Are your learners’ heads in the clouds? If not, maybe they should be. Feature-rich learning management systems (LMS) and cloud-based hosting solutions to deliver e-learning improve the education experience with advanced technologies by enabling organizations to deliver training anywhere, to anyone who needs it, when they need it.
Here are the top 5 things to consider when upgrading your LMS:
1. Proprietary vs. Open Source LMS
Proprietary LMSs can require hundreds to thousands of man hours per year to administer and create and manage courses, and most make it very difficult to get meaningful data and reports from them. Making the move to an open source LMS can alleviate these pain points once it is set up properly, as they provide a robust and flexible e-learning platform.
When choosing a new solution, many companies underestimate the time and expertise it takes for their staff to migrate their old system to a new open source solution or to implement a new one. Moodle is a proven platform for educators, trainers, and learners. As a highly flexible LMS, Moodle can be used to conduct courses online or to support face-to-face teaching. Totara is an open source distribution of Moodle. Moodle was primarily built to suit the needs of education where Totara was designed for corporate learning and provides more features suited to companies, such as team management capabilities.
Look for a vendor who can provide complete services such as setting up your site with security provisioning, migrating your old one, branding your LMS site so it is responsive on every device, installing plugins, and migrating your LMS courses and content to the cloud. Invariably, you will want some kind of customization, so the vendor should be able to handle that as well. Free up your staff who are not usually experts in learning management systems and would be better working on other initiatives.
2. Plugins
Make sure you can enhance your system with plugins. Both Moodle and Totara have a number of built-in plugins for e-commerce, plagiarism (very serious problem for educational institutions), productivity, web conferencing and virtual classrooms, and media integration.
3. Access to Data
LMSs are big on data but don’t provide easy ways to access it or to create meaningful insights or reports from the data. Extend your LMS’s reporting capabilities with reporting and analytics solutions like Zoola Analytics to get the most insight to all of the data in your LMS, not just subsets of it. Taking a data-driven approach, this software enables managers to prove the impact of their learning programs and use the data to improve course engagement and learning effectiveness.
4. Cloud Hosting
Three questions to ask here: Is it reliable? Is it secure? Does it meet compliance? With GDPR enforced, data security is top of mind with CLOs, even for organizations not in the EU. Choose a solution that partners with other cloud-based vendors, especially on the same cloud infrastructure to reduce latency and comply with data storage regulations.
5. Expert Help
Burdens on L&D departments to troubleshoot LMS issues can be alleviated by working with a vendor that has a dedicated, expert help desk to work with you as a partner. This means that they are not there just to troubleshoot problems, but willingly apply their expert knowledge to help you maximize your LMS’s adoption and ensure its optimal utility. They should be responsive and solve issues rapidly.