It is required that all courses delivered through distance education delivery systems track student time throughout the course. This is not mandating seat time, but ensuring the learning management system (LMS) can appropriately track, quantify, and report how long students are spending in the course. Please provide documentation that the LMS you are using can do this.
Our LMS allows you to easily review time spent on the course, or individual lessons, by each student.
It can be done under the 'Instructor Gradebook' tab or under the 'Administration' tab. Click here to review process on how to do this.
What is the nature and extent of your computer learning management system (LMS)? If you use a custom made system, commercial product, or third part to provide this, please list what and/or who?
DigitalChalk is a SAS (software as a service) based LMS that resides upon the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud. Our solution provides redundancy of servers and storage across multiple data centers as well as support for the latest levels of encryption. Our customer's data and intellectual property is considered private content and exclusive to each customer's specific dedicated organizational unit.
Does your LMS do the following? Check all that apply.
- Tracks learners progress
- Maintains grades
- Stores historical information
- Tracks and stores student completion data
- Maintains payment information
The DigitalChalk system utilizes the AWS infrastructure. Degradation or loss of system availability due to loss of service availability from Amazon is possible, however unlikely. In the event of service interruption or degraded performance from Amazon, DigitalChalk will post a system maintenance notification and post regular updates on the anticipated recovery of services on Twitter at @digitalchalk. The AWS data centers are ISO270001 and SAS70 certified and provide one of the most state of the art Internet hosting infrastructures available worldwide.
What is the equipment reliability factor? What is the percentage of "down-time"? What are your plans and policies for any equipment failures associated with your LMS?
DigitalChalk is dedicated to achieving the maximum system availability possible. From the inception of DigitalChalk, the system has maintained very high availability with better than 99.999% up time. In the event of unscheduled system downtime due to DigitalChalk system failure, DigitalChalk support will work continuously until system availability is restored.
What security measures are utilized? We are asking for specifics on measures that are taken to maintain internet security.
DigitalChalk software is written using the latest in secure Web technology. For your security protection we do not reveal the underlying technologies being used. We can verify that DigitalChalk employs a modular architecture that does not have direct database access or direct connections to the underlying systems. The system uses SSL security for all pages that contain sensitive information such as user login or credit card payment. DigitalChalk uses PCI compliant payment processing.
Is your LMS ADA compliant?
No
How is student identity verified? Include a description of where this identification mechanism can be found in the course and how it is implemented. At minimum students should be asked to attest to their identity somewhere in the course. How is this facilitated?
We require that students fill out their *certification number* during the account creation process. We have also chosen to ask them to attest to their identity at the very beginning of the course using a web archive, assignment, or test.
Is evaluation data made available to instructors and/or students?
With the survey tool (implemented using a web archive) we have chosen to use we can pull the data from there.
Please explain how the evaluation is provided to the student. A summary of course evaluations will be required as a part of the recertification process at the end of the three year certification term.
We have chosen to use a web archive element that allows us to deliver an external survey to our students.
Describe your organization's plan to ensure instructors are sufficient to offer instructional support for the course(s).
The LMS that we use allows us to enable student's to either e-mail the instructor and they can also comment on the lessons and we can respond to them that way as well.
Please specify times technical assistance is available to students and how this information is communicated to the student.
Our LMS can provide technical support to students - we let the student know either via e-mail, bulletin when they login, or in the course description.
Who provides technical assistance?
We provide technical assistance or we let them know to get in touch with our LMS, DigitalChalk, to give them the needed assistance.