The assessment engine in EthosCE has been significantly improved in the 7.4.1 release and we think it’s amazing! We love our quiz module and the new features it makes available to our customers. Here are some of the highlights:

Self assessments

Self-assessments should be challenging to the learner. Course administrators assume that they must provide enough questions to cover the topic area broadly and deeply. Typically this means a lot of questions, and often the questions are lengthy and complicated.

Navigating a 100+ question self-assessment exam with such question requires additional features to make things easier for the learner. EthosCE now provides the following features that should help greatly.

Allow resume

Learners can start a quiz, log out and then come back and finish it later.

Answer sheet

The answer sheet shows the learner a list of sortable categorized questions, whether they've been answered or not and whether the answer was correct. Each question in the answer sheet is linked to the question itself. In this way, the learner can work through related questions or jump around as needed.

Photo by Ryan McGilchrist

Random access to questions

Learners have random access to quiz questions.

Navigation improvements

When more than a specified number of questions exist in a quiz, the learner has access to pagination controls. For less than the specified number the learner has access to a jump menu listing questions.

When more than the specified number of question exists in a quiz the learner is shown how many questions have been answered and how many remain.

"Locking" questions

If learners have random access to quiz questions, you might not want them going back and changing an answer. This would preserve their first attempt. EthosCE allows you to option all lock questions so that users cannot change them once answered. To change the answer with locked questions the learner would have to re-attempt the quiz.

When a user sees a locked question after answering it, the question and selected response are shown.

Peer comparison per question

Learners can optionally be shown how they compared with peers for each question.

Peer comparison per quiz

Learners can optionally be shown how they compared with peers for each quiz.

Peer comparison per category

Learners can optionally be shown how they compared with peers for each category of quiz questions.

Question tagging

In order to do peer comparison per category, each question in EthosCE can be tagged with a category term that you define. In addition, questions can be searched by category from the question bank.

Granular feedback

When providing learners feedback after a question or quiz, we've made the options more granular about what you show to the learner and when. The following options are available both after each question and after the quiz.

• Whether to show the question
• Whether to show the learner's choice
• Whether to show the correct choice
• Whether to show peer comparison
• Whether to show if the user answered correctly
• Whether to show answer feedback (based on the choice)
• Whether to show the question feedback
• Whether to show quiz feedback

Quizzes as a learning activity

Not all quizzes are meant to be assessments. For example, a case study can be presented in a quiz. Each question provides the learner with additional information and the user is asked to make a choice. If the choice is incorrect, the learner is shown why it was incorrect. The learner cannot move forward until the question is answered correctly. For such a quiz, all users end up with a final score of 100 percent, but the score is irrelevant. The quiz is used as a learning tool not an assessment.

To deliver such a quiz, EthosCE provides the "Repeat until correct" option on quizzes.

Timed quizzes

For true assessments, EthosCE allows for the course administrator to provide timed quizzes with a countdown timer that shows the learner how much time is remaining.

EthosCE is a learning management system (LMS) for continuing education. The application is designed to deliver and track continuing education. But what about creating the content to be delivered to learners?

EthosCE 7.4 Supports Tin Can API

EthosCE is built with Drupal, which is a very popular content management system. This means that a lot of tools are available in Drupal for creating content.

EthosCE provides support for playing or launching content authored elsewhere, such as Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter, Articulate Storyline, Camtasia, GoToMeeting, Lectora, WebEx, and many other tools. We also support SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 and Tin Can using an ADL-certified SCORM engine.

We're content agnostic -- if you can play it on the web, you can play it in EthosCE.

However, in EthosCE itself we provide the following content objects which can be used to create e-learning content in EthosCE. There is no need to use an external tool.

Course page

The course page is a single standalone page of HTML content. Course administrators can use this to enter content directly or embed content that exists elsewhere. For example a video from YouTube or Vimeo, iFrame, Flash animation, etc. Course administrators can format text, input images and tables using a rich text editor known as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

Administrators can embed “tokens” in the course page (and other course objects). Tokens are replaced with data relevant to the user at the time the page is viewed. For example, a user’s name, membership number, expiration date, or the number of credits available in a course can all be put into a course page. In this way an administrator can create personalized content or allow a learner to confirm a profile field value before finishing and claiming and transmitting credit to an external provider.

