Founded in the tumultuous times, we've overcome the hurdles that have stopped many new ventures in their tracks. We started out consulting, providing web application design and development services, including playing a pivotal role in the development of several fundraising systems.

But rather quickly, the consulting work led us back to our roots of knowledge assessment and learning management. In 2003, we started developing a test and survey engine. An inquiry from some former colleagues (and a current client) soon had us designing and developing a learning management system built specifically for e-learning content providers.

Our goals at the time:

• a clean and easy to use interface for both the learner and the administrator - after all a learning management system that requires user training seems counter intuitive
• ubiquitous availability - Internet browser based delivery with any standards compliant web browser without the need for any third party plug-ins or extensions
• support for the then emerging SCORM 2004 (and earlier 1.2) standards so content can be developed using a choice of best of breed authoring tools
• provide our clients with visibility and the ability to manage all of their customers with a single logon
• deliver the software as a service, alleviating our clients of the worries of hosting and allowing us to keep the product current as the web evolves

We've achieved these goals and they remain central to the ongoing development of the service.

Since the Firmwater LMS went live in January, 2005, our clients have delivered their training products to over 110,000 people in over 480 organizations around the world.

The LMS has:

• processed over 2.7 million login requests,
• delivered over 7.5 million interactive learning objects (SCO's in SCORM speak), and
• administered over 465,000 tests and surveys in which it has recorded over 10.8 million responses.

Our clients are diverse, offering training on a wide range of topics from Industrial skills and safety training, workplace violence and harassment, presentation skills, to breastfeeding education.

Our largest customer supports over 68,000 users in over 210 organizations with just two full time support staff, a testament to the reliability and maturity of the LMS. However, when they are faced with issues outside of their expertise, they know we are there to stand beside them.

We continue to invest in the ongoing development of the Firmwater LMS. There have been 29 releases since March, 2007 with the latest release out just last week (more to come on that and other releases in future posts to this site). We remain focused on developing the features asked for by our customers.

To this day, we remain focused on helping training companies transform and grow their businesses online. If this story resounds with yours, drop us a line and let's see if there's a fit between our capabilities and your needs. Perhaps we can help you take your training business to the next level!

To our customers, we thank you for your patronage, patience and support through the years. To our families, we thank you for believing in us, putting up with some late night or early morning hours on occasion and being understanding.

This morning's enhancements allow you to define the credit types that are available and to assign credits against your courses. Here's a quick overview of how to use the new functionality:

Define Continuing Education credit types

1. Enable 'Continuing Education Credits' functionality for your organization from the Settings page.

2. With the functionality turned on, you'll see a new 'Credit Types' menu for the Configuration tab. This page shows you all the Continuing Education credit types that are available for an organization.

   You can add new types and, if you have more than one defined, you can drag to set the order that they are displayed in.

   

Assign credits to your courses

1. To assign credits to one of your courses, go to the course summary page and click the 'Edit' link.

2. Switch to the 'Credits and Certificate' page.

3. Assign values to one or more of the listed credit types and click the 'Save Changes' button.

   

It's as simple as that. You'll now see the credits listed on the course summary page. If completion certificate access is enabled, the certificates will include information about the credits earned.

We've got some more enhancements planned to expose more information about the Continuing Education credit earned by users in reports, so stay tuned. Enjoy!

How to send messages

Welcome messages can be sent or resent one at a time or in bulk.

1. Use the new 'Send welcome message' action from the user summary page. The user must have a well-formed email address for the action to be enabled.

   

2. Select one or more users from the users list page and use the 'Send welcome message' operation.

   If you've setup a new client, have assigned content to the users and are ready to go live, this is a good way to send messages to all the users.

   

3. You can also send welcome messages to new users when importing a list of users. Enable the 'Send users a welcome message' checkbox on the confirmation page.

   

4. If you allow users to signup and create their own accounts, you can have a welcome message sent to new users when this happens.

Configuring your emails

You can configure which emails are turned on for any of your clients from the Support and Email Settings page. You can also specify the email's sender name and reply to address. In the future, this is also where you'll edit the content of the emails if you want to customize them. We haven't added that capability yet. Until then, if you want a custom message, just let us know and we'll be happy to configure it for you.

High deliverability

Our email infrastructure is designed for high deliverability so emails should avoid junk filters and make it through to your users' inboxes. It is also designed to scale, as we expect to send tens of thousands of emails each month.

We're excited to build on this first phase of email capability. We hope you like it.

You've always had the option of enforcing a minimum password length and requiring users to change their password after a certain number of days. Now you can require that their password meet other criteria.

