You’ve got your course ready after putting together the most relevant content. Now, how will you make it available to your audience?
You need a platform to post your content where your audience hangs out. This platform is what is called the Learning Management System or LMS. In simple terms, LMS is a software program that allows users to publish courses, manage users, track progress, conduct assessments, and more based on the needs of the user.
How do you choose an LMS?
First, you need to first understand the business objectives and the goals you want to achieve. These platforms are used for various purposes such as in-house corporate training for employees, self-paced learning and assessment for academic scholars, upskilling and certification for practising professionals.
Next, look for the features that an LMS offers.
- Intuitive User Interface – A simple and easy to use UI with intuitive interaction and navigation is an important feature of an LMS. Your learner shouldn’t have to do a course on how to use the LMS!
- Integration – The LMS you choose should support easy integration capabilities with other systems such as payment gateway, talent management system, employee resource planning, human resource management systems and customer relationship management system.
- Content Management – Uploading content, viewing, navigating through content, downloading are all the basic functions an LMS offers. There are also various standards and guidelines for elearning platforms which need to be adhered to. Also the ability to define the learning path and structure the content to support learning, assessments and evaluation are critical to an LMS.
- Mobility – The learning that happens on a mobile device is as effective and common as it happens on a desktop or web version. Hence the LMS should support mobile and tablet devices.
- Evaluation – Tests and assessments are a part of the learning process. The LMS should support capabilities to conduct assessments and evaluation which are essential for course completion.
- Analytics – Ability to track the progress and collect metrics data, provides a lot of insight into the learning process. This helps improve the content and the user engagement and is a must have feature.
- Security – User information on the LMS and the other content and data on the platform needs to be secure. Hence based on the sensitivity of the data the decision of choosing an on-prem vs cloud solution needs to be evaluated.
- Branding and customization – The ability to customize the course to suit the customer requirement is desirable. The whitelabeling of the course for companies is an essential feature as most of the companies.
Based on what your needs are, you can look for products which offer the combination of the above features that match your requirements the most. If you want to know more about the different LMS products on the market, click here.