Simply viewing a course page is considered enough to "complete" the object as a course requirements, although time-based requirements can also be applied.

An EthosCE Book Page

Book

The book is a series of pages linked together. Like a course page, course administrators can enter multimedia content directly or embed multimedia content that exists elsewhere. Tokens are also available.

Books provide more control over criteria for completion. The course administrator can require a user to view all pages of the book or just a single page before completing the course. Time-based requirements can also be applied.

Book pages can be grouped into hierarchal relationships to create chapters and other organizational relationships.

Quiz

Most EthosCE customers think first of the quiz module as a tool for assessing knowledge. However a few use it for content authoring. When using quiz with the “repeat until correct” option, quiz becomes an excellent tool for authoring case studies and delivering case-based learning.

By using a full page of content in a multichoice or other quiz question type, the learner can move through a case study and must correctly respond to each question before continuing forward. Content and case narrative can be interspersed with decision making. An incorrect answer can provide additional feedback to the learner. In this way, the quiz module become the classic “decision-forcing” method of case-based learning.

Possibilities abound

Drupal has a huge ecosystem of other modules that can be used for content creation. For example H5P is an HTML5 authoring format that we are watching closely for a possible integration with EthosCE.

If you have a content authoring need send us a note. We're very enthusiastic about using EthosCE to support course objects authored in Drupal to meet the needs of our customers.

Recently I did a call with a newly launched EthosCE customer to ask how the implementation of their learning management system turned out. It’s always satisfying to hear that things went well and this call was very satisfying.

Photo by 401(K) 2012

Bear with me as I am going to brag a little bit, but this customer's LMS manager told me that she had implemented 5 learning management systems during her career and was especially pleased with the response time of the EthosCE team during implementation.

But what I really wanted to share in this blog post was this quote:

“EthosCE was by far the best value for the price.”

That’s a pretty heady quote for a product manager to hear, and I promise I’m not making it up. It turns out that what makes the difference is not just the price itself as much as the pricing model. When this customer was comparing LMS systems, all the other systems she looked at charged by the number of users. In comparison, EthosCE pricing is a flat fee for implementation and support.

The customer provides certification for IT professionals, and like many of our externally facing customers, they don’t have a fixed number of users. If things go well for them, a lot of users are certified and their costs are higher.

It turns out that for this customer, “value” was defined in two ways.

1. Predictability of costs regardless of the number of users.
   The cost of EthosCE is predictable because of the flat-fee pricing model. There is no risk that if thousands of unexpected users show up that costs will soar. The revenue from those users goes directly to their bottom line.
2. Total cost of license. I’m proud to say that this customer found that EthosCE had the lowest cost of all the LMS systems they evaluated.

Pricing an LMS is not easy, and lots has been written about it, but hearing that we beat our competitors “by far” is validation that flat-fee pricing has a place in the LMS world.

If you’re interested in learning more about EthosCE and would like to speak with one of our customers as a reference, contact us and we’ll be glad to set it up.

EthosCE is a robust platform for selling online training. It allows for selling courses — either directly to the learners or to the learners via their employer.

In this blog post I am going to highlight features that show how EthosCE goes beyond the traditional learning management system and excels as a commerical training delivery platform.

No per-user pricing

First and perhaps most importantly, a flat-fee model licensing allows you to keep more revenue in your pocket. As your user base grows, you'll always pay the same amount for EthosCE.

E-commerce

Can an LMS be self-funding and drive revenue growth? Yes, but only if it can support sophisticated e-commerce features such as renewable subscriptions and a pay-wall.
Photo by LendingMemo.com.

EthosCE ships with an out-of-the-box e-commerce module that supports online sales, unlimited coupons, role-based pricing and pricing attributes. We integrate with your payment platform so all the revenue goes directly to you. No-revenue sharing model is required.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions allow for you to provide free or discounted training activities to learners with a subscription. Learners can directly purchase a time-limited subscription or receive access as an employee via a corporate or business contract.

