Simple and Powerful Administration System

Overview:

Akuter Management System offers a single platform to centralize distribution, tracking and reporting as well as the remote management of usage and licenses. The training modules can be developed in-house or bought from catalogs to be then included in the certification and training programs by an administrator. Users only need an Internet browser to access the system. Authentication is done either from the Akuter authentication system or from an existing system via the Radius protocol. When a user logs in his/her profile is recognized by the Akuter System and the screens in accordance with his/her profile's rights provided. Connectors allow the automatic update of the employees or customers databases with that of Akuter to eliminate double entries and errors. The link with the Akuter's support server allows the installation, management and maintenance of the software licenses and the follow-up of the traffic. The report services provide a very detailed reporting of the users' activities to document the proof of compliance as well as generate management information.

There are 4 user profiles:

• System administrator: A System Administrator can configure the system in the context of its company's environment and establish the default settings. Numerous parameters are accessible as simply as checking and unchecking boxes or selecting values from dropdown lists. This is an easy way of making the system unique to your needs without any programming or technical knowledge.
• Administrator: Typically an administrator is a curriculum manager in charge of building and managing the certification, training or compliance programs. They will first activate the learning modules and name them as prerequisite or curriculum's content. Many rules are available to customize each program, include skills gap analysis, restrict or open access, allow multiple attempts and score improvement, supervise groups of learners, edit detailed audit reports etc.
• Scorer: Some exams such as open or essay questions require a human scoring. A scorer will receive pending exams and compare learner's answers with scoring guidelines before to validate a final score.
• Learner: Learners access their unique portal to take the certification and training programs which were assigned to them or which they assigned themselves.

Benefits:

Akuter Enterprise delivers substantial benefits to make your corporation more effective in today's competitive market. Fast production and delivery of knowledge information such as employee training, compliance and certification programs, product learning, sales knowledge or marketing communication will deliver competitive advantage to the enterprise. Moreover Akuter gives you the means to control completely your system at a cost depending only on the real use (Learning time). No need to rely on expensive and cumbersome outside resources, no fear to lose control of you intellectual assets. Finally Technology is made affordable and sustainable even for a small organization. A genuine competitive advantage.

• Fulfill regulatory compliance
• Turn your knowledge cost center into a profit center
• Accurately calculate your ROI
• Enhance knowledge, satisfaction and loyalty
• Respond quickly to changing business needs
• Align business units
• Build competitive advantage

Fulfill regulatory compliance:
No more worry about unexpected audits or proof of compliance. Akuter keeps all records for each program and each employee. Moreover, the system anticipates lacks of certified resources, deadlines narrowing and employees' status toward compliance through a proactive alerts and messaging feature. Companies and organizations that use Akuter have a clear vision and control their compliance issues. They are good companies and good organization to work for.

Turn your knowledge cost center into a profit center:
When employees and customers are well trained it affects positively your organization's bottom line. You retain the best people, you serve better your customer and you build a knowledge centric organization. Education is always an investment; with Akuter the ROI is high and fast.

Accurately calculate your ROI:
Because of its real-time server-driven tracking core feature, Akuter gives you a detailed and accurate statement of the time spent by every learner of the system and the time spend on every program. It is therefore easy to keep your budget in line. Furthermore, individual credit limits combined with alerts will let you know in advance of potential overtimes and will give you the ability to prevent them.

Enhance knowledge, satisfaction and loyalty:
With Akuter you can provide your employees, suppliers, customers and stakeholders with a consistent knowledge program that will enhance their recognition and pride toward your organization.

Respond quickly to changing business needs:
Regulation, products, business environment change all the time. With Akuter you make sure you are always up to date and that your compliance and certification programs take into account the latest. Akuter includes an easy smart program upgrade feature that ensures that users are offered new versions when starting a new program. Programs' version number is always recorded making it easy to isolate groups with obsolete certifications and to reassign them newer programs.

Align business units:
Consistency is an important part of business units' alignment. Akuter's powerful curriculum management allows delivering the same content in an audience specific manner. Some will have to go through tight pre-assessments and post-assessments while others will just be asked to have studied the materials.

Build competitive advantage:
By retaining the best employees and selecting the best partners and having the ability to keep them competitive you increase your chances to build and sustain your business advantages. From customers and distributors well trained on your products and services to well trained employees and procedures savvy suppliers the field for improvement is vast. This is where having Akuter makes a difference.

Features:

Akuter Management System offers ergonomic and easy to use screens always provided in context and according to the user's preferences, rights and status of progress.

