A Conversation between Jane Jazrawy, CEO of CarriersEdge, and Mark Murrell, President of CarriersEdge.

This blog has been edited down for conciseness. To listen to the entire conversation, please check out CarrierEdge’s November Episode of the Inside Webinar series they have on their YouTube Channel.

Introduction

Jane Jazrawy: First let’s talk a little bit about why we’re talking about learning management systems (LMS). It is not quite as attractive as technical training, but LMS have been your life for a very long time, Mark, right?

Mark Murrell: It has. I built my first design and built my first learning management system, or what would count as a very rudimentary LMS, in 1999 back when we were in the world of computer-based training and all of the courses that you were building were deployed on CD-ROMs or on executables that were just shared in an internal network. But we still had to track who was doing what and who was completing courses and verifying that it was completed. So, I had to build a system that would allow us to do that, print out certificates, and have a centralized storage of results. I’ve been at this for a long time and been building LMS throughout. I think CarriersEdge is the fourth major LMS that I’ve built.

Jane: What are the elements of an LMS? If you’re trying to take what you used to do in a physical classroom and put it into a learning management system, what do you need to have?

Mark: The LMS really has three main elements to it. One is the group of users, the people that are being trained. One is the group of courses that are being provided to those people. And one is the activity or the different things that happen when people take those courses. The main focus of a LMS is really a matchmaking system between users and content. In the beginning it was primarily used to keep track of who did what when so that you can see if you’re putting out a particular course, you can see who actually finished it, who hasn’t finished it, and confirm that it’s all done.

But as they evolved, they really grew into something much more elaborate and that sort of back-end piece of tracking who did what became, well, it maybe not secondary, but it it’s kind of the second stage because the first stage is really having a lot of powerful tools for managing who should be doing what. It isn’t just who did something in the past. It’s what should be happening in the future. Learning management has evolved to really grow into something that will support what people should be doing in the future and make it easy to manage and control that.

The Early Learning Management Systems

Jane: Now that we kind of have a framework of what it’s supposed to be, let’s go back and talk about the early ones because you’ve been working in learning management for twenty-five years.

Mark: Until the dot com craze in the early 2000’s, “learning management system” wasn’t really a phrase that anybody used.

Jane: Famously, The Open University in England, which is like a free university that was one of the first online universities must have had some sort of LMS. So briefly, how did that work? Like, how did people use LMS before there was even an Internet?

Mark: People were using dial up modems and sometimes people would be in a local network, but they were very different. It sort of was an outgrowth of the old correspondence course. And in in the old days, you would have a correspondence course, and content would get mailed to you and you complete your reading and your assignments, and you mail it back and it gets marked. And those kind of got moved into computer-based networks. The Open University was doing something similar to that. The assignments would be posted into the system, and people could go into the classes that they’re part of, get their assignments, and go through and complete them and submit them and the instructor would be able to mark them. So, it simplified that process a little bit.

But it was really about the content and not so much about reporting or tracking on anything that anybody did. It was really a centralized distribution system, and that’s kind of how they originally started, and that’s what First Class was designed to do in the beginning. 

Jane: I think it exploded in the ‘90s when the Internet became a way to connect people, and educators are really good at figuring out how to use things for their own purposes. The Internet in the ‘90s really became a hotbed of learning. So, you ended up being at the forefront of that and worked on a big system called Saba.

Mark: Yeah. We worked with that a bit. Saba was kind of the first successful commercial LMS that came out in the late ‘90s. And their original target market was large companies. What was interesting about Saba is they had a very specific problem that they were trying to solve, and that was keeping track of distributed learning across a huge area. The example that they used in their promotion as to why they existed and their initial success story was related to Ford, Ford Motor Company. 

Ford was having a huge issue with their dealerships submitting way too much warranty work and asking for reimbursement for all of this work with mechanics that weren’t properly trained on the vehicles. They were identifying things as warranty work and not really doing it properly, and it was costing Ford a lot of money. They implemented Saba as a way of keeping track of who was actually sufficiently trained at a dealership, and so they wouldn’t reimburse warranty work for people who weren’t sufficiently trained. That was a really successful project for them, and it proved to the world that something like an LMS could be really helpful because it helps you to stay on top of things that are happening in stretched out places that you can’t always get to.

