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7 Factors To Consider Before Choosing A Learning Management System

Most organizations and learning institutions are interested in building digital training modules for providing effective and organized learning to employees and students via LMS even though there are many apps out there. The Learning Management System, LMS, has been under constant development to offer much more advanced features. Thus, selecting an LMS will require balancing your budget, money, value, and requirements.

The existing LMS platforms are numerous, and this can bring about some confusion when selecting one. However, the perfect LMS platform should completely satisfy the learning needs of your organization. This article will discuss the various factors to consider before choosing an LMS platform for your organization. Besides, you can find more information regarding LMS software development on Yalantis.com.

Table of Contents

What is Learning Management System?

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.

learning mangement system — Learning Management System

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 use 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.

Learning Management System Considerations

If hosted in the cloud, a Learning Management System 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 LMS.

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 precise questions will also assist in determining the number of attempts made in the various questions.

The reports made by the Learning Management System 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 like 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 Learning Management System 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.

Since there are parameters’ variations, you cannot compare the various 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 Learning Management System 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, the customer support department takes part in notifying the customers about the temporary problem.

Consider choosing an Learning Management System 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 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 Learning Management System 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 keep 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! This article is an excellent breakdown of the selection process of an ideal Learning Management System platform. After reading it, you will undoubtedly know about purchasing an LMS to deliver corporate learning in a supportive and scalable manner. Above, you have the various pointers to use when selecting the best LMS platform for your operations.

And if you want to know more about how to create a language learning app, you should read the article “Making a Language Learning App” at Aimprosoft.com.