• Course management
• Curriculum management
• User management
• Group management
• Pre-assignments
• Alerts, messaging and collaboration
• Intelligent Adaptive Interface
• Real time tracking
• Scoring
• Audit and Management Reports
• Multi-language
• Quick Helps
• Learner's portal

Courses management:
A course is a learning object either developed with Akuter Author or an AICC-SCORM compliant third party.
A course, or its manifest files, is located on the server's repository. It will be attached to Akuter Management System for further use within curricula and assignments. A course can be created in advance before it is physically installed and attached to Akuter Enterprise. This is called a course planning. Administrators will determine how to use learning objects parked into the repository. Content upgrades are easy and processed in a transparent way: Learners who are already started will stay with their current version, learners who are not started will be provided with the new version. Version numbers are recorded and Administrators know who did what, making it easy to re-assign refreshers or the complete curriculum's new version.

Curriculum management:
A curriculum is a series of courses managed by a set of rules.

• Create, modify, activate, or delete a curriculum
• Choose the assignment type (Pre-assignment or Self-assignments)
• Add prerequisites to a curriculum
• Add courses to a curriculum

• Specify the number of allowed attempts per course
• Specify a course's score to pass for each attempt number
• Specify a curriculum's score to pass based on courses' averages

Curricula management provides the administrator with the ability to define learning objects tailored to the learner or to a group of learners. An administrator, using the rule-based curriculum management, can tailor learning to specific requirements, prerequisites and score to pass for each course and for the whole curriculum. Akuter Management System guides administrators into defining personalized learning, scheduling and curriculum definitions from learning objects for individuals or groups. If set in Self-assigned mode a curriculum can be re-assigned directly by the learner as many times.

Pre-assessments and post-assessments are provided either from prerequisites, quizzes or exams. They can provide suggestions or lock in or out learners. Assessments can be used just to record how people perform from the tracking features without stopping their progression or used as a milestone controlling access to the next step of a curriculum.

User management:
A user is an individual who can access Akuter Enterprise in order to:

• Take assignments as a learner
• Manage the system as an Administrator
• Score exams as a scorer
• Configure the software as a system administrator

Akuter's user management interface provides powerful filters and search features to manage thousands of users easily. It provides summary and detailed information as well as statistics and messaging tools.

Group management:
A group is a gathering of learners to allow batch assignment. A learner may belong to more than one group.

• Create, modify, activate, or delete groups
• Add, remove learners from groups
• Assign a curriculum to a group

Pre-Assignments:
Pre-Assignments can be made to an individual learner or a group of learners. Pre-assignments will appear on each learner's portal.

Alerts, Messaging and Collaboration:
Alert Services Center is Akuter Enterprise's powerful automated messaging system which is triggered by pre-selected or scheduled events. It alerts users about progress of assignments, status of credits or narrowing deadlines. These event-based and schedule-based alerts and messaging services provide a powerful private collaborative support for learners, administrators and supervisors.

There are 10 categories of standard alerts:

• New Assignment - notifying that a curriculum has been newly assigned to one or more learners
• Assignment started - notifying that a learner has started a given assignment
• Assignment completed - notifying that an assignment has been passed or failed
• Course completed - notifying that a course has been completed (if no exam), passed or failed (if exam)
• Score pending - notifying that an exam with essay question(s) needs to be scored
• New group's member - notifying that a learner has been newly added to a group. This learner will automatically receive the group's assignments and eventually a "New Assignment" alert message will be sent
• Learner's credit limit - notifying that a learner has reached the alert threshold on his/her learning time limit
• Deadline - warning that a Learner has reached his/her alert threshold before completing an Assignment
• New user - notifying that a new user has been created either manually or via an automated process
• Score available – notifying that an exam with essay question(s) has been scored

More alerts can be added using the AE's plug-in architecture and extensions.

When criteria are met for an alert category and the system administrator has activated this particular alert, a message is generated and sent to the activated recipients. You can decide which recipients will be active for each category of alerts. Alert messages are securely queued until delivery. All messages are server-driven and generated from the Akuter Management System server using the customer's SMTP server. As it is server- generated, recipients cannot reply to an alert message. Links in the body text can be added if needed. Alert Services' recipients use the Supervisor's email account available in the Learner, Group and Curriculum's records and/ or the Default Alert email available on the System Administrator's screens. These fields are generally automatically filled in from a connector linking AE to other applications such as ERP, CRM, HR, etc. However an Administrator can manually enter or edit these fields if needed. If no supervisor email is available in the Learner's records, group's records or curriculum's records, messages are sent to the "Default Alert email" set by the System Administrator. An alert's recipient can be a group of several recipients. Messages are edited in the default language.

