Hi, Jessica:
We do a lot of these things. We have an e-learning program manager who builds courses in Articulate that we add to course shells (there is a SCORM object for this). We also have 1 DecisionSim course currently and have had others in the past. We also have 3, soon to be 4, practice improvement modules (PIMs). DLC has to build these for us currently because they are a lot more complicated, and there is an added cost. We do hope one day to be able to do these ourselves, but because of the complexity that’s not an option now. EthosCE does have a very basic PIM feature that we’ve used for a follow-up course tied to a live meeting. It has worked out fine. As our older courses expire we’re looking at them to see if they need to be rebuilt using Articulate to make them less like PowerPoint presentations and more like actual courses. We’ve also started talking about gamification. Our physicians in leadership are resistant to this, but I think they’ll come around. We have a quarterly virtual journal club where we use the GoToWebinar course object, and that has been working out VERY well.
We are going to be beta-testing the new EthosCE video add-on starting later this spring that will also give us more flexibility and will allow us to innovate more with video content. We do a virtual annual meeting every year, where we record a certain amount of the content from our live meeting and offer it online (and downloadable). Same with our practice management workshop. Being able to work with our video in a better way will be great. We also have a TON of the more traditional case-based stuff.
Feel free to check out our site: https://education.aaaai.org/. We have a lot of free courses, so poke around and try some of them out if you like. Let me know which ones you’d like to try in full and I’ll dig out the right answers for the assessments so you can move through them more easily. You will have to set up a free account, and since it’s all run through our AMS database it’s a few extra steps, but it doesn’t take much time to get it set up.
Honestly, the best thing to do is ask them what they WANT your LMS to do. Shoot for the moon with brainstorming and then explore what Ethos can and can’t do. Be sure they know you might not be able to do everything they envision, but until you ask you really don’t know. Get them thinking about sites they’ve used that they liked and disliked and ask them why. Just keep in the back of your mind the fact that once the Pandora’s box is opened, there is no closing it. We had a couple of scientific committees that really took hold of the idea of creating content and now we can’t get them to back off. We’ve been trying to find diplomatic ways to make them understand that they need to give us some space to work with other committees for other content we need, but I think our director is just going to have to get rude. I appreciate their enthusiasm, and it’s catching on with other committees.
Also, get on your test site and just start playing around with the different content types (books, pages, courses, polls, etc.). Ethos is really hard to break, and if you’re working in your test site it’s even safer. When you run into problems or questions, put in tickets. There are a lot of things that simply can’t be covered in training, a lot of deeper functions, that you will only learn if you make time to dive in now and then. Trust me on this: you won’t regret spending a Friday afternoon learning more about your LMS. My motto is: The more I dig, the more I can do.