Digital learning modules are keenly desired by most organizations and learning institutions for offering structured learning to employees and students through Learning Management Systems (LMS). The LMS, Learning Management System has always been improving to provide much more complex features. So you will need to balance your budget, money (cost), value, and requirements when choosing an LMS.
There are many, many LMS platforms currently available, which may cause some confusion in the selection process. Nevertheless, the ideal LMS platform has to fully fulfill your organization’s learning needs. Let’s dive deeper into the various factors to consider before choosing an LMS platform for your organization.
What is LMS?
The Learning Management System, LMS, is software for delivering, managing, tracking results, and generating reports for online training programs and courses. It can either be hosted in the cloud remotely or on the user company’s servers.
The software provides the functionality required by businesses, organizations, and educational institutions, thus offering opportunities for online training that can be accessed 24/7. The only thing you need is a reliable network to work on the courses at any time.
LMS equips valuable insights to the eLearning developers, indicating how learners are using the software to navigate the course. In addition, by tracking the course results and generating reports, the platform ensures that organizations meet their course management and eLearning objectives.
If hosted in the cloud, an LMS supports quick content customization for individual learners. In addition, it helps the organization to reduce associated infrastructure and labor costs. Below are some of the considerations to put in place before purchasing a Learning Management System.
LMS Considerations
Reporting
A comprehensive analysis and reporting is the first thing to look for in an LMS since its primary goal is to offer the learners’ performance insights while ultimately making the course effective. Besides being a great tool for background admin monitoring, it also assists you in gauging the users’ learning tendencies.
Referring to detailed quiz reports and tracking the compliance of the e-Learners will assist you in finding the specific periods they spend on the particular lessons. The detailed questions will also assist in determining the number of attempts made in the various questions.
The reports made by the LMS can be categorized into:
• Course reports; deals with assessment, schedule, and enrollment
• User reports; deals with login activities, active users and their progress, and performance comparison
• Organization training; deals with the curriculum, complete course reports, and certification
• Custom reports; flexible to meet your needs
You can schedule an auto-generation for the reports, either daily, weekly or monthly. This way, these reports will be dropped straight into your inbox.
Ease of Integration
Your LMS users are likely to communicate or work on other platforms simultaneously. For this reason, your LMS should be able to integrate with features such as webhooks and Single-sign-on, SSO for efficiency.
SSO allows the users to access LMS in other applications with the same credentials. Webhook is ideal for real-time communication between different systems and your LMS.
A perfect LMS should also be linkable to gamification engines and social media platforms such as Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter. This will significantly increase your range of audience.
Pricing/ Licensing Structure
Your budget is a vital consideration before choosing an LMS platform. While LMS pricing varies from vendor to vendor, a well-defined pricing structure should have no hidden costs that will come about after purchasing the platform.
Key takeaways:
Custom learning management systems cost typically depends on your business type (the price of an LMS for beginner teachers and textbooks is not the same as the one for enterprises) and the functionality you want your future LMS to feature.
Open source LMS customization is one of the most cost-effective open source LMS solutions (and not only for growing businesses) because it is up to 16x times less expensive than other options for building a custom LMS.
However, unless your service provider adds it in the initial quote (Raccoon Gang for example), you should always take into account extra expenses like setup fees, training and support, integrations, etc. into custom LMS cost calculations.
Since there are parameters’ variations, you cannot compare the multiple LMS platforms based on their licensing policy and pricing. Some platforms demand an on-registration course payment through payment gateways, while others apply pricing based on the features. The typical LMS pricing layouts include:
• Lifetime licensing
• Monthly/ annual subscription
• Batch discounts
• Per-user pricing
• Upper threshold user or content limitation
Consider executing thorough research to unearth hidden or extra charges before settling down for any LMS.
Content Compatibility
The foundation of your LMS dramatically lies in the content since all of its features revolve around the course material intended to be delivered. Therefore, with the right content at the right place, there will be a positive impact and effectiveness on the course content.
A good LMS platform should support visual content and slideshows. While visual content demonstrations assure a better topic understanding, to-the-point slideshows assist in delivering precise information. The other consideration to take in place is whether the particular type of LMS platform will be compatible with your choice of a document, either XML, PowerPoint, presentation, or PDF.
Customer Support
Customer support is a crucial part of any business as the department is ever busy. Even when the other departments are down, it is the customer support department that takes part in notifying the customers about the temporary problem.
Consider choosing an LMS platform that offers both quality and availability. In addition, an ideal LMS vendor should offer additional knowledge-based services such as installation video demonstrations and guides. In short, choose the platform that never fails its customers.
Security and Privacy
An ideal LMS platform should be compatible with LDAP Authentication, Active Directory, or Federated Services so that the admins do not give individual permissions to the different users. This security feature that saves much time on your operations uses a public domain or a firewall to permit you to administer the security settings.
Also, the platform should allow the admins to view a learner’s log history and instructors’ activities. These activities may include curriculum, course changes, learners’ information, and grade books.
Functionality
Different LMS platforms offer various ways of searching content, either date, keywords and phrases, instructor’s name, location. The best platform for you should support these and much more features while executing its operations much quicker and accurately. It should also support other features like searching by filtering user lists, courses, and curriculum.
In addition, an excellent LMS system should include automatic online enrollments for the learners. This works the best in reducing staff and much paperwork. With automated online registration, the learners can access the various course descriptions before signing up. The feature also assists the learners to unregister from courses in a much straightforward way.
The auto registration allows important notifications like reminders and enrollment confirmations to be delivered to the students’ emails some days before the course begins. In addition, some advanced LMS platforms also offer a one-click entry point where the learners can click and get directly to the course.
Conclusion
There you go! Above, you have the various pointers to use when selecting the best LMS platform for your operations. This article is an excellent breakdown of the selection process of an ideal LMS platform. After reading it, you will undoubtedly know about purchasing an LMS that will deliver corporate learning in a supportive and scalable manner.