To start, we have two options:

1. No complexity requirements (default)
2. Start with letter, and contain at least one number and one special character

You can set the password settings on the Accounts and Access page.

We're able to add other complexity requirements so if one of your clients or prospects has a specific requirement, let us know!

Assign content based on language or membership type

Membership registration

We added two new filter options to assignments. You can now create rules to deliver content to users based on the membership type of a user or on the user's language. Of course, you'll only see these new options for clients that have membership enabled or support multiple languages.

Membership registration

You can now designate specific membership types that allow self-registration. When enabled, each membership type will have its own registration page. By visiting the page, a user can create and pay for membership when signing up for an account.

And, paired with the new assignment membership type filter, new members who register will be able to access training content immediately.

To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.14.

New help documentation

Help documentation

Search across clients

Assessment presentation settings

We've completely revamped the help documentation that is available from within the LMS. This was a long process but useful to us as it identified a few areas of our application where we can improve things. There is now complete documentation for both administrators and students. It can be accessed from the 'Help' link in the top-right corner of the LMS when you're logged in (it's also available on our public site's support section). The documentation you see from within the LMS depends on your assigned role.

Documentation is an ongoing process so we'll continue to improve it over time. We also have plans of making the default help page context-sensitive so that it's determined by which page it was launched from.

Search across all your clients

It was really easy to search for a user within an organization -- but not if you didn't know what organization the user was associated with. Sometimes you may get a support request in the form of a voicemail or in an email which doesn't give a clue as to the person's organization.

We recognized that we didn't have an effective way for administrators to search across all their clients. Given that some of our clients have hundreds of their own clients using our LMS, we needed to do something.

We've added a new tab called 'Search' which is available, for now, only to Master Administrators (in fact, it is their new default page). It provides a quick way to search for a user or to jump to a client. The page may look a little sparse for now but, don't worry, we've got greater plans for this page coming.

Edit presentation settings of assessments

Our built-in assessment engine offers many presentation options to control the user's experience when taking a test or survey. You can specify:

• a time limit
• whether users can suspend and resume an attempt
• how users can navigate through questions
• what feedback is displayed
• the information displayed to the user after they complete an attempt

While we've always allowed you to control these settings at author-time, we didn't provide an easy way to update these on the fly. This is now possible. This is especially useful for our clients who share the same test or survey across many clients but want different settings to be used.

Easier updating of your content

Quite often, typos are found or some tweaks are required after you deploy your learning content to a population of users. We've made it easier for you to update previously loaded content. There is now a new option on the content loading page which specifies that you want to update the resources of content in place.

Other new features and enhancements

A few more of the new features and enhancements include:

• Ability to display the list of locations as an expandable hierarchy
• Ensure that learning content with long-running videos doesn't time out
• Complete support for SCORM 2004 roll-up rules

To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.13.

So, a number of months ago, I planned to work with some of the more recognized authoring tools to test out their functionality and report back on my learning experiences. I started my learning journey with Camtasia Studio 6 and decided that the best way to truly understand the challenges training vendors face when creating SCORM content is to actually take on a content creation project myself. And after much deliberation, our team here at Firmwater settled on developing a new user orientation video, to instruct students on how to navigate our LMS.

So, instead of getting right into the "goods and bads" of Camtasia, I thought it would be more helpful if I mentioned some of my lessons learned during the course of my first ever content authoring experience. So, here's my list:

Being new to working with a LMS, he's not well-versed in the technical jargon of the learning industry -- he doesn't speak SCORM. He had a folder of content and wanted to be able to load it and have students view it. Understandable. Our client had received the published files from a colleague so he hadn't actually used Presenter himself, nor did he know what format the files were in.

I'm not aware of any of our other clients' use of Adobe Presenter so I didn't have any hands on experience with it. In the PowerPoint-to-Flash learning category of authoring tools, the majority leans heavily to the use of Articulate Presenter. Articulate has great support and a strong community behind them. They've got lots of useful articles about working with their tools, including this one detailing step-by-step instructions for publishing to a LMS. Adobe... not so much.

I went hunting on the Web for instructions to help our client out. The best I could find on how to publish from Presenter to a LMS was a partial screen shot of the product's 'Reporting' tab (on Adobe's features page).

Since I couldn't find any instructions, I figured it would be worthwhile to download their product, try it out and document how to do it.

Does This Sound Familiar?

"I want to start providing some of my training courses online. I already have my classroom materials prepared, so how can I get started?" If that sounds familiar to you then this blog post can help explain where you can go from here.