I realized, when I was thinking about this, that it’s very similar to what we’re doing with FedEx right now, where FedEx has discounted insurance programs and things like that for their contractors. But the deductible for insurance claims is different depending on whether the drivers are compliant with their training. So, the LMS becomes very critical in determining whether drivers are up to date on their training and what the what the deductible should be in the case of a crash.

One of the things that was kind of interesting about Saba being the first ones into the market is that it really was designed for what they saw as their sweet spot customer, which was large enterprise. Other large customers they had were like regional banks that had thousands of employees, and anybody who needed to do a lot of management of training was a good customer for them. But what was very distinct about almost all those customers is that they were all white-collar people sitting in an office. That’s a very different very different approach than what we see in trucking.

White-Collar vs. Blue-Collar e-learning

Jane: Going further into what white-collar e-learning is and the learning management that they do, it is self directed. You can choose the courses that you want to take. You can follow a career path. Is there anything else that you can that you can think of that kind of sets apart white-collar e-learning?

Mark: There are several things that, to me, are immediately apparent. When I’m looking at another learning management system, I can immediately tell if it’s designed for white-collar in a few ways. One is that there’s a lot of text, and it takes a lot to get to the actual e-learning.

They (white-collar LMSs) also assume that you (the learner) is going to be a very active participant and you’re going to take notes and you’re going to want to engage with other people. So that’s a very particular audience approach. They assume the audience has newer computers on high-speed Internet in a centralized location. And they make those assumptions because most of their audience does, and it factors into how the thing performs. You need to have a good machine and a good connection to get good performance out of them. So those things immediately give away that this is a white-collar designed LMS. That kind of thing is very common in the white-collar e-learning world. And trucking and other blue-collar industries treat education very differently. So there’s a very different model that needs to be applied there.

Jane: The second model, and this kind of goes back to your history as well, is work that you did for a big retail gas station chain. And when you did this, there was no high-speed broadband.

Mark: There is an assumption that everybody who has a good connection works well in the white-collar world, and does not work in manufacturing, in energy, in transportation. And, yes, the chain of gas stations that we were working at were very different use case because they’re out in the middle of nowhere, had terribly slow connections, and had an audience that did not want to be doing that content. It’s a bunch of teenagers working a shift at a gas station. They do not care. They are not looking to further their career by getting better at spill prevention. So, you have to approach it entirely differently.

You have to have a model that tells them exactly what’s- they’re required to do, and says, “okay, you’ve got this much time to do it, and you’ve got a requirement, you’ve got to have it finished by this day.” It has more reporting for managers about the people that aren’t doing it, so the managers can follow-up and it has to work really well on a slow connection and an older machine. And that totally changes everything.

Jane: What were some of the biggest changes that you had to make on the back end in the learning management part of the system (outside of the courses)?

Mark: On the back end, you have to be very careful about tracking what’s happening and making sure that you’re not eating up a lot of bandwidth with that because the bandwidth is needed for the content delivery. You must make it very easy for people to see what they’re required to do when they get in. You can’t have a whole bunch of explanations like “go here for this, go here for that.” It is straight to the facts, “this is what you need,” and “get to it now.”

Then you also have to make it more controlled, and you have to constrain the learners so that they are actually forced to go through all of the content, to listen to all of the audio, and go through all of the checkpoint quizzes. In the white-collar world, you don’t care about that because people are there to learn. They’re going to take the time. They’re going to explore all the optional things. But here, you have to be very sure about things that people need to do and kind of force them into doing it. and not allow them to skirt the issue, find loopholes and ways around it – because they for sure will if they if they can.

You have to keep it very simple, but you have to put requirements right in their face – what they need to redo on a particular schedule and really push it on them that way and that’s the biggest change.

Transportation Learning Management Systems

Jane: Which parts did you find were the most important elements that you had to bring from your experience and put into a transportation LMS?

Mark: I’ll preface that answer with a little bit of the pros and cons of having a general-purpose system versus something it is built specifically for an audience. And Saba, that I was mentioning earlier, is a general-purpose system or they try to be a general-purpose system. There’s also Open Source that we haven’t really talked that much about, Open Source was starting to come out when we were looking at building this.

