Whether you are a small-scale business or a large-scale organization, digitizing is never a bad idea. LMS enables your organization to function efficiently and makes day-to-day activities easy.
Since you have decided to go online, the most important element of the process is choosing which LMS to purchase; a learning management system that won’t only justify your investment but also can be trusted, eg, Totara. Following are the features that one must always look for before purchasing any LMS:
- User-Friendly Interface: Any LMS needs to be user-friendly so that the admin can easily create the course tailored to the workforces’ needs. While choosing LMS, make sure as to how convenient LMS will make for you to create the course and how many varieties of courses or videos you can integrate on a single platform. It should be user-friendly for both admin and learner to operate.
- Flexible Assigning and Analyzing: As an organization, it is your responsibility to make sure your employees get educated on the relevant course and enhance their skills relevant to their job profile. A smart LMS will not only assign your employees the relevant course but also will track the progress of your employee. Analyzing your employee’s performance and progress will help to identify the areas that might need improvement and take corrective measures accordingly.
- Social Learning Integration: Learning becomes monotonous in some time. So to make your employees learning a little more interesting and interactively choose LMS that will not only provide courses on the portal but will integrate your process of learning with your peer group. Choose an LMS that provides you with the opportunity to discuss the course content online where one can publish articles, discuss and post queries online. Your integration with informal learning tools will allow your employees to interact with each other, exchange information, and share feedback.
- Certification: Some LMS platforms enable you to provide online certification for online training programs to provide training for specific skills or tasks. Certification helps you to segregate one from another based on their course of skills and talent, therefore making it easy to assign a task to an employee based on their skill. For example, an HR online certificate to ensure that every member of your team is specialized in human resources and has the necessary talent to perform the functions assigned to him/her as an HR.
- Data Security: One has to make sure that their data is well protected and no one can pry on it. Your LMS should have data security measures such as protected servers, encryption tools, and blockers, to protect it from unauthorized access. So make sure to ask your LMS vendor about data security policies.
- Mobile Learning: Supposedly you have an employee who is always on the move. His job profile doesn’t allow him to work from one place. How are you going to give them online training? Here we need an LMS that supports responsive courses that can be accessed and seen through any device. Online learning should be able to be accessed irrespective of device.
- Cost considerations: Your budget plays a vital role in selecting the right LMS platform. The pricing may vary depending upon the vendor. Make sure to do extensive research before purchasing LMS as an LMS can also come with certain hidden costs.
- Feedback: The best way to measure the effectiveness of online learning is to directly ask the learners. Therefore, you need to have an LMS that has an in-built feature where one can conduct surveys and then compile that data. This enables one to measure the efficiency of learning and identify the areas that need corrective measures.
Building your online learning requires care and planning. One must see through every possible pros and cons of LMS that you are considering. Never make a hasty decision over the purchase of LMS as it is the core of providing online learning to learners.