A Learning Management System (LMS) has so much to offer to K-12 institutes, Universities, and Corporations when it comes to the overall management of administration and training processes. Higher Education Institute can get benefits like online learning solutions that facilitate and improve upon traditional educational methods. An LMS can be beneficial for large and small corporations in many ways, such as it saves money and time by allowing the smooth administration of large amounts of information in a user-friendly, web-based environment. A business can also use an LMS to train its employees regarding policies and procedures, skills and job roles, and much more.
If you are still undecided about an LMS, this article will help to make your final decision.
What will you learn from this article?
- Advantages of LMS
- How to choose the best cloud LMS for your needs.
- Important factors one should consider when choosing a Cloud-Based LMS solution.
- Benefits of the LMS platform for corporate or education
What to Consider When Choosing a Cloud-Based LMS Solution
The popularity of LMS is increasing rapidly in the market. With the market growing so quickly, there are many options available to choose from. When considering cloud-based LMS platforms, whether for educational institutions or corporate environments, several critical factors come into play. It's essential to choose an LMS that not only meets your current needs but is also scalable and adaptable to future requirements. Here are three key factors to consider in detail:
1. Scalability and Flexibility
- Educational Institutes: For schools and universities, the ability to scale is crucial as student numbers can vary significantly each year. The LMS should easily accommodate increases or decreases in user numbers without compromising performance. Additionally, it should support various educational programs, including distance learning, blended courses, and full-time curricula.
- Corporate Environment: Companies need an LMS that can grow with the business and adapt to varying employee training requirements. This includes onboarding new employees, ongoing professional development, and training for specific skills. Flexibility in customising learning paths, integrating with other corporate tools (like HR systems), and supporting different languages and geographic locations is also vital.
2. User Experience (UX) and Accessibility
- Educational Institutes: A user-friendly interface is essential to facilitate engagement and ensure that students of all ages and technical abilities can navigate the system efficiently. Accessibility features are also critical to cater to students with disabilities, ensuring that the LMS is compliant with legal standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- Corporate Environment: For corporations, the LMS should provide a seamless experience that integrates well with the daily workflow of employees. The system should be intuitive, reducing the learning curve and helping staff to access and complete courses efficiently. Mobile access is also increasingly important, allowing employees to learn on-the-go or in remote working situations.
3. Data Security and Compliance
- Educational Institutes: Data security is paramount in educational settings where sensitive information about students and their academic progress must be protected. The LMS must comply with educational standards and regulations, such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in the U.S., or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, which governs data protection and privacy.
- Corporate Environment: In a corporate context, the LMS should ensure data security for confidential company information and employee data. Compliance with industry-specific regulations (like HIPAA for healthcare, or Sarbanes-Oxley for financial services) is essential. The ability to audit user activities and provide detailed reports is also crucial for maintaining transparency and accountability.
How to Choose the Best LMS for Educational Institutes?
1. Consider Your Needs
Before you start hunting the best LMS for your institute and employee training, the best thing is to list down your basic needs. Answer important questions like:
- Who are you going to teach?
- Who will be your students?
- What are the student’s learning objectives?
Finding the answer to these questions will make it easier to find the right LMS for your institution that can contribute most efficiently to your needs. Not only should you know the learning objective and course logistics, but you should have a clear idea of your audience. You should have a good understanding of who your students will be? How many students will you entertain in one course? And what kind of course training programs outline will be more useful for your students? Knowing it all will make sure that content delivery matches your students’ needs.
2. Must-Have Features
The LMS will not only be used by the students and teachers, but the administrators will also use it for many purposes. K-12 education institutes can avail the most benefits by using the LMS to integrate with other schools and institute within the estates.
The second thing you should consider while shopping for LMS is the availability of required features. For example, Canvas LMS is one of the best LMS in the market, but it lacks some features like unavailability or shortage of eCommerce module. Therefore, with the changing dynamics of technology, it is important to know which feature is the priority while integrating an LMS.
Let’s say you want to include discussion boards or forums, or you want to have grading/scoring capabilities to track learner progress. What if your first priority feature is data tracking or user automation? Prioritizing the list of features will help you select the right LMS, which can be used to meet the objective of your learners, teachers, and administrators.
3. Think About the Future
Implementing a new LMS in an educational institute requires a good amount of money. You should better consider the scope of education you are providing. Consider focusing on points like:
- Will you expand your institute reach in the future?
- Will you implement another system that can be integrated with LMS in the near future?
