What is a Learning Management System? (Definition, Features, and Benefits)
Learn more about how and why businesses train their staff using Learning Management Systems.
What is an LMS?
A learning management system (LMS) is software designed for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.
The acronym LMS is explained as follows:
Learning: A learning management system delivers online courses and training to employees, members, and partners of an organization.
Administration: An LMS helps HR managers organize, manage, and monitor their online courses, participants, and results. It can also analyze the effectiveness of your corporate training program.
System: In this context, "system" means software commonly used by universities, businesses, hospitals, government organizations, and businesses across all industries to deliver, track, and report on training.
Most Learning Management System Solutions comprise Two Main User Roles:
Administrators
Administrators manage the LMS, which involves a combination of multiple tasks such as overseeing course creation, content management (creating training courses and learning plans or contacting third-party content providers), assigning groups of employees to specific training plans, and tracking their learning outcomes.
The admin interface is where an L&D manager performs tasks to create, organize, manage, and deliver courses; add students; analyze reports; automate notifications, and share data with senior stakeholders.
Learner?
An LMS student typically includes employees, partners, or customers enrolled in a training program. Most LMS solutions ensure the student has a personalized and streamlined learning experience. Training is available on-demand and on mobile devices. The learner interface in an LMS usually has an intuitive dashboard that highlights key learning metrics, such as enrolled courses, assignments, grades, and more.
Types of LMSs
Cloud-based LMS
A cloud-based LMS allows you to access and use the LMS by installing no software or hardware. To access the LMS, users simply log into a web portal.
On-premise LMS
The on-premise LMS is built and installed to your organization's specifications on a physical server of your choice. However, the on-site installation ensures the security of user and company data. Compared to a cloud-based LMS, where the vendor handles service and support, it is up to the organization's internal IT department to maintain the e-learning platform and its security, as well as perform any necessary updates. The downside, however, is the extra cost associated with maintenance and installation.
open source LMS
An open-source learning management system (LMS) is a type of e-learning platform that allows you to access and change code. You need a dedicated IT team to configure, install, customize, and maintain the LMS. Most open-source LMSs have no licensing fees but have significant hidden costs associated with installation and maintenance.
Pricing models used for learning management systems include:
Freemium
This pricing model allows users to access the core functionality of some LMS platforms. Once users use the more advanced features of the system, a fee is added.
Subscription
Users regularly pay a recurring fee to access the LMS. The subscription can grant enterprise-wide access to all LMS features or can require them to pay for each user of the system.
Active User Pricing Model
In the active user-pricing model, you only charge your subscribers based on how active they are. This means that you only charge users who use the LMS. Companies can enroll as many employees as they like in the LMS, but we will only charge them based on whom they use.
Licensing
This is an annual fee that companies have to pay for renewal or an upfront payment that gives users unlimited access to life.
What are the use cases of an LMS?
A learning management system supports a variety of internal and external business use cases, including:
Employee development and retention
Organizations in various industries and sectors use an LMS to train their staff. They can deliver courses within the learning management system to ensure employees gain job skills, are kept abreast of product changes, stay current on compliance training, and more. For example, provide mandatory compliance training to employees, or you may need to upgrade existing employees' skills on new software updates. With an enterprise LMS, you can eliminate the disruption associated with traditional learning by allowing your employees to access the online training at their own pace and on their own mobile devices. Using an LMS, an organization can reduce employee-training costs compared to traditional classroom or instructor-led training. An LMS also provides administrators with deeper insight into training performance and course completion rates through built-in monitoring and reporting tools.
Recruit new employees
Through e-learning to training programs, they can effectively implement an LMS to support, streamline, and automate the onboarding of new employees across multiple departments, geographies, or offices. The key takeaway here is that it can be time-consuming and costly to hire and train every new employee. This is especially true if the organization is large and the turnover is quite high. That's why many organizations use an LMS to transfer onboarding training, or at least a portion of it, to an online process.
