Describing the Organization
The non-profit organization that works with autistic children and children suffering from intellectual developmental disabilities. Its mission is to enhance social, communication, and independent living skills for children with disabilities to become productive members of society. It offers therapeutic services, intensive support services, and family training. As a new non-profit organization, it has ten staff members and anticipates the first year of business to have 50 clients.
Our non-profit organization's goal is to provide children and families with an individualized program to meet their needs, overcome barriers, and help children with disabilities become as independent as possible to transition into adulthood. The organization is in the process of procuring a new learning management system, which will be customized to provide individualized educational programming for our children with disabilities.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The current systems and processes used in education
The organization has put systems and processes in place to give the best education to children with autism and intellectual developmental disabilities. The pandemic changed how learning institutions operate and many institutions are adopting online learning. With the shift to remote learning, it is important to create online platforms that can provide individualized content and more attention children with autism and intellectual disabilities ( De Smet, et al, 2016) . The organization aims to improve social and cognitive skills, verbal and nonverbal communication skills, adaptive skills, and minimizing negative behaviors.
The LMS is designed specifically for the organization as a complementary technology to help learners with autism and intellectual disabilities engage with the right content and learning material at the comfort of their homes (El Zein et al., 2016). While online learning is not the solution, it gives autistic students the much-needed one-on-one with qualified educators. Students can also progress at their own pace, unlike a traditional classroom.
The LMS provides an individualized learning experience. Our skilled special educators meet with the child to identify the child's capabilities, learning needs, and areas that require attention. After signing up on the LMS, the child will access various learning materials that suit individual needs. Online classes through the system are opportunities for instructors and students to collaborate. There are fun educational videos and activities for the learners to encourage them to learn on their own. The system also integrates tools such as calendars and has built-in analytics that easily tracks the user's progress. The content is culturally-sensitive as the organization is targeting diverse students.
Key Internal and educational stakeholders that will access and maintain the LMS
The organization must put in place adequate safety measures. LMS contains sensitive student information that must be protected. The technology administrator will configure appropriate security settings, and the administrators and teachers are familiar with the security features, and they make sure that they are enabled. Administrators, educators, and students go through multifactor authentication to access the system limiting unauthorized entry.
The key stakeholders with access to the system are technology administrators, management, teachers, and learners. The technology administrator is responsible for implementing and managing the technical aspects of the LMS. The technology administrator will address technical issues. For instance, when the users cannot access the system or the system takes time to load.
The organization's management will access the system to ensure that the system works well and meets its needs. The organization hopes to reach 50 clients by the end of the first year; thus, the management must ensure that the LMS is responsive and meet all the students' learning needs. The students are the clients, and the system is created to meet their unique needs, whereas the teachers are the ones who come up with the content and use the LMS to teach students.
Determine at least five key specific needs of the organization that you foresee will benefit from an LMS based on its roles. Justify your response.
The new organization has many needs that it hopes to satisfy in the year and in future as the business grows. Organizational needs follow Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The five needs are survival, stability, growth, dominance, and perpetuation. Survival is the lowest yet the most important need as the organization needs to stay afloat to keep running. Most businesses do not survive the first three years due to various challenges. LMS will help the organization survive as the organization will offer traditional and online services to students to attract and retain more clients.
Stability is an organizational goal that comes after survival. When the organization is stable, it has loyal clients that it serves. The organization will use LMS to offer the best service to not lose its clients and return to survival mode. Stability will propel the organization to grow.
The third organizational need is growth. The organization plans to have at least 50 clients by the end of the first year, which is a small number, but the number of students will increase as the organization grows. LMS will make it possible for the organization to grow and attend to many students while keeping the cost low. As the organization grows, the need for dominance and perpetuation arises. A well designed LMS will help the organization stay ahead of the competition and stay in business for long.
Suggest a strategy for assessing proprietary and open-access LMSs to correspond with the needs of your organization.
Open-access LMSs like Moodle are freely accessible, whereas the organization will pay for proprietary LMS such as Blackboard and Litmos. However, cost is not the only factor to consider as other important factors such as development, hardware, technical support, scalability, security, and integration are important ( De Smet et al, 2016) . The organization is looking for a scalable and user-friendly LMS that will motivate children with autism and developmental disorders to read. The LMS must also guarantee safety and privacy for sensitive information.
The strategy for determining whether to procure open-access or proprietary LMS should be based on the organizational goals, learner's circumstances, and the organization's capacity to manage open-access LMS (Kats, 2013). The organization's goal is to offer the best learning for students with autism and intellectual developmental disabilities. The organization has one only IT administrator and cannot dedicate a lot of resources to managing an open-access LMS, and this could be the reason to opt for proprietary LMS. The organization's ability to manage a self-hosted LMS implies that the organization needs the right personnel with expertise and experience to manage in-house hosting. Also, the learner's circumstances matter will affect the choice of whether to buy open-source LMS or proprietary LMS. The volume of training, how the online learning sessions will take place, and learners' location are some of the important factors to consider.
References
De Smet, C., Valcke, M., Schellens, T., De Wever, B., & Vanderlinde, R. (2016). A qualitative study on learning and teaching with learning paths in a learning management system. JSSE-Journal of Social Science Education, 27-37.
El Zein, F., Gevarter, C., Bryant, B., Son, S. H., Bryant, D., Kim, M., & Solis, M. (2016). A comparison between iPad-assisted and teacher-directed reading instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, 28 (2), 195-215.
Kats, Y. (Ed.). (2013). Learning management systems and instructional design: best practices in online education. IGI Global.