- Will you be able to manage the cost of LMS, and with rapidly changing technology, will you be able to reap the full fruits from the LMS?
Finding the answer to this question will help you understand the value you will get from your investment you will make on LMS. To analyze these factors before making purchasing the LMS. Now, let’s examine the same factors for the corporate sector.
How to Choose Best LMS for Corporate Businesses?
We will check the same three factors and analyze them for a business or corporate needs.
1. Consider Your Needs (Determine the Business Goals)
For a business, it is of utmost importance to create a clear, measurable, and achievable goal that needs to be achieved with the help of eLearning. Ask yourself:
What do I want to achieve with the training of my employees?
From the answer, you will get clear goals such as:
- With online training courses and eLearning sale will be expected to boost by 25%,
- With LMS implementation, we will save the yearly cost of sending employees for training abroad,
- With eLearning, the duration of certification will reduce significantly,
- The organization can create their own courses for its employees as well as sell them to other organizations.
Don’t create goals that are unattainable and unmeasurable like:
- Boost sales,
- Reduce cost and expense,
- Reduce time.
First, you should list down the actual clear need of your business and then convert them into measurable business goals. You can always check what percentage of that goal you have achieved after training of your employees such as:
- Check your employees’ knowledge of the product line after training.
- Check how your colleagues have mastered their sales skills
Efficient employees with better skills mean more revenue and more profits.
2. Must-Have Features
Once you narrow down the objectives you want to achieve from the LMS, it is the right time to list down the feature requirements from the LMS. The more specific your needs, the easier it is to find the perfect fit for your organization.
To narrow down the features you will require from the LMS; you need to wear the lens of your business and define the features requirements such as:
- Social learning
- Talent Management
- Mobile learning
- eCommerce modules
- White-labeling and customization
- Gamification features
- Certifications (Grading/Scoring feature)
You can also categorized based on technical requirements such as:
- Cloud-based or hosted solution
- Integration with other systems
And, based on cost as well:
- Pay-per-active-users
- Pay-per-learner
- Pay-as-you-go
- License Fee / Subscription
Knowing the exact requirements will get you your perfect LMS.
3. Think About the Future
A business can avail of many advantages from an LMS besides training and eLearning. But, investing a hefty amount requires serious considerations. Better plan out the future and the use of LMS within the organization. The important question is:
- Do you think the implementation of LMS will recover the cost it incurs in the coming future?
- Can you use it to its full potential before it becomes obsolete?
- Will your operations keep growing to sustain the cost of LMS?
- Are you looking for an expansion in the new future?
- Will you expand the reach of your business abroad and need remote employees to get trained by the LMS?
Costing the future needs and the cost you spent in the present in implementing the LMS will get you your answers. Now, let’s move to our next part of the article, where we will discuss the benefits of an LMS in the education and corporate sector.
What are Benefits of Learning Management Systems?
In Educational Institutes
1. Easy Tracking & Reporting
The biggest advantage of LMS in an educational institute is providing a platform to easily track and report every activity by the teachers and students. LMS is a tool that offers centralized and consolidated storehouse for educational data. Teachers can create a course outline that students can access from the LMS. Similarly, students can take quizzes and submit assignments in which the teacher can check, score, and grade the student.
All study material is available at a single platform that students can access anytime from anywhere. In other words, an LMS saves an institute from the hassle of maintaining learning materials at multiple places.
2. A Personalized Approach
If a class has 100+ students, wouldn’t that be impossible for the teacher to give personal attention to each student? Well, an LMS overcomes this hurdle through a student-centric approach. By focusing on the unique needs of each student, an LMS creates equal learning opportunities for all. Students can each receive a customized learning experience through tailored learning paths that engage learners with a variety of courses. Achieving this level of personalization is extremely difficult in a traditional classroom setting.
3. Engagement
In an online learning class, students are encouraged to engage more and communicate freely. A user-friendly LMS can help build connections with peers for learning purposes. It helps students to share opinions, collaborate on different projects or assignments, and create engagement for learning. Students can also keep posted each other on the latest updates from the teachers and institutes. Live Chat feature in LMS can help students interact with teachers without meeting them face to face.
In Corporate Organizations
1. Job Performance
An LMS saves business hours to manage and train employees, which ultimately enhances job performance. Take the example of a newly hired employee. No matter how much experience the employee has, you still need to train the person regarding his job role, company policies, compliance, and much more. An LMS provides a single platform to do all these jobs.