Sample Content

An LMS that can provide a paywall is vital for monetizing training content and increasing the purchase conversion rate.

When selling training activities directly to learners, providing sample content can help increase your conversion rate. Sample content shows potential customers the quality of the training materials you are providing. EthosCE can segment your content so that it is both in-front-of and behind a pay wall. Users are enticed to enroll without payment to receive a sample of content, but only receive the full course content or completion credit after payment.

Once enrolled, a built-in reminder system can email or send text messages to learners who opted not to purchase and remind them of their incomplete status.

Customer Portals

If you are targeting your training programs to corporations or small businesses, EthosCE allows you to provide each group a branded portal for their employees complete with their logo and colors. Employees can access the portal via a custom URL.

Contextual Permissions

When using customer portals, each of your customers can be a course administrator and create their own courses. Each customer's administrative permissions are context sensitive and prevent them from editing courses outside their own portal.

Today we've released EthosCE 7.4.2. We'll be rolling this release out to customers during the coming weeks. Here's a description of what to expect.

Enrollment bundles for paid courses.

In 7.4.1 we released “enrollment bundles.” Enrollment bundles are a group of questions that a learner must answer before enrolling in the course. In 7.4.2 we have added support for enrollment bundles for paid courses!

Enrollment bundles are useful because they allow administrators to collect time- or event-sensitive data that you might not want to collect on the user profile. Example use cases would include asking for:

• “The name and number of guests” for those attending a conference;
• “Years of experience” data to be used for outcomes reports;
• “How did you find this course” for marketing purposes;
• Or any other course-specific questions might change from course to course.

The learners’ responses can be downloaded in the enrollment report.

Linked-enrollment requirements

Linked-enrollment requirements allow administrators to require users to purchase or enroll in one course before they purchase or enroll in a second course. Until now EthosCE has only offered “Course-completion enrollment requirements,” which require completion of one or more courses before enrolling in a second course.

Linked-enrollment requirements are especially useful for conference registrations. For example, an administrator can require a user to purchase a conference registration before purchasing a single seminar. In EthosCE 7.4.1 this would require two steps: first purchase the conference and then purchase the seminar. Now, a user can do this in a single step.

Web service documentation

We’ve added a built-in web service documentation for those EthosCE customers who want to use our web service add-on module.

What Else?

7.4.2 includes many other minor additions, changes and more than 80 bug fixes. The full list is available to customers in the changelog.

At EthosCE Learning Management System, we are strong advocates and supporters of web services for seamless data transfers between EthosCE and 3rd party applications (e.g., association management systems, accreditation systems, CE, content learning management systems).  Here are a few of the web services that EthosCE supports:

ACCME PARS

EthosCE has built-in capabilities for ACCME accredited providers to download PARS reports which can eventually be manually uploaded into ACCME PARS system. The course administrator can enter the fields related to activity, commercial support, income and expenses at a per course level. These values appear in the PARS report that can be downloaded at a course, academic or calendar year level.

CE Broker:

This add-on module is used to automatically report eligible learner credits that were earned in EthosCE to CE Broker system.  We have successfully deployed this module for several of our customers. The module considers user demographic data and eligible credit criteria to report submissions. The learner can view the status of the reported credits reported. Any failed credits due to missing course fields or learner profile information will be queued for re-submission as soon as the the missing field(s) is/are updated by the administrator/learner.

CPE Monitor:

EthosCE provides an add on module for reporting ACPE credits earned by Pharmacists and Pharmacy Technician users directly to CPE Monitor site. Learners will be required to enter the NABP e-profile ID and DOB in their profile. Administrators must enter the UAN # for the course so that the data can be sent to CPE Monitor web service.  The system has built-in rules to send credits based on the activity type and the guidelines set forth by the NABP.

Credit reporter:

EthosCE has a powerful web service module that exposes the credits earned by learners in EthosCE to external systems. This data can be sent to accreditation boards based on the specifications set forth by the respective board.  Our system has reported credits to ABIM (American Board of Internal Medicine). We are working on adding reporting capabilities to some of the other specialty boards.

