What’s In An LMS?
January/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.