New hires can normally have difficulty remembering details about a company's history or compliance policies. However, with an effective online onboarding program implemented through an LMS, new hires can access important information when they need it most. A learning management system is also an excellent focal point for educating new hires about the company's employee code of conduct, privacy guidelines, harassment policies, and more.
Customer and partner training
An LMS can also train an organization's partners and channels (e.g., resellers). You can easily teach your channel collaborators how to best market, sell, and support your products. This is a great way to enhance your reseller programs and deliver more value to partners. For example, if you are an agency that helps companies develop the soft skills of their employees, you can create a course in your LMS and share it with various clients.
Another common LMS use case is for businesses to train their customers. This is especially common in software and technology companies, where continuing customer education will also bring greater value to customers and enable them to use their products with ease. Whether you have a sales force that needs to get to market faster or have access to just-in-time training or a partner network that needs product training, an LMS enables the delivery, management, and reporting of everything through the Extended Enterprise LMS.
Sales Enablement
Most companies want a deal to be "closed" or "won.” To help salespeople get there more often, an LMS is critical to enabling sales at scale by equipping salespeople with the knowledge they need, whether it’s new products and services, industry changes, or new sales techniques. The system allows you to provide just-in-time product training immediately after the release of new products and previous catalog refresher courses. The platform also speeds up onboarding, so new hires can start selling faster and you can keep your best results.
Compliance training?
An LMS can help you keep your employees informed of compliance regulations. With a learning platform, it's easy to add new compliance standards to your online course in minutes. An LMS facilitates tracking to ensure employees receive the required training and manage recurring certifications. This is especially valuable in the healthcare, BFSI, and manufacturing sectors.
Benefits of using an LMS
(i) Organization
These are some benefits that the organization has gained from using an LMS.
Save on training costs.
LMS platforms reduce learning costs by eliminating expenses, such as instructor fees, classroom rental, travel, and printing costs. Having instructor-led webinars or virtual training and a digital archive for all training material eliminates these costs.
Update content rapidly.
An LMS makes updating training content quick and seamless. An administrator can add new modules to the existing training program and easily customize the content. Compared to traditional learning models, the trainer may have had to create new material.
Remote Training?
With an LMS, you can train your employees effectively, regardless of their physical location. Employees who work from home or in other non-traditional work environments can benefit from virtual training to continue learning programs.
Mobile Learning
Traditional classroom training programs would require employees to leave their daily duties on a specific day, affecting productivity. However, LMS solutions with mobile applications provide students with direct access to their training anytime and anywhere.
Centralization of content
Cloud-based learning management systems allow all users to access information from a central hub and enable online collaboration. An LMS stores information in an encrypted format, making it safe from cyber-security threats.
Track Results
Most LMS platforms come with analytics and reporting tools that help administrators identify learning gaps, generate user engagement statistics (e.g., how often users log in, when they complete a course, etc.), and measure the ROI of training programs. This data provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of your training program and the need to improve performance management in your company, as well as clear development paths for your employees.
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Encourage a Continuous Learning Culture
Offline training programs take a long time to organize, so they usually take place every year or as needed. eLearning courses are easy to deliver and affordable, along with online presentations and webinars. Using an LMS for training guarantees continuity in the updating and learning of employees.
Engage and motivate learners.
Corporate training is sometimes about becoming familiar with company policies or understanding compliance regulations. To keep employees engaged, you can add some elements of interactivity and gamification (e.g., quizzes, and rewards) using your LMS. Game-based elements included in eLearning modules also improve learning retention rates and motivate employees to complete the course.
Compliance Training That Works
Most times, employee training at companies focuses on compliance with the law. A good LMS automatically monitors and reports on compliance levels and provides early warnings of renewal requirements. This is a powerful risk management tool for avoiding fines or costs because of non-compliance.
Administrative efficiency
Report on user and course-level data, auto-assign courses, view dashboards with student overviews—you can do it all in one place via an LMS. This saves time in all areas, from course development to maintenance to compiling reports for executives and stakeholders.