SSO:

More than 75% of EthosCE implementations involve a Single Sign On (SSO) integration with association management systems (AMS), or other identity management systems. The SSO integration is used to ensure that the users are automatically logged into the LMS when they are logged into the primary authentication provider. The user profile updates can be uni or bidirectional based on the customer's business workflows.

EthosCE is proud to announce that Talented Learning has named EthosCE a Top 10 Association LMS in the World. With deep association-friendly features such as single-sign-on (SSO), Association Management System (AMS) integration, credit reporting, and e-commerce integration, EthosCE is a natural choice for medium- to large-size associations looking for a flat-fee continuing education solution.

"We're very excited and proud to be named a Top 10 Association LMS in the World by Talented Learning," said EthosCE CEO Jeremy Lundberg. "Our pricing model, hosting options, deep integrations and non-profit friendly technology are a perfect fit for associations."

EthosCE also provides a full suite of consulting services as part of, or prior to, an LMS integration for associations. Process improvement, technology strategy, systems and business analysis, revenue generation consulting for continuing education and tailored LMS training are all available.

About EthosCE
EthosCE is a full-featured learning management system designed for continuing education. EthosCE’s software and consulting services allow customers to streamline administrative and business workflows while delivering a high degree of learner participation and satisfaction.

As fully supported open-source software, EthosCE provides an alternative to traditional LMS pricing models and is available in hosted or on-site configurations for customers of all sizes and industries. EthosCE installations manage more than 1.5 million CE credits for hundreds of thousands of professionals around the world.

DLC Solutions is dedicated to ensuring both customers and learners have the best learning experience possible by leveraging expertise in business process analytics, software development and user experience engineering.

Leading organizations in health care, insurance, associations, universities and government have successfully deployed EthosCE to streamline their administrative and business workflows with a high degree of learner participation and satisfaction.
http://www.ethosce.com

About Talented Learning
Talented Learning is a news, research and consulting organization dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of extended enterprise learning technology solutions.   Talented Learning publishes eLearning news, vendor reviews, case studies, articles, education and best practices that are useful to professionals involved in channel, franchise, customer, member and public sector eLearning.

Our research helps organizations at every stage of the extended enterprise learning technology lifecycle from business case development, requirements identification, technology vendor selection, deployment to adoption marketing.  Talented Learning was founded by long-term eLearning veterans John Leh, CEO, and Joelle Girton, Editor-In-Chief.

We are happy to announce that our Annual EthosCE User Group Meeting will be held on January 12th, 2016 in Washington, DC and registration is now open!

The meeting will be held the day before the 41st Annual Conference of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEHP). While our event is not associated with the Conference, we hope that this will make it easier for you to join us.

Our gathering will provide you with the ability to:

• Connect with other EthosCE clients including associations, health systems, education companies and insurance companies.
• Understand how other organizations have implemented and are leveraging EthosCE LMS.
• Share and learn about best practices.

Lunch will be provided at the event, so no need to pack a brown bag. All guests are invited to a EthosCE-sponsored happy hour after the meeting to socialize and deepen our community connections. After a full day of talks and discussions, we hope you’ll attend and enjoy a drink on us while you strengthen your professional network.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, January 12, 2016!

You can register for the EthosCE User Group Meeting online.

For more information and ongoing updates about the event visit the EthosCE User Group homepage.

We look forward to seeing you there!
EthosCE Team

We are very thankful to the Endocrine Society for hosting this year’s meeting at their beautiful headquarters in Washington D.C. Their support in this event has been remarkable and their hospitality has helped make this first meeting much less daunting for us. We cannot thank them enough.

After many months of hard work, we are excited to announce the release of EthosCE 7.4.3, the latest update to our EthosCE Learning Management System designed for continuing education.

EthosCE 7.4.3 provides new features as well as improvements to existing features. This release will be available to new and existing customers beginning December 2015.

New Features

GoToWebinar

EthosCE has full integration with GoToWebinar.

Support for GoToWebinar is now native to EthosCE! All customers with a GoToWebinar account are now able to create webinars, automatically enroll learners, and evaluate the amount of time spent in the webinar as a requirement for completion of the course.

Course Waitlisting

Users can add themselves to a waitlist for full courses. Administrators can tag, sort, enroll and email people on the waitlist.