Intelligent Adaptive Interface:
Akuter offers a Server Centric Model. Server Centric systems are those learning systems that deliver, control and track learning objects through direct control of the server. These are dedicated simulators and learning systems that deliver intelligent learning under the control of large and intelligent software programs.

Figure above shows a generalized architecture of server centric model, which consists of two levels. The higher level consists of Intelligent Adaptive Server and learning objects. The lower level, which represents the learner's machine, consists only of the content object and learner screen. The Intelligent Adaptive Server based on preset rules produces content objects.
A Server Centric system determines the next sequence of learning objects based on its rules. It will then deliver these learning objects to the learner. The server is able to take decisions without the assistance of run-time modules at the client side.
The advantage of these systems is the possibility to build larger and smarter systems. We also believe that this type of system is more effective in training the student. This is due to combining real-time tracking with rules based decision.

Real time tracking:
The server-driven Akuter Enterprise's technology allows tracking of learner's activity in real time by the second and by the screen.

Scoring:
Akuter Scoring Management System is used to process examination results and assess the user's comprehension. Two types of scoring are handled by the system
Automatic Scoring: Akuter Scoring Management system receives the user's answers to examination pages and gives a score. A rule driven system assesses the score values, such as passing grades associated with the number of attempts allowed. Results are available in real time to learners and the administrators.
Manual scoring: When an exam includes one or more essay questions, a scorer has to review answers and give a score. To do so, a scorer will have all information on how the exam was performed and even a guide line coming from the course designer only available to the scorer. This is useful in situations where a text answer is required such as training level evaluations, marketing surveys, and non-WBT sessions such as field practice.

For each learner's answer the scorer can compare the answer with a sample guideline or sample of correct answers. The course's author prepares correct answers and guidelines during content production. Akuter Scoring Management System keeps the scoring administrator informed of the learner's progress toward completion in real time. In addition, the system displays the time a learner spent on the exam and the next available attempts, which provides the scorer the necessary information to make the right decisions.

Audit and management reports:
The Akuter Report Services give access to built-in reports and custom made reports. Akuter enterprise provides a powerful reporting system. The very fine, secured and rich data tracking allows delivering proof of compliance respecting the FDA's guidelines such as 21CFR part 11.

The above figure is an example of report giving a learner's activity records. The report gives summarized and detailed information such as time spent on every screen, numbering the visits or attempts, exam results, etc. This is instrumental when proving regulation compliance but also as a tool to manage intelligently the learning activity. Each user or program activity can be tracked and display in an audit compatible manner. Extensive reporting and analysis of the knowledge base is available with Akuter Enterprise. Furthermore, users can generate reports and attach them to the system. Users can produce customized report templates using Report Editors and use the generated file to integrate with the system.

• Set different rights to learners and non-learners: System administrators can set default values for the report system management like letting users print, export reports, choose their output format, use special features etc.
• Output format: Choose the output format of your reports (Java, PDF, RTF, HTML, CSV etc.)
• View and analyze historic data in real time: You can refresh your reports as often as you want and the data will immediately be updated on your screen giving a real time monitoring of learners' activity. Akuter Management System includes extensive real time reporting and analysis to assess learning results and effectiveness of course objects.
• Review data about users, groups, courses and curricula: A set of pre-designed reports is available to administrators.
• Export reports: Numerous export formats are available for further use or integration within other applications.
• Print reports: Once reports are displayed on screen users can easily print them in one of the available formats. This feature can be disabled separately for learners and non-learners.
• Edit your own reports: Akuter Report System allows full integration of customer defined reports, using an easy to use report editor. ARS also support Crystal Report format.

Multi-language and customization:
Akuter Management System comes in English, French and Spanish as standard. Any other language-alphabets can be added as an option. When logging in, users are offered their browser's default language if available or the default language selected by the administrator. Users can change their language at this time to control their screens' display, navigation and messages.

Each customer can have their own welcome page.

Quick helps:
Online help is provided on each screen within user's chosen language. This lowers barriers of adoption and gives an updated online documentation full of tips and advises.

Learner's portal:
Each Learner benefits from a personalized learning portal providing complete view of their assignments progress in real time. All details are provided and displayed according to their preferences. Status and tool tips give them the reasons for not having access to a specific assignment at this time (dates not matching, prerequisites not met, assignment removed or unauthorized etc.).

View can be summarized…

or detailed.

Minimum System Requirements: