Lakota Local Schools

Profile
Lakota Local Schools, the eighth largest school district in Ohio, is comprised of 19 schools. Lakota is home to five National Blue Ribbon Schools and has earned "Excellent" status by the state of Ohio four consecutive years. Lakota Local Schools serves more than 17,000 students and 1,500 teachers and staff and continues to grow rapidly each year.

Challenge
Lakota typically hires 40 new teachers each year, all of which require special district-specific training before each new school year. Lakota wanted to successfully train their new employees, but also needed low training costs and more time for teachers to prepare for the upcoming school year.

In order to meet these goals, Lakota concluded that it needed a complete elearning solution that included an authoring tool to develop training for its new employees and a Learning Management System (LMS) to manage and track the courses.

Solution
With the goal of saving both time and money, Lakota began investigating several elearning providers. Experts at Lakota first started by looking at learning management systems, such as Blackboard, WebCT, Angel, and CourseMill by Trivantis. They also investigated several open source solutions.

During this investigation, Lakota realized that Blackboard and WebCT were too expensive for the Lakota School System to purchase and maintain. In addition, the district found that open source solutions involved too much maintenance and technical expertise. For instance, in order to utilize an open source solution, Lakota would need an additional staff member to build and manage its own interface and write custom HTML content.

Through the investigation of several LMSs, Lakota Local Schools decided on CourseMill by Trivantis. "We quickly noticed that CourseMill was the right solution for our needs," said John Laws, Director of Technology at Lakota Local Schools. "We were thoroughly impressed with the easy implementation and low maintenance of CourseMill coupled with the ongoing support that Trivantis provides. Best of all, CourseMill provided all this at an affordable cost!"

After selecting CourseMill by Trivantis as its LMS, Lakota then began to search for an authoring tool that would enable the rapid creation of online courses. Lakota investigated Lectora by Trivantis, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and other authoring tools. Lakota noticed, however, that the learning curve for Dreamweaver and several other authoring tools was extremely high and maintenance and training would make the creation of content long and tedious.

"Lectora’s drag-and-drop technology makes content development faster and more efficient than any other authoring tool we came across."

-John Laws, Director of Technology

On the other hand, Laws found that Lectora provided the perfect blend between ease of use and expandability. The combination of Trivantis’ authoring tool and LMS was just what Laws had been looking for. "Lectora’s drag-and-drop technology makes content development faster and more efficient than any other authoring tool we came across," said Laws.

Benefits
“As a complete elearning solution, Lectora and CourseMill enable us to save costs on training by rapidly creating and hosting online content without the need for full-time staff members," said Laws. "I know that as Lakota Local Schools expands, both Lectora and CourseMill can grow with us." Laws also noted that by delivering online courses in CourseMill, Lakota can allow teachers to concentrate on preparing for students for an additional eight hours, which is a "tremendous savings to Lakota."

"As a complete elearning solution, Lectora and CourseMill enable us to save costs on training by rapidly creating and hosting online content without the need for full-time staff members."

Since implementing Lectora and CourseMill in the 2004-2005 academic school year, Lakota Local Schools has created eleven online courses. Each module took only two weeks or less for one developer to create.

The most recent courses provide complete operating details for teachers on how to manage attendance, enter grades, complete progress reports, and review student demographics. "This has allowed the Technology Department to reach more people without increasing our investment in traditional staff training time," said Laws.

eLearning Tools Integrate with Other Departments
In addition to teachers at Lakota utilizing Trivantis’ complete elearning solution, the district recently began integrating CourseMill and courses created in Lectora into the Human Resources Department. "Although we are still in the early stages of this process, we feel this will significantly reduce telephone and email correspondences related to HR operations," said Laws.

Lakota has been so pleased with the success of Lectora and CourseMill that the District Office now plans to integrate CourseMill into the classroom at the Junior and Senior buildings.

Lakota will utilize CourseMill at the student level by taking advantage of beneficial features such as instant messaging between students and homework attachments. "Interactivity is extremely important in education and the instant messaging in CourseMill will drive collaboration and learning to new levels for our students in a controlled learning environment," said Laws.