Moodle is the primary Open Source product. It’s really designed for post-secondary, for the higher education market. Which is completely different from blue-collar and white-collar as well. Because if it’s designed for university students or college students, that’s a whole different mentality. It assumes there are instructors monitoring the assignments and having a course that runs over multiple weeks and things like that. There are different ways that you can do things in Moodle, but it really is based on that sort of core assumption that you’ve got a multi-week course that is being led by an instructor. It is very text based because in university courses, everything is text based. There’s a few pictures and diagrams, but you’re not getting interaction really. So it’s not designed to handle that.

So, we were looking at what was out there, and off the shelf systems were really focused on white-collar. Open Source was in its infancy, Moodle was just starting to come up and it really was pretty rough, and it wasn’t going to be very useful. But at the same time, I built three different learning management systems for different audiences already, and I thought, “well, doesn’t make sense to use anything off-the-shelf because they’re not going to cover what we need.” And we already have the core pieces here, so we might as well build what we want. And then from that, we can build things that are very specifically suited to the trucking industry, that are very specifically designed to serve what a truck driver needs versus what other people are after. And we did that and that’s been, I think, the right decision because we’ve been able to do things that you would never be able to do with an off-the-shelf system. We’ve been able to serve an audience that you’d never be able to serve otherwise.

Jane: The trucking industry is different, but when we started working in it, we didn’t realize how different. In the structure of an LMS, you have to almost mirror the organizational structure to how people are organized in real life. A white-collar system versus a university system versus a blue-collar system are all going to be very different. How did you figure out how to structure the organizational element of the LMS that you designed for trucking?

Mark: It still comes down to the basics of users, courses, and activity. We started with that, but then we talked to fleets about how they organize their different businesses, how things are set up, and the relationship. Here’s another place where trucking is very different: the relationship between the driver, the fleet manager, the safety person, and the HR (human resources) side of things.

In a white-collar world, education and professional development is always driven by HR. There may be a dedicated training group, but it’s usually under HR. And trucking, when we came in, there really wasn’t HR. There was Safety, directing what people were required to do, and fleet managers or dispatchers responsible for the drivers.

So you had this kind of odd triangle that had to be balanced and we had to make sure that all of those things could be incorporated into the system and could serve the industry really well and flexibly. That was one of the things that we built in. We talked to people about what their challenges were and saw the pieces that would fit there. We looked at our past experience to see where we could take things we’ve learned from the past and apply it and put it all together and then just keep building on it over time, over the years. As customers use it, they make requests, or they say, “you know, this is fine, but I really have an issue with this,” or “it would be really helpful if we could do that.” And then we build that in over time.

Jane: One of the things that we’ve always had built in is the ability to move users around.

Mark: Oh, yeah. That happens a whole lot more. In the white-collar world, and even in the postsecondary world, you’re not really moving people around that much because you don’t need to. But in the trucking world, people could be on a different board every couple of weeks, so you need to have the ability to track that and make it really easy for people to move from one place to another. And along with that, have all their assignments updated to match because now they’ve moved from one customer to another. They need the customer-specific training, they may be moving from one region to another, so they need some different regional training, they’ve moved from domestic to cross-border, now they’re hauling hazmat. There’s a lot of different things that all need to be tracked and need to be managed there. So that’s something that we built in from the beginning is the ability to do that kind of thing, and it’s been helpful because you have to stay on top of it.

Jane: The other thing that I think is something that we have designed that doesn’t exist in other LMS, especially white-collar education, is our “Programs” paradigm. The idea that you take a set of a set of learning materials, you put them together, and package it. We started at Suncor doing that.

Mark: Yeah. That’s not that uncommon to have a curriculum that you can define, that includes different content. What’s different here is that people will want those things to show up at different times. So, you’ll have a week one package and then you’ll have a week three package and a week five package for drivers. And you don’t want all of those showing up at the same time. Again, sort of coming back to the analogy of the gas stations and people just want stuff they need to have, you don’t want to overburden them with things that they aren’t going to be doing now. So, you need to have that stuff kind of hidden until a very particular time. That is something that we needed to build in to support the way the industry does training for its drivers and particularly onboarding for fleets that are doing onboarding.

Jane: We do it a little bit differently than other systems where we don’t have the “here’s your one question. Answer this one question.” “Click next. Here’s your one question.” Is there a reason that you decided to do it a different way?

