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In current times, where the business environment is experiencing disruptions at a pace never seen before, companies are facing an urgent need to ensure that their employees can upgrade their skill-levels in time to be able to retain their market competitiveness. With the growing size of organizations, and with their branching-out into different locations, there is an urgent need being felt for a virtual platform over which training of employees could be conducted in a centralized manner. A Learning Management System or an LMS is a software product that is designed exactly to meet this need. To know about the potential benefits of incorporating the use of an LMS within an organization, you can read up on why an organization needs to have a learning platform, and how it can be made the best use of.
What is an LMS?
The Learning Management System (LMS), is intuitive in itself – it is a system that helps in managing to learn. Essentially, an LMS is a software-based platform that enables efficient management and quick delivery of e-learning courses and programs and effective measurement of learning outcomes. An LMS commonly comprises of two components: a server component and a user interface.
- The server component facilitates the creation, delivery, and management of training courses, stores data in a dedicated database to which it provides controlled access, maintains a registry of authenticated users, sends notifications, and so on.
- The user interface (UI) runs on the user’s side, enabling users of the LMS platform, be it students, instructors, and administrators, to use it in the desired manner.
Who uses the Learning Management System?
Learning Management Systems are used by any organization that requires to provide online learning content to intended trainees. As such, organizations that use LMS could be any of the following categories:
- i) Educational Institutions
- ii) Coaching Classes
- iii) Business Organizations
- iv) Governments
- v) Non-Government Agencies
How do you know That your organization needs an LMS?
With an increasing need to train and develop employees, organizations are continuously looking for ways to deliver training efficiently. There are certain signs which indicate that your organization needs an LMS.
1. Inability to analyze the effectiveness of training
If your current training method is not helping you evaluate training effectiveness, adopting the use of a learning platform such as an LMS is a must. An LMS will help you analyze how well your employees are grasping the knowledge and determine productivity improvements.
2. A huge burden of costs
Classroom training can be very expensive, due to venue costs, trainer fees, travel, and related expenditures. However, all of these costs can be minimized by using an LMS.
3. The need for implementing compliance training
An LMS helps you deliver effective compliance training to all your employees more efficiently than classroom training. A good LMS will also help you track your employee’s compliance.
4. Content is boring
The biggest reason why employees are not actively participating in training is usually boring content. However, with the gamification features in an LMS, you can provide an enhanced learning experience to the employees.
5. Inability to effectively analyze feedback
An LMS provides you the tools to train, track, report, and also get feedback from your employees (learners). The consistent use of integrated post-course evaluations is important for fine-tuning and improving your offerings.
What are the key benefits of an LMS?
The Benefits of a Learning Management System (LMS) are quite wide and are briefly enumerated below:
Learning System improves the Learning Strategy
An LMS helps in establishing an appropriate blended learning strategy and increasing departmental efficiency. Because it facilitates a wide variety of types of training sessions (Live Instructor-led Training, Pre-Recorded Learning Modules, AR/VR-driven training sessions, etc), a training manager can look at delivering training through different modes to maximize learning efficiency. By aligning all of this functionality into one place an LMS is truly a powerful offering for any organization.
LMS Benefits the Accessibility
Modern-day LMSs offer multi-device support, allowing the user to select their preferred platform when accessing their learning modules. Therefore, people can access their learning modules very conveniently at remote locations or even while traveling.
• Advanced Reporting Features
New and more innovative reporting capabilities are constantly evolving within the marketplace due to industry perceived best practices. An LMS gives you the capability to monitor and evaluate all of the actions conducted within the system.
• Personal Development
An LMS is a virtual playground for learning and development personnel. Experts state this concerning the marketplace in itself and how LMS are shaped in the anticipation of supporting future market trends.
From the above, it is clear that no matter what the size of your business is, an LMS is essential for your enterprise
What makes a perfect LMS?
A perfect LMS is the one that possesses all the necessary features and should not be loaded with unnecessary features, which are not useful for your specific organizational training needs. So, if you decide to purchase a new learning platform, you must keep a check on the following important features an LMS must-have.
1. Responsive Design
You must ensure that the LMS has a responsive design, so that the learning material is easily accessible on any device, for example, smartphones or tablets.
2. eLearning Assessment Tools
Assessing any gaps in learning is highly essential. This is why the LMS must have inbuilt features that support a variety of eLearning assessment methods or tools, such as eLearning templates. Also, there must be an assessment tracking feature to determine the progress of learning among users.
3. Intuitive User Interface
If the users aren’t able to conveniently navigate through the LMS platform, they are bound to not make enough use of it, or may not have adequate levels of engagement with the learning content. Therefore, make sure to choose an LMS that has an intuitive user interface, as the UI will be aligned with the abilities and skillsets of the eLearning team.
4. Reports and Analytics
To make sure that your online training objectives are met, you must purchase an LMS that has both reporting and analytics features. In most of the LMS platforms, you may find a feature (often known as LMS reports) that allows you to generate metrics based on the major pain-points related to online training. When you are buying a compliance training management system for your organization, make sure it has a strong reporting and assessment feature.
