LMS Tips: Learning Management Systems - the must-have features

What’s In An LMS?                                  

 

February 2009

Considering a Learning Management System? To be successful, an LMS must fit into your overall E-Learning plan and facilitate the business goals you want to accomplish. An LMS worthy of your time (and money!) must provide an infrastructure that allows you to plan, deliver and manage E-Learning programs in new and existing formats.

So, what should you look for in an LMS?

• Supports blended learning. People learn in different ways. An LMS should offer training options that are student-paced or instructor-led.
• Administration. The LMS must enable administrators to manage user registrations and profiles, define roles, set curricula, author courses, manage content, chart student progress and administer e-commerce.
• Reporting. Standard and customized reports on individual and group performance must be available to Administrators. Reports should be scalable to include the entire learning-base.
• Scheduling. The system should be able to build schedules for learners and instructors.
• Learning Screens. All learning screens and features should be manageable, using automated, user-friendly student and administration screens.
• Assessment. Evaluation, testing and assessment engines help you build a program that becomes more valuable over time.
• Skills management. A skills management component enables organizations to measure training needs and identify improvement areas based on learners’ collective competence in specified areas.
• Configurability. If an organization needs to completely re-engineer its internal processes to install an LMS or employ expensive programming resources to make changes to the LMS, then it’s probably not a good fit.
• Content management capabilities connect smaller learning objects to build courses and curriculums. Existing content and formats should transfer quickly and easily into the course builder features.

There's little doubt that an LMS, an online training system, is a great investment that will offer new frontiers for your training initiatives. Finding the system that's the best fit for your company requires a careful selection process and thorough survey of available features.