Mark: What we’ve learned is that it’s also actually better because people get to see the whole context of the test. And in a lot of those tests, you will sometimes get down to question ten or twelve and realize that embedded in that question is the answer to question two. But if you have all of the questions showing up at once, you can see the whole context, you have to write better questions, but it is also a better assessment of people’s knowledge. And I think one of the things that we have also seen is that it is it’s better for people to see the whole picture and be able to think about it. And for technical reasons, it is way more efficient to be able to serve out the test once and track what’s happening.

We actually track every single question because one of the most valuable parts of the learning management system that people sometimes don’t think about is data analytics. It’s not just “did somebody take a course or did they pass a test,” it is “what are the trends? Who’s getting this question wrong all the time? And what are the questions that people struggle with?” Things like that. By storing each question and each answer response individually, we can start to run some of those analytics. On the content side, we have the ability for people to look at questions that are being answered wrong most commonly and see if there’s something that needs to be clarified in the options there. On the fleet side, the administrators can look at those analytics and see if there are people who need additional help, if there are subject areas where their drivers are struggling and really drill down into the specifics and see what’s going on. That’s something that you don’t see that much in other learning management systems. And it’s less of an issue, again, when people are kind of self-directed. But with drivers who may not want to speak up and say, “I don’t understand,” or “I’m struggling with this,” it’s really useful to have that data to be able to identify it and then have that private conversation with them.

What Can You Do With a Learning Management System?

Jane: If you were a potential customer looking for a driver training system, what would you be looking for?

Mark: People do typically ask a little bit about the LMS, but at very basic level their thinking is, “can I see who finished a course? Can I see who did this?” Every single system for tracking things will have that. And there’s lots of people that say they have an LMS and really all they have is basic tracking of activities. But the larger question is, “what can you do with that? What do you do with that information after?”

So, “yes, I can see that somebody finished a course. But who is in progress in a course and taking a long time? Who is probably having difficulty with that, and I need to give them some help.” Like I was talking about earlier, where are the subject areas that are causing problems? Those are the valuable things that the learning management gives, being able to look below the surface, not just “this happened on this day,” but “what else is going on? How did it go? What else needs to be done after? What are the trends that we’re seeing?” And “where are the gaps with people?”

But also, like I said, sort of in the beginning, it isn’t just about what happened in the past. You absolutely want to drill into all of those and get the details on what happened in the past. But a LMS is really about an aspirational thing. This is where it does overlap with the white-collar. Regardless of what the audience is, it is a bit aspirational in that it is about what should be happening. “Where do we want to get to? How do we build a higher performing organization by educating people? Where are the gaps? What do we need to be doing differently? What programs should we be doing?”

Trucking has traditionally been an area of scarcity in training because it was such a pain to deliver training, people did the bare minimum. But when you move it online and you’ve got a kind of world of opportunities, you have to think about not just “what do we absolutely need to do? What is the reg change? Where is the person who needs a renewal on something?”

You have to move away from that and think about “where do we want to get to? What would be the ideal for our fleet? And what is the education plan that will get us there?” That is what you look at in terms of the LMS. What we were talking about earlier as far as being able to have it match the org structure, and “is it going to be something where we can easily get our drivers in there, new drivers added, keep it up to date. Is it going to be a pain to do all of that kind of day-to-day management?”

And then a little bit on the end, “how is it going to talk to other systems?” Because more and more that’s become an issue in transportation as well. We have more back-office systems that need to be talking to each other. Cameras are one good way. And that’s another example of kind of things we learned along the way and the benefits of building the system from scratch specifically for trucking.

Jane: Is there anything else that you’d like to add about, you know, your experience within the LMS world?

Mark: It’s really been very different. It’s enjoyable to build these things, enjoyable to build a new function. I’m very happy to see post-COVID that the trucking industry has kind of made a big leap forward in technology. We don’t really see the drivers with flip phones anymore. Smartphones have become common so that a mobile app can work for delivery of content, and people are getting much more comfortable with technology and able to take more advantage of it. So that’s been cool. And it’s allowed us to focus on adding things that are going to really be of benefit to the audience that are very specific, and purpose built. And we don’t have time to go into those details of the things that are coming. But it’s going to make a big difference in the experience for both drivers and administrators over the next six to nine months?

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