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WebMentor LMS™
Features & Benefits
WebMentor LMS is a scalable browser-based Learning Management System designed
to support a single course up to a complete online training operation.
For Organizations
- Organizations may now upload courses and request that they be installed by the Course Provider.
- Student enrollment fields may now be set to: READ, WRITE, or HIDDEN to control students' access to their values.
For Instructors
- Instructors may place links on the course syllabus page which
give individual course session access to webinars, social networking sites, etc.
- Instructors may now grade essay questions in tests created with WebMentor Author.
- Instructors have greater control when manually generating and displaying certificates.
For Students
- Students may now be in more than one curriculum.
- Students may now set course attributes prior to entering a SCORM course.
- A completion warning icon
 appears preceding a course title in the Student Main Menu when a time-limited course is about to expire.
- A completion warning icon appears preceding a subscription title in the Student Main Menu when a time-limited subscription is about to expire.
General Enhancements
- Organization-specific setup.cfm files now enable/disable many LMS features on a per-organization basis.
- All user roles now have a search tool to help locate LMS features. The Search tool searches the text of menu items and tab labels to take you to the correct screen or tab in the LMS.
- Enabled/disabled in setup.cfm
- Time zones are now used whenever a time is specified.
- Course Provider sets TZ(s) available to organizations on the server.
- Organizations set TZ(s) that their Students can use.
- All new times stored are UTC. Legacy times that do not have a TZ setting default to US Eastern (ET).
- Organizations define their default TZ and all times in all reports are normalized to that TZ.
- Students define their own TZ and times in Student reports use that TZ.
- Dates on certificates include the TZ.
- Calendar events may be emailed to Students in Vcal format.
- Session Start Date can trigger a calendar event
- Session End Date can trigger a calendar event
- Subscription Duration can trigger a calendar event
- Administrators and Instructors can manage calendar events for Students registered in course sessions.
- Groups can manage calendar events for Group members.
- External course catalogs (outside the LMS) may now invoke the LMS shopping cart. Users may keep shopping until finished, then log into the LMS to check out.
- Training Orders are now decrement when a student enters the course instead of when a student is registered for the course. (i.e., PO seats are recovered upon de-registration if students never enter the course.)
- Course sessions may now be "limited" so that the "Maximum Students" field limits the number of non-reuseable entries to the course session. This makes max students cumulative (non-reuseable).
- Enabled/disabled in setup.cfm
- Subscriptions may now be set to de-register students automatically from subscription courses when the subscription expires.
- New reports for Subscriptions and Training Orders
- For Organizations, Review Training Orders now includes information on usage
- For Administrators, Subscription Report now includes courses in subscription
- Subscriber Report tab now shows student completions of subscription
- Registration/Subscription Requests and Approvals
An Organization may specify that student registration requests for course sessions and/or subscriptions require approval before being processed. Requests may be approved by the Organization, a Group Manager of a Group to which a requesting student belongs, or a Course Administrator or Course Instructor assigned to the course session.
Benefit: Students can browse the course catalog and request approval to take a course more easily, while Management can review and process such requests more efficiently.
Students may use a shopping cart to purchase courses and subscriptions. The shopping cart is optional for each Organization.
Benefit: Students can purchase several courses and/or subscriptions at one time and use coupon codes to reduce the total cost of the purchase.
Organizations may create discount coupons that students may use when purchasing courses and/or subscriptions. The Course Provider can also create coupons for use by one or more Organizations. Coupons can be used with the shopping cart or with the standard non-shopping cart payment method.
Benefit: Organizations can offer and manage pricing incentives for courses.
- Improved Reporting
- New reports for Organizations:
- Training status of the members of one or more Groups, similar to the Group Training Report
- A summary report that displays training summary information for one or more Groups, similar to the Group Training Summary Report
- A Training Summary Report that shows the training completions for students enrolled in the Organization
- New reports for Group Managers:
- Training status of the members of the Group
- Training summary report for the entire Group
- Custom Reports: The Course Provider may now create custom reports for use by one or more Organizations. Organizations may run the custom reports at will, supplying variable values to tailor the results as needed. Results may be sorted by any column, printed, and downloaded.
Usability
- Modern, streamlined user interface with collapsible inline help
- Full run-time delivery system that requires
only a browser on the student computer. No proprietary plugins or technologies required.
- Complete feature tailoring within organizations. An organization can display or hide any tab or menu for its user base to optimize the user's experience
- Full support for Instructor-Led Training (ILT), including downloadable course handouts and uploadable student assignments, resource scheduling, printable attendance sheets, and more
- Course Ratings:
Courses can be rated on a scale of 1
to 5 by registered students if permitted by the Course Provider, their
organization and the course itself. If course ratings are
turned on for a course and student, the rating will show
up in the Course Catalog. The student can click on the
rating and get a more detailed description of what the
ratings mean and any comments entered by other
students about the course.
- Student lesson plan (curriculum)
- A curriculum can include core (required) courses and/or elective (optional)
courses or subscriptions.
- Curricula may be assigned to groups.
- Group members may be assigned to a curriculum by their group manager
or automatically by virtue of their becoming a member of the group.
- Students may be assigned to a curriculum individually.
- Wait lists
- A course may have a course wait list associated with it.
- Individual sessions of a course may have a session wait list associated
with them.
- Students on a wait list are notified by e-mail when a seat becomes
available.
- A notified student will have a specified number of days – depending
upon the wait list - to register for the course before being dropped
from the wait list.
- Check completion criteria and print certificates of
completion if requirements are met. If the required criteria are not met,
the student can be advised of the steps necessary to fulfill remaining
requirements.
- Support for distribution of courses on CD-ROM to remote locations
for installation and delivery on local computers. Tracking and performance
data may be returned to the central server and synchronized in the student
record database.
Standards
- Support for SCORM, the ADL
standard for interoperability and reusability of courseware.
- Support for ODBC-compliant database products (e.g., Access,
Oracle, or SQL Server) to support all aspects of the training environment.
Extensibility
- Flexible "facet"-based programmatic interface for adding custom functionality to a WebMentor LMS training server. A facet is a replaceable set of ColdFusion methods that provide a specific type of functionality. Release 5.2 contains built-in facets for user authentication (login) and e-commerce.
- Full student records management for WebMentor courses
as well as "foreign
courses" from vendors such as MindLeaders, SmartForce, NETg, and SkillSoft.
Security & Scalability
- Hardened against common web-based threats (SQL injection, etc.)
- Scales to support the largest eLearning operations
(> 2 million active registrations)
- Scalability through administrative roles that can
be assigned to one individual to centralize responsibility or to many individuals
to distribute authority.
Internationalization
- Full multilanguage support throughout the system, including complete localization in Spanish
Ecommerce
- Fully integrated e-commerce functions for secure
online credit card transactions and automated validation.
- Support for multiple e-commerce merchant accounts from VeriSign and/or
E-xact
- Ability to assign one or more organizations to any merchant account
- Payment receipts for e-commerce transactions
- Organizations may access and manage their financial transactions and
display financial reports
Collaboration
- Course and organization conferences that support threaded discussion
and attachments, e-mail notification, and searching
- Bulletin boards
Reporting
- Robust reporting throughout, including sortable report columns, HTML and PDF printing, and CSV-format file downloads
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