Waitlisting is available on all courses. When a course enrollment reaches the enrollment limit, learners are now able to add themselves to a waitlist. Administrators can manage the waitlist to add, remove and enroll learners as well as set a status such as “not interested” or “ready to enroll.”

Administrators may send an email to an individual on the waitlist or to the entire list to announce newly available spaces or the availability of another course.

Webform Templates

EthosCE has long supported Webforms, a powerful tool for collecting information from learners in a course or the public at large. However, for EthosCE customers with many administrators, keeping track of which webform to use as a “template” has been a challenge. Templates could accidentally be edited or used in the wrong place. With EthosCE 7.4.3, Webform templates allow for a locked, permission-restricted template that can be easily copied into a new template when creating a course object.

Administrative Credit Awarding, Editing and Deleting

Administrators can award, edit or delete credit in bulk.

EthosCE’s powerful credit awarding module provides robust features for credit eligibility, certificate mapping, credit types and credit claiming, and now it extends those features for administrators to use on an ad hoc basis. Administrators can now visit any course report and award any type and amount of credit to any learner, either individually or in bulk. Learners who have already earned credit can have their credit type or amount changed. Administrators can also delete credit.

This feature also comes with audit capabilities so that any awarded credit can be traced back to who awarded or edited it. Deleted credits are also logged in a deleted credit log.

Report Viewer Role

Users with the report viewer role may log in and view any system report. The report viewer role does not have any course or site editing permissions. This new role allows you to grant access to reports without being concerned about unwanted access to administrative functionality.
Quiz question import
All question types can now be imported via a CSV file. Imported questions can be added to a quiz and if necessary, updated be reimporting.

New Homepage Promo Style Block

Improved homepage slideshow options.

We have introduced a new homepage block that consists of a full-width, all-image promo. This allows the site admin to have full control of typographic design and layout within the block. The block also supports a series of all-image promos that are displayed as part of a slideshow and can be linked to a course or other page.

RESTful XML/JSON Web Service

A RESTful web service is now available for all customers. Web service functions include retrieving and creating users, retrieving course enrollments and completions, and e-commerce. Web service documentation is available online.

Improvements

Transcript/Enrollment Importer

The transcript importer now gives administrators the option to enroll existing users immediately or to enroll them upon login. Enrollment records for nonexistent users are saved and awarded when the learner creates an account.

Conditional Access to Course Object by Grade Range

Course objects before 7.4.3 provided conditional access based on a single grade, for example, higher than 70%. In 7.4.3, administrators can now specify a range that allows access. This allows for remediation course objects. For example, if a learner scores between 0% and 69% a course object can be presented to them but not learners who scored 70% or higher.

Conditional Requirements of Course Object by Grade Range

Administrators can allow access to or make a learning object optional based on a grade range.

In addition to conditionally allowing access to course objects, administrators can now make an object optional based on a grade range. In this way administrators can allow a learner to “test out” of a required course object by showing mastery of a subject in quiz and scoring higher than a specified percentage.

Quiz feedback

We’ve added additional options to the quiz feedback settings. Administrators can now restrict feedback to only be shown after the learner passes the quiz or exhausts their attempts.

Reports

The following reports are new!

• Quiz Download Report: A download of all users’ responses to all quiz questions including full user profile data.
• Course content usage report: A system-wide list of all course objects and the courses that contain them.
• Reported Credit Failure Report: This report shows all credits records that were not accepted by a third-party, such as an AMS, CRM, or credentialing organizations such as CPE Monitor.
• Deleted Credit Log: A log of all credit records deleted by administrators.
• Course Credit Log: A log of all credit records for a learner including a history of administrative edits..

PARS Date Periods

The site administrator can now set the start date of the 365 day range to be used by PARS reports.

Webform Improvements

The upgrade of the webform module include semantic differential survey questions.

The Webform module has been updated and includes several new features including the ability to allow conditionals to act on more than one component in the same rule. This great feature allows for complex conditional to be created more quickly.

Grid questions have also been improved to include support for semantic differential survey questions. This is a grid with opposite values on the left and right of the scale.