For starters, you need to be aware of the fact that your original classroom content cannot be delivered on the Web in its original state. So, if your content is currently in the form of PowerPoint slides, video recordings, or even Word documents, it will need to be converted to an online format before you can move it online.

So, how do you "convert" it from its original state to an online format? Well, that's where authoring tools come in.

You can choose which languages you'd like to make available for your organization's users. And, if you're interested in adding support for another language, please contact us.

Esperamos que te guste!

Well, it sounds like that would do the trick and if it's really that easy, then why doesn't everyone do it? So, it's at this point that I began learning a few things from the CSTD "Telling Ain't Training" workshop last month.

Now, if you're looking at that cartoon and at least slightly cracking a smile, then it has served its purpose. By the way, I really look like that; at least 99.9% of the time. I'm also a chatterbox and very much a kid at heart. And if you're wondering right now, as you look at that cartoon, whether or not to take me seriously, well I must tell you; I have extensive industry experience that will prove my credibility. In a nutshell, I have over twelve years of experience in procrastination, nine in perfectionism and at least four being a nonconformist. As you can see, this experience is clearly relevant to the topics I will be discussing.

Moving on, let's talk a little bit about the purpose of this blog series. Cutting to the chase, it's pretty much for newbies. If this is your first time in the elearning pool, then this blog is for you! Now if you're a newbie like me then you've probably only recently frolicked around the shallow end of this pool. But as you may already be dreading, our due date for Olympic enrollment is coming up very soon. So, it's time to jump into the deep end! Can't float? Well, perhaps you can find some comfort in knowing that your water wings could, in essence, be this blog.

This one took a little longer than usual to get out the door, but hopefully it will prove to be worth the wait. We upgraded some of our infrastructure in the process, so we needed to be extra careful to make sure that everything works smoothly. Along with several bug fixes, there are over 20 new features. Here are the highlights:

Custom domains

Interaction Data Report

New file upload interface

We offer our service as a white-label solution. When you offer our LMS to your clients, we want it to appear as if you made it. You control the branding and the terminology used. Your clients see your contact support information and the system can be customized so that emails are sent from your organization.

The final step to completely hide Firmwater from view was to allow you to use your own custom domain. We had done this for a few of our larger clients but it wasn't easy for us to manage this across a large number of clients. Now we can offer it to everybody.

You can now choose to use your own domain. So, instead of sending out addresses to your clients with 'lms.firmwater.com', you can use a URL such as:

'lms.yourcompany.com' or 'portal.yourcompany.com' (or whatever you'd like).

Note that there is an additional monthly charge to make use of a custom domain. This requires some setup on our part and we incur additional costs to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain and for dedicated IP addresses.

If you're interested, or for more details, please contact us.

Simpler login URLs

Upgrading our infrastructure has given us some additional capabilities that we didn't have before. We've now been able to simplify the addresses of your login page and those of your clients (the old addresses still work too). You can now just tack on your client ID to the domain used.

If your client's ID is 'yourclient', their login page can now be accessed at 'lms.firmwater.com/yourclient'. (Previously, you would have to use 'https://lms.firmwater.com/lms/?cid=yourclient'.)

This works if you're using a custom domain as well. Your client's login page would be accessed at 'lms.yourcompany.com/yourclient'.

Improved reporting

Reporting now uses an updated platform, allowing for better support from all browsers and, in many cases, improved report execution times. Users will no longer experience application time outs while interacting with reports for long periods of time. We've also organized the list of reports into menus to make it easier to find similar reports.

Along with making improvements to several of the existing reports, we also added two new reports:

• Interaction Data Report: Export of the SCORM interaction data saved per user attempt. Some content saves question response data to the LMS through this mechanism.
• Location List: Lists all locations and the number of users for each.

Other new features and enhancements

A few more of the new features and enhancements include:

• Support for taxes when making purchases through the LMS.
• Importing of locations, departments, job titles.
• An improved file upload interface.

We hope you enjoy all the new features. To see everything that's new, see the release notes for Version 2.12.

And so, without much further ado, we are quite pleased to announce that we are now on Twitter! Follow us @firmwater to be in-the-know about the most important Firmwater LMS news.

Happy following!

Today, they posted a great article to their blog with a list of 101 quick video tutorials. Each video shows how to do something with one their products -- and all are 5 minutes or less.

I don't use Articulate regularly but I'm often asked how to do a specific task with their products. I've already found a couple of videos in this list that I could have used in the past. Definitely worth checking out, if you use Articulate!

See the article »