Hunter & Boater Licensing LMS

LMS makeover for the nation’s largest hunter and boater education and licensing program.

Texas Parks’ Online Registration System (ORS) makes life better each year for a lot of different people – about 100,000 Texans earning hunting and boating licenses each year, some 3,500 volunteer live training instructors, a handful of third-party online course providers, some 1,700 sporting goods stores that sell hunting, fishing, and boating permits, and 500 game wardens dispersed across the state.

The LMS manages separate training programs for hunters and boaters, and each program requires completing both live courses and online courses. For live courses, hunters and boaters register using maps and driving distance, and for online courses they register through the LMS with approved third-party sources. The LMS platform manages curriculum, tracks course completions, fee payments, learner transcripts, and creates personalized license certificates. Now hunters and boaters can immediately print their own certificates. Waiting for mail is eliminated, and the agency could thus eliminate printing and mailing certificates to participants, saving costs of printing and postage.  Also, for the first time, licenses and certificates have 2D bar codes. 

Texas Parks required new e-commerce operations for fee collections. It works like this: In live courses, volunteer instructors collect fees from hunters and boaters, so Element added a portal for uploading class rosters, test scores, and fees that the LMS feeds directly into Texas.gov. Similarly for online courses, third-party vendors use a portal to upload learner records and fees, also fed into Texas.gov. For live courses, the LMS replaced time-eating legacy test-scoring methods with online reporting that’s faster, easier, and more accurate.

 

Today, Texas Parks has a centralized training database with participant records for the agency’s massive and growing base of 1.2 million hunters and boaters. That allowed Element to integrate LMS licensing with permit sales from the agency’s statewide point-of-sale system. As a result, retail staff in 1,700 stores can quickly verify if a customer qualifies for an array of state permits their customers can immediately purchase online. Filling another agency requirement, the LMS now feeds fresh license and permit data into smart phone apps carried by Texas game wardens. Game wardens, in the field, now have instant, accurate access to a person’s current license credentials and permits. 

Texas is big, so Texas Parks has to think big. The new built-to-order LMS reflects the agency’s makeover vision, a staged replacement of legacy components they had absorbed for over more than a decade. Element’s ORS modernization opens new pathways for Texas Parks to help Texans and state visitors better enjoy and conserve the state’s rich natural resources.