An LMS helps businesses to save travelling cost for training their employees. An LMS can also be a tool to record, maintain, and evaluate the overall performance of an employee. In short, an LMS can enhance the job performance level by ten times.
2. Retention Talent Management
LMS helps businesses to retain employees by offering them an opportunity to grow their career by learning more skills. Employees can submit their learning requirements in the application that later can be catered to designed personalized learning opportunities for employees. An LMS is the best tool to retain young talent by providing employees with opportunities to learn more.
3. Engagement between Employee and Employer
Compliance policies keep changing as per the new rules and regulations from higher authorities. Updating these changes using traditional offline methods can be very time-consuming. An LMS can help a business to distribute the message and update the compliance policies within no time. Live chat options can help employees to engage with each other for day-to-day operations as well as with Human Resources for different updates.
LMS can ensure that all of your employees are on the same page about the company policies, and the compliances are always followed.
Here it is time to provide a list of best Cloud-based LMS solutions for both Educational Institutes and Companies.
What are the Best Cloud-Based Learning Management Systems?
LMS for Education
Here are the best 3 LMS for higher-education institutes:
Google Classroom
If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn. [Ignacio Estrada]
Main Features of the LMS:
- It provides engagement through teacher and student interactions.
- Parents are also included in the interaction.
- It provides home learning
- It helps administrators to staff appraisals
It helps Organize Parent-Teacher Consultation Evenings. It is one of the easiest and best ways of teaching students.
CANVAS
- It offers a collaborative workspace to upload audio and video messages as a shared resource.
- It allows integrated learning outcomes, LTI integration, audio/video library, and RSS support.
- It has open API and integrated tools like Google documents, Ether pad, and media reporting for improved customer experience.
- It has an option to customize the user profiles as per their requirement.
- It has analytics to generate progress reports.
- It also supports the external integration of third-party apps.
- It is available on mobile for Android and IOS.
MOODLE
- It can create online courses and offers data backup management.
- It has collaborative tools and plans, quick notification, detailed reporting and logs, and security alert updates.
- It has a customizable site design and layout, embed external resources, handles the user’s responsibilities and permissions.
- It comes with multilingual capability.
- It has multimedia integration along with multiple progress tracking functions such as outcomes & rubrics.
- It has a personalized dashboard.
- It can perform peer and self-assessment for both students and teachers.
Now let’s check the list of top 3 Cloud-based LMS for businesses.
Corporate LMS For Business
TalentLMS
- TalentLMS comes with strong management of creating training courses within the organization based on employees' needs.
- It has a good custom homepage, reporting, branding, and fields that provide the business flexibility to customize it as per their needs and requirements.
- It helps businesses to design individual plans, defines employee roles, mobile accessibility, appraisal system, and training metrics for employees.
- It has good registration management, ILT support, web conference, display transcripts, data import and export, testing, etc.
- It supports exam e-commerce, which is a plus for businesses.
- It is available on desktop as well as iOS and Android mobiles.
Lessonly
- It helps test an employee's knowledge.
- The application has an option to help employees apply their training and get meaningful feedback from their managers,
- The application offers an additional feature for sales and customer support where employees can improve their chat skills with customers, practice handling support tickets thoughtfully, learn to deliver effective product presentations, rehearse pitches and customer interactions on video, and compose mock emails to prospects or customers.
- It offers webcam recording and screen recording options.
- Lessonly comes for both desktop and mobile.
Litmos
- The learning management systems (LMS) offer an online course builder, which uses content creation tools that support multiple formats and is in the form of a module.
- The LMS can be used to create Instructor-Led Training in a virtual environment. Employees can be assigned tests and quizzes to examine their knowledge for the job.
- It offers customized learning paths, reports, and dashboards for reviewing performance and gaining sight of the learning impact.
- The LMS helps to build E-Commerce programs along with an update for each one with messages and notifications.
- It has gamification options to motivate employees, along with a meaningful survey and feedback.
Conclusion
An LMS has much to offer to both an educational institute and a corporate business at the same time. Due to the popularity of eLearning, there are more than 700 LMS available in the market. Choosing the right one for you is a puzzle in itself. But, if you know the right clues, you can easily solve this puzzle.
Before shopping for an LMS, you should know a couple of things like why you need an LMS? What objective are you planning to achieve with the LMS? What features do you require in an LMS? And, most importantly, what plans you have on using an LMS? Knowing the answer to these questions will help you select the perfect option for yourself.
However, ready-made solutions may not be enough for your needs, so the best option is to create a custom one.