Exclude from search

Course and Site Administrator roles may now configure content to be excluded from search on a per-content item basis. For example, a single course or webform can be excluded from search.

Fully Responsive Calendar

The EthosCE calendar has been updated to improve display on smaller screens.

Configurable Display of Price Per Role

Role based pricing can now be configured to display all roles and the associated price, or only the price that the user is eligible to receive. In addition, either $0.00 or no price can be displayed for free courses.

Question Numbering

Quiz now numbers all quiz questions.

Reference by Name or Node ID

When referencing a course or content object, administrators can either continue to enter the name or use the node ID. This is useful when EthosCE contains many courses or objects with similar titles.

Custom Subject for Reminder Emails

Administrators may set a custom subject line per reminder.

The release also includes numerous other small changes and over 60 bug fixes. The full changelog is available online.

I am very excited to present with Scott Bradbury, MS, American Academy of Pediatrics and Olivier Petinaux, MS, American College of Surgeons at the 41st Annual Conference of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions.  The conference will be held January 13 – 16, 2016 at the Gaylord National® in National Harbor, MD.  Our EthosCE Learning Management System team will also be exhibiting.  Please stop by and see us!

Presentation Abstract

Debating Three Pathways to LMS and Educational Technology Nirvana: Build Your Own, Open Source and off the Shelf
Session Description Swimming in a sea of endless options and choices when it comes to selecting a learning management system (LMS)? Confounded by the array of choices when it comes to selecting other technologies to support your continuing medical education? In this point/counterpoint session, three panelists will debate and discuss the pros and cons of three potential solutions: Build Your Own, Open Source, and Off the Shelf. The right solution for you may involve one of these approaches, or a mix of these approaches...so tune in and learn the advantages and disadvantages of each from three different perspectives. Target Audience Description Educators and technologists of all levels interested in learning more about technological solutions for their organizations.

Learning Objectives:

• List three advantages and disadvantages to using off the shelf software to meet educational technology and learning management system (LMS) needs.
• List three advantages and disadvantages to using open source to meet educational technology and LMS needs.
• List three advantages and disadvantages to using a 'build it yourself' solution to meet educational technology and LMS needs.

Speakers:
Scott Bradbury, MS, American Academy of Pediatrics
Jeremy Lundberg, MSSW, EthosCE Learning Management System | DLC Solutions
Olivier Petinaux, MS, American College of Surgeons

EthosCE 7.4.3 ships with dozens of new features and improvements. Get a first-hand look at what we've been building in this product release overview webinar.

EthosCE and the Lymphoma Research Foundation (LRF) are pleased to announce a comprehensive series of webcasts recorded at the 2015 North American Educational Forum on Lymphoma. Our veteran team of webcasting professionals captured and produced this innovative webcast program on breaking advances on lymphoma treatment options, patient support issues, clinical trials and research to members of the lymphoma community.  Please visit http://www.lymphoma.org/webcasts to view these important webcasts.

Topics include:

• Lymphoma Overview
• Disease-Specific Sessions
• Treatment  Options
• Understanding Clinical Trials

Editors Note:  Raja Venkata, PMP, CHCP, LSSBB, is the Director of Client Services for EthosCE Learning Management System. Raja leads the management of many of our large-scale LMS partnerships with leading medical associations, academic centers, and health systems. He has a proven track record for applying innovative methodologies, such as PMI, SCRUM, and Lean Six Sigma principles that drive effective processes, successful implementations and, ultimately, result in high-level client satisfaction.

TOPIC: A Pecha Kucha (translation: "Get to the Point") Approach to CME Project Management

Location:  http://cmepalooza.com/spring-2016/

Spend about 7 minutes to hear from "GEICO Gecko" when he tries to solve the mystery of delivering CME projects by breaking down the ocean of project management processes to 6 key tips and techniques that can be applied to any CME project delivery.

Using an outcomes based approach, the gold dust day "GEICO" will walk the audience through the core philosophy and framework behind these principles and demonstrate how these can be applied in the CME context to deliver stellar business results for your departmental and leadership teams!

This "GEICO" could save you time, $$$ and WORRY!