Your Learning Management System (LMS) is a vital tool that should help your organization get the most from your learning and development initiatives. Sometimes things change, however, and the tools that once helped are starting to hold you back.
Choosing a new LMS, whether you’re upgrading or starting from scratch, is a major decision that can have a huge impact on your organization. Here are the 5 critical signs to watch out for when looking for your next LMS:
1. Lack Of Functionality & Accessibility
Learning is evolving at the pace of technology, and your LMS has to keep pace. The ubiquitous nature of the internet means that people don’t consume media, educational or otherwise, in the same ways we used to. If your LMS doesn’t support the latest tech and eLearning trends, it is having a direct negative effect on your L&D programs.
Providing interactive content, leveraging video streaming, and adding gamification to your learning programs are proven methods to improve learning outcomes and retention that all utilize the latest technological advancements.
Making sure your new LMS is accessible from mobile devices and structuring your lessons to suit consumption on mobile platforms are also key features that will improve the quality of the learning experience you are providing.
If you are looking at an LMS that can’t provide this kind of functionality and accessibility, keep looking!
2. Poor UI & UX
If your LMS is a pain to use, it is also creating a painful learning experience. User experience (UX) is the emotional reaction that users have when interacting with your LMS. One of the biggest factors affecting UX is your User Interface (UI). If using and navigating your LMS is confusing, time-consuming, or off-putting (think ugly design), nobody is going to look forward to using it, even if you are providing content people are genuinely interested in.
Always make sure that you can easily implement a responsive and intuitive experience for your users so that learning, teaching, and even administration is a breeze. Watch our on-demand webinar to explore different ways to manage the user experience in your LMS.
3. Not Enough Support
They say that to err is human, but to really foul things up you need technology. That’s why you need proper and timely support for your LMS. If an LMS provider can’t offer you at least 99.9% uptime, quick and effective customer service, and help with implementation and migration, look elsewhere.
The reputation of any provider’s support team may just be the most important factor to evaluate because these are the people who will be helping you when things go awry. Your LMS is a major investment as the foundation of your eLearning initiatives, so you need to make sure there are experts there to make sure all of your needs can be met.
4. Out Of Control Costs
The last thing you want to find yourself thinking when it comes to your new LMS is “this deal is getting worse all the time”. Whether it’s cost overruns due to growth, costly support tickets, or outlandish licensing fees, an LMS should never be draining your budget.
Instead, your LMS should be contributing to your ROI, not destroying it. Make sure you carefully evaluate how much a proprietary LMS will cost for your user base, both today and in the future. Take into account if expanding functionality will cost you, if major updates will require additional fees, and how the growth of users, courses, etc will affect your bottom line.
While there are literally thousands of proprietary LMS options on the market, one of the best ways to manage costs is by using an open source solutions such as Moodle (for education) and Totara Learn (for business).
5. Limited & Time-Consuming Reporting
Analytics is the key to creating the best possible learning experience, and mountains of data are generated by learning management systems. Unfortunately, many platforms lack the necessary reporting functionality that allows you to truly leverage learning analytics for insights into how to optimize your learning and training processes. What this means is that you end up manually compiling information from different sources, formatting spreadsheets, and spending hours doing frustrating data entry for subpar reporting results.
You should be able to utilize your learning analytics to provide a better eLearning experience with data collected not just from your LMS, but from all integrated systems. Powerful automation can take the headache out of creating and sending reports, as well as eliminating hours of mind-numbing administrative time.
Make no mistake, having data-backed insights is the best way to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of your eLearning programs, especially with industry-leading tools such as Zoola Analytics.
At Lambda Solutions our LMS experts are always on standby to help you determine the best eLearning solution to meet your organization's goals. With over 15 years of experience, we have the expertise to provide you with the answers you’re looking for, whether you need to migrate to a new LMS or are looking to launch one for the first time. Contact us for details!