5. Data Security
This is one of the most important features that you must consider. You would want your sensitive data to be protected against prying eyes. Hence, always invest in an LMS that has data security measures in place.
Modern and High-End LMS uses Case Scenario to Boost eLearning Benefits
One very effective way to identify whether the LMS that you are considering buying is suited for your organizational needs is to test its response to various use-case scenarios that would crop up in your organization. By creating those use-cases and testing them on the LMS, you would be able to identify exactly how well the LMS would function when it is used for something similar in real-life operations. An LMS using case scenario analyzes the situations and helps you decide whether it will be able to meet the training needs.
Of course, even if the LMS allows you to test use-case scenarios, it would seem to be quite difficult to think of all the different possible scenarios that could crop up. One way to go about this in an organized manner is to create a list of scenarios by asking the question ‘Who will do What?’ on the LMS and later tabulate your answers with the same headers. This would give you an idea of what test-case scenarios to create for testing on the LMS.
Importance of Implementing Compliance Training to Your Business
Introducing compliance training to your business can have several benefits. It helps your employees to learn from mistakes made in the past and instills critical thinking in the minds of your staff. This would enable the staff to resolve complex issues with ease and flexibility. With an effective training management system, the employees get a better insight into their role in the organization. The employer can develop a strategy to create a healthy and constant learning environment, which will further contribute to a positive and safer working status and encourage the employees to contribute to business growth.
How do you know it’s time to replace your outdated LMS?
Organizations across industries depend on learning management systems for handling their day to day training activities. Due to the importance of LMS, it may go without saying that an outdated LMS or one with inadequate features can hinder an entire organizational learning process. Below mentioned are several points describing the need for changing the outdated LMS:
1. LMS User Interface Is Non-Intuitive:
If users struggle to use the system due to a badly-designed UI, it may lead to clutter, inability to search for necessary courses or mistakes in content placement. Your LMS needs to have a simple and easy interface so that users can complete their tasks with ease.
2. LMS Lacks Integration capability with Other Systems
Most companies already have an HRIS (Human Resource Information System) or an HRMS (Human Resource Management System), if your LMS cannot integrate with them, your organization would have to deal with issues such as information discrepancies, dual data entry, or incomplete user records. The LMS must be integrable with HRIS for enabling succession planning and promotion. Having employee information regarding skills, job-roles, and training automatically synced to the system can lead to a better functioning organization.
3. LMS is Non-Compatible with Mobile:
An LMS built only for desktop computers is a big no-no, especially in an era where it seems every person is glued to their smartphone. In fact, In the US, 91% of the population is connected to high-speed internet (4G/5G network or WiFi) via smartphone. Not capitalizing on that would be a mistake. Your users should have the ability to access their LMS from mobile devices as smartphones are fast evolving to be the most preferred devices for internet browsing.
4. LMS is Missing Valuable Reporting and Analytics
An LMS without robust reporting and analytics capabilities would not be able to effectively help to fulfill your organizational needs. It is important to be able to extract regular reports to be able to make decisions regarding future training and development strategy.
Given the above points, it is clear why you must have a robust and modern LMS to effectively improve the learning experience.
How do you know if your LMS is Safe and Secure?
While an LMS is crucial in automating learning and development processes in an enterprise, it is important to note that the system is going to contain massive volumes of confidential company data. And therefore, while such platforms are finding quick acceptance in the corporate world, data safety remains one of the biggest concerns. If you too are planning to buy an LMS and are concerned about data security, here is what you should know.
1. SSL Security
SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a technology that adds encryption to the web protocol, to make web browsing safe and sound. It has been made compulsory on websites that require handling credit cards or any other mode of payment. So, while purchasing an LMS, ask your vendor if it has been enabled with an SSL protective layer.
2. IP Blocker
To keep unwanted IP addresses from accessing your data, your LMS should have an IP blocker. IP addresses can be manually added to the ‘blocked’ or ‘allowed’ list, so you can easily protect your elearning content and user data from hostile virtual attackers.
3. Password Authentication
This feature allows usernames and passwords to be completely safe by transmitting them to a remote access server. Other protocols may also be involved to ensure that the data is accessed only by authorized users.
4. Data Recovery
Pay clear attention to data recovery or protection against disasters while looking for security features in an LMS. You need to ensure that the data centers have high-density power systems in place and are monitored with regular data backups.
Guide to Successful LMS Implementation
The Implementation process of LMS does not have to be frustrating, and we here at Gyrus do all that we can to help our clients successfully transition their training and development activities over on to our GyrusAim LMS platform. To do this, we hand-hold the client organization through the following different steps:
- a) Tuning our LMS Product, Process, and Content to suit the client organization’s needs
- b) Defining Organizational Roles and Permissions by working closely with the client management
- c) Testing the LMS in a Secure Environment
- d) Performing Final Tune-up
- e) Launching the LMS Platform
