhancements include a robust communication tool for instructor and student feedback as well as an instructor Administrative Control Panel to manage student communication, course grades, and assessments. Keys for success and lessons learned So how was Berklee Media able to accomplish building a successful system? Having the support of management and

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JANUARY 27, 2003 / THE ELEARNING DEVELOPERS JOURNAL

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About the Guild

AUTHOR CONTACT Maria Leggett is an Online Course Developer for Berklee Media, a branch of the Berklee College of Music. She works with Berklee faculty and other music professionals to create engaging, interactive online music courses. Leggett has been in the training and Internet industry for six years delivering instructor-led training and creating web-based courses for companies such as Verizon, Genuity, and New Horizons. Before joining Berklee Media, Maria was an Educational Consultant at Genuity, creating webbased training on Genuity products and Siebel CRM software for the sales force. She was also the project manager for the learning management system implementation. Maria has several technical certifications in Web development and an educational background in information design. Contact Maria at mleggett@berklee.edu ONLINE DISCUSSIONS Extend your learning beyond the printed page! If you are looking for more information on this topic, if you have questions about an article, or if you disagree with a viewpoint stated in this article, then join the online discussions and extend your learning. Follow these easy steps to participate: 1. Go to www.eLearningGuild.com and sign in. 2. Click on the Online Discussion button on the main menu. 3. Using the pull down menu, select the Online Discussion: Journal Topics 4. Select this article from the Subject list. 5. Click on ADD A NEW MESSAGE. 6. Enter your message. It will be posted as soon as you hit the Submit button on the form. Additional information on the topics covered in this article is also listed in the Guild Resource directory.
The eLearning Guild is a Community of Practice for designers, developers, and managers of e-Learning. Through this member-driven community, we provide high-quality learning opportunities, networking services, resources, and publications. Community members represent a diverse group of instructional designers, content developers, web developers, project managers, contractors, consultants, and managers and directors of training and learning services all of whom share a common interest in e-Learning design, development, and management. Currently there are over 2,300 resources available. Members have access to all of these resources and they can also post resources at any time!

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THANK YOU TO THESE GUILD ENTERPRISE SPONSORS

CLARK Training & Consulting (CTC) is a global leader in instructional design offering both training and consulting services. Our award-winning seminars are based on the latest research in instructional psychology and human performance improvement. www.clarktraining.com Contact: Kimberly Perkins 602-230-9190 Cyclone Interactive is an interactive media and web development firm creating online, CD and presentation solutions for a wide range of clients and industries. www.cycloneinteractive.com Contact: Earl Dimaculangan earl@cycloneinteractive.com 617.350.8834 Spectra Interactive Learning is a unique, full service, e-Learning consulting company growing and expanding in North America and Europe to meet the growing need for expertise in e-Learning strategy development, instructional design and program implementation. www.spectrainteractive.com Contact: Brenda Pfaus, President bpfaus@spectrainteractive.com Ottawa, Canada (613) 230-9978 To learn how to become a Guild Enterprise Sponsor, please contact David Holcombe at dh@eLearningGuild.com or call 707.566.8990.

THE ELEARNING DEVELOPERS JOURNAL / JANUARY 27, 2003

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