Organizations that are set up for long-term success make continual learning an essential part of their workplace culture. It’s a great way to encourage employees to keep up with rapid changes in technology and cultivate an agile workforce.
Esri has long offered a large collection of e-Learning resources to help organizations build their employees’ geospatial capabilities and get comprehensive value out of their investments in ArcGIS technology. Given that every organization has unique workforce training needs, Esri now offers Esri Academy LMS Integration, a subscription-based product that allows organizations to deliver this professional development and training via their own enterprise learning management systems (LMS).
“We’ve heard from organizations that it can be challenging to make sure that all their GIS users know, first, that they have access to on-demand Esri training and, second, that they know how and where to find it,” said Patty McGray, Esri’s director of customer education. “Giving their employees one access point for all their training and professional development needs is a really efficient and user-friendly way for these organizations to build in-house GIS skills.”
Through Esri Academy LMS Integration, organizations get to use a single learning management system for the high-quality e-Learning resources offered by Esri, which include the following:
- Web courses: Interactive, self-paced courses cover conceptual information and are composed of activities, hands-on exercises, and quizzes. For these, learners need their own access to Esri software to complete the exercises. Course durations range from one to four hours.
- Training seminars: These recorded technical presentations and demonstrations by Esri experts may include Q&A sessions from live seminars. These usually last about one hour.
- Videos: These demonstrations from Esri experts on product capabilities and apps include a curated selection of recorded technical workshops from Esri conferences. Durations range from 5 to 90 minutes.
Esri Academy LMS Integration subscriptions are available at multiple levels to support organizations of various sizes. Levels range from 0 to 50 up to 100,000 users. To purchase a subscription, organizations must have
- An active Esri maintenance subscription.
- A high-speed internet connection.
- An LMS that is compliant with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) e-Learning format. Esri Academy LMS Integration supports SCORM 2004 3rd Edition and SCORM 1.2.
- An LMS administrator who is familiar with the procedures for ingesting SCORM files into a learning management system. (This is a common workflow, and many administrators are familiar with it.)
After an organization purchases the Esri Academy LMS Integration subscription, Esri provides the LMS administrator with SCORM files for all the resources. Once the administrator uploads those to the organization’s LMS and enables learner access, individuals within the organization can seamlessly use Esri e-Learning resources at any time to build and reinforce their ArcGIS technology skills.
While access is given from within the LMS, the resources themselves are hosted by Esri Academy. This means that learners experience the live version of all Esri Academy e-Learning resources. Additionally, if a resource is updated on the Esri Academy site, users automatically see the updates through their LMS. New resources are added to Esri Academy regularly, and their SCORM files are provided to organizations each quarter.
With an Esri Academy LMS Integration subscription, managers are able to use one system to assign courses to their team members and track their learning accomplishments. Administrators only have to maintain one e-Learning system, and they can rely on their organization’s own standard processes to deliver professional development and workforce training resources to employees.
Learn more about Esri Academy LMS Integration and get started using it.
