3 ways your LMS is wasting your time
March 8, 2022
An ever-reliable stalwart of the learning and development and HR industries is the Learning Management System (LMS) which comes in many variations and configurations. Legacy learning systems will often come with the tagline “years of experience”, but we find that many of these systems are built with dated technology and therefore lack the flexibility to serve the modern learning environment.
With the world being online at unprecedented rates in the last 2 years, we are reliant on technology like never before. The LMS has also become an integral part of managing digital learning, however is it really making life easier? We share some ways that your LMS should below:
Your LMS is restrictive and controls what you can do!
As learning administrators we’ve become the masters of finding fixes for problems our LMS really should be solving. Finding clever workarounds and using excel spreadsheets with macros are ways that learning administrators find helpful to provide the information their stakeholders need, but these just take more time.
Managing and administrating many learners is difficult enough but add in a rigid and functionally limited “Legacy” LMS with poor customisability or flexibility capabilities and the strain could even break a camel’s back.
Every learning system should be able to provide the right level of flexibility and power to help administrators manage all the requirements of their learning. These off the shelf systems will allow you to create, schedule, share and review reports with only a few easy steps as opposed to wasting a few days crunching data on an excel spreadsheet (or three). Your life should be made simpler with capabilities such as creating custom reports, customisable and insightful dashboards, granular and comprehensive data sets, and simplified content building tools.
Your LMS doesn’t play nicely with other systems
The days of singular, hour-long eLearning modules sitting on the LMS are gone (or should be). Organisations are realising that to cater for the diverse needs of their learners a wide array of engaging learning options need to be available. But building and adapting these courses can be difficult and time consuming.
Major content (LinkedIn, Coursera etc) providers now share their content in your system through integrations allowing your LMS to offer a wider range of learning opportunities thus catering to more learning styles and requirements. It also saves an incredible amount of time for learning administrators and managers, having a wealth of content at your disposal instead of the time-consuming exercise of having to source or build content.
But that’s not all, all modern LMS systems come with a whole suite of integrations with other applications your business uses such as CRM’s, HR Tools and even Sales and Marketing applications. By utilising integrations and connecting your platforms you will have consistent data flows removing the need for workarounds, and data synching hack’s. Learning systems with advanced compatibility with other systems also provide you with a much easier way to manage user information. Applications like Zapier make integrating platforms easy and cost-effective.
You have to jump through hoops to adapt and update content
Successful learning team’s understand the value of being flexible and adaptive with learning content. As learning and development teams we must be ahead of the curve with new information and have the capacity to deal with “change” or “update” content requests. Your learning system needs to reflect this need in a practical and effective way.
Updating text, changing images and any number of other content types can add up to serious amount of time from a day. Along with the manual labour of updates you’re often forced to use a couple of different programs, such as an authoring tool, that requires publishing to SCORM, then going through the re-upload process and before you know it you’ve eaten away at precious time for what should be a simple task.
Quality learning platforms have authoring capabilities ingrained into their core system and included as part of their offering. Building a range of learning experiences such as micro-learning, quizzes, surveys, micro-sites, landing pages and more can be simple and dare I say it fun, when you’re working with a modern editing interface. No programming or development skills should be required, instead incorporate your creativity to unlock the potential of your learning offering.