Xaurum

What Xaurum is

Xaurum builds learning management software for companies and professional organizations, with offices in Hoeilaart in Belgium and Breda in the Netherlands. Its homepage calls it "een toonaangevend en innovatief bedrijf voor leeroplossingen in België en Nederland" (a leading and innovative company for learning solutions in Belgium and the Netherlands) and says "Vanuit Xaurum bouwen we volledige leeroplossingen voor bedrijven en professionele organisaties" (at Xaurum we build complete learning solutions for companies and professional organizations). The site is in Dutch, with French and English versions, and the footer copyright runs from 2003.

Its stated mission is to improve the quality of training processes so that everyone can grow their competencies. The reader it serves is a company training department or an HR team that has to organize training of every kind for its own staff, track who did what, and prove it.

Xaurum sells five products: Course Control, the core LMS; E-learning Manager, for online courses; Test Maker, for tests and exams; Quality Sensor, for evaluation forms; and PE-online, which the homepage says automates accreditation and (re)registration. It runs them as SaaS on its own infrastructure: the homepage says "Voor onze SaaS services hebben we een eigen dedicated Private Cloud omgeving uitgebouwd" (for our SaaS services we have built our own dedicated private cloud), on a high-availability VMware setup.

Course Control: the LMS for training departments

The Course Control page says the software manages complex learning processes efficiently and takes over the administration, so that training departments can concentrate on linking strategic business needs to training. It lists what that covers:

• managing classroom learning, on-the-job training, coaching, e-learning and test activities;
• making learning paths visible to the organization;
• assigning certificates and managing competencies;
• managing and scheduling trainers, and planning rooms;
• templates for quickly scheduling new training sessions;
• quality control through evaluation forms;
• invoicing of training;
• publishing course content and learning programs on an intranet or the internet;
• support for tests, assessments and questionnaires made in Test Maker.

Enrollment works two ways. Under a personal development plan, employees can enroll themselves in learning activities and help manage their own development, while training managers or line managers can assign activities to them. User management handles groups of participants, invites users to learning programs, tests and e-learning, and puts users who must follow the same learning path into learning groups.

Email is automated: invitations, validation and cancellation messages are scheduled automatically, and notifications go to managers, participants and trainers. Reporting covers training effort by organization, user group and learning program, with dashboards and statistics, and the page also lists the sociale balans (social balance report). Student data can be loaded from the company's HR system with Excel or an XML data import.

The development plan and certificates

The employee view brings everything together. Under "My planned training," attendance at classroom sessions, e-learning, coaching sessions and on-the-job guidance are shown in one overview. Employees choose from the company's own catalog of classroom training and e-learning and can also request external courses. Training paths can be laid out in advance; the page says these paths may or may not be mandatory and can offer several alternatives at each step.

Employees can enter certificates, diplomas or skills they already hold, so a training manager or team lead gets a quick overview of the skills present in the company or team. The page adds that managers can follow mandatory refresher training and the points employees must earn under legal requirements, .

The portal

Course Control's portal can be set to the company's own branding, and the page says users get a uniform view so that "voelt iedereen zich meteen thuis" (everyone feels at home right away). Configurable widgets give an overview of the whole system. Users are reminded of planned training, evaluations, validations, e-learning deadlines and tests. A training calendar presents the course offer, and courses a user is already enrolled in appear in a personal calendar. For keeping people informed, administrators can publish news on the homepage and longer articles, link articles to other LMS elements, and control publication by date and target audience, with support for multiple languages.

E-learning Manager

E-learning Manager handles the online side "op technisch, inhoudelijk en pedagogisch vlak" (on a technical, content and teaching level), with fast rollout to a large group of users in the company's own house style. Courses can carry supporting documents, tests and evaluations, and content from different sources can be combined in one training plan. The page lists support for e-learning libraries from Altissia, ENI, Flowsparks, GoodHabitz, Instruxion, Intuition, Tosa Progress and others, and for SCORM 1.2, LTI 1.1 and AICC courses and tests. Administrators manage course descriptions, enrollments and their own courses and tests, invite students to the e-learning portal, send newsletters and form student groups for shared programs. Student data syncs from HR by Excel or XML import, and usage reports run by user, organization and learning program.

E-learning Manager also has e-commerce: an organization can sell its e-learning, take card payments through Ogone, and manage automatic orders and invoicing to its customers.

Test Maker, Quality Sensor and PE-online

Test Maker is described as an online tool that helps instructors create online tests, quizzes, assessments and exams, and Course Control supports the results. Quality Sensor produces personalized evaluation forms, feeding the quality control step in Course Control. PE-online automates accreditation and (re)registration.

Getting started

The site publishes no prices. Each product page offers a downloadable datasheet and a demo request, and the homepage invites organizations looking for a partner for their internal learning processes to request a free demo. A projects page and a customers page show the company's custom LMS work.

Who it suits

Xaurum suits companies and professional organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands that run a mix of classroom, e-learning, coaching and on-the-job training and want it all in one system with trainer and room planning, certificates, competencies and HR data import. Training departments that must track mandatory refresher training and accreditation points have a specific reason to look at Course Control with PE-online, and organizations that also sell e-learning externally can use E-learning Manager's shop.

A small team that only needs a simple online course player may find the suite more than it needs, and anyone who wants to compare prices before a conversation will have to request a demo first.