(ii) Learners?
These benefits accrue to employees by using an LMS:
Skill development with lower investment
An LMS with its eLearning and mobile functionality allows employees to take training at their own pace. This is a great way to engage employees, as they may not have the resources or time to go through this type of training themselves.
Knowledge retention
One of the biggest barriers to effective learning and development is an employee's ability to keep knowledge essential to their job. eLearning can be more powerful than traditional learning. With course creation tools that integrate with your LMS, L&D administrators can input course content in a variety of multimedia formats to enhance the user experience and engagement with learning materials.
Instead of watching a presentation and then forgetting about it, students can pause the video during an online course, take notes, skip to a previous lesson, or take a follow-up quiz to test their knowledge. Microlearning modules can supplement classroom instruction and for just-in-time training.
Train Independently
Instructor-led training follows a unified approach to employee learning and development. Some employees may focus on one course for a longer period, while others prefer smaller blocks of training. A self-paced eLearning course addresses these different training needs and preferences.
Mobile Accessibility:
With an LMS, you can create flexible training programs that employees can follow as they see fit. Most LMSs have mobile apps that can be installed on all devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Organized training contents
Learning management systems serve as a repository for storing and organizing training materials, such as online courses, additional documentation, and all eLearning modules. Centralizing training content in an LMS will help employees refresh their memories by reviewing key modules by simply logging into the LMS. This is especially helpful for new hires, who are inundated with information during the first few weeks of initial training.
Content for Your Learning Management System
Off-the-Shelf Content
External content providers develop ready-made training courses. These courses are typically high-quality resources and can be easily distributed from the vendor's content library.
Internally created content
Some organizations may choose to create training content themselves. This can be a more time-consuming alternative and requires an in-house team dedicated to content creation. Organizations that choose to go this route usually have instructional designers who storyboard and create custom content. They also use course creation tools to create this training content. This approach may be more beneficial in the long run and is usually preferred when the content required is relatively niche.
Features of the LMS
Most modern LMS solutions have the following characteristics:
User Management
This feature allows administrators to add and edit users, assign them roles, and combine them into groups.
This feature allows administrators to create training courses based on various learning resources. They can then manage and administer this training to different groups in the organization.
Content Creation
Most LMS solutions that offer this functionality have built-in course creation tools. This helps administrators create customized training content using various interactive media elements, such as embedded videos, images, and more.
Content Library
LMS vendors also provide high-quality turnkey training for their clients. This continuous access to out-of-the-box content makes it easy to immediately implement engaging training programs.
The analytics feature helps administrators track training performance at the user and course levels. By analyzing student performance and progress, instructors can evaluate areas for improvement and increase overall training efficiency.
Mobile Learning
With mobile learning, students can access their learning content from their mobile devices anywhere and anytime. Easy accessibility of training content helps improve knowledge retention and information recall.
Gamification
Including gamified elements like points, badges, and certificates helps increase student engagement, motivation, and completion rates.
Social Learning
Some LMS solutions try to promote informal learning through features like chats, group feeds, discussion forums, etc. These features enhance collaboration and training participation.
Certifications
Most LMS solutions also help administrators create, customize, and generate certificates after course completion. This is especially valuable for companies that need to provide regular compliance training to their employees as a requirement.
Integrations
Modern LMS solutions also offer integrations with third-party software solutions such as webinar tools, HRIS solutions, payroll systems, and more. These integrations seamlessly bring organizations' software suites together to break down accessibility barriers and improve overall business performance.
Steps involved in using a learning management system to deliver effective training:
Step 1: Develop Training Programs
The first step in building an effective training program is to create training materials or upload existing content to the LMS.
You can create courses from scratch using an integrated course creation tool. Alternatively, you can also upload existing content to the LMS. Some LMS solutions also allow you to include content such as YouTube videos, webinars, and other multimedia formats in your training courses.
Step 2: Organize Users
The second step in the process is to categorize users by job title, department, skill level, certifications, and so on. This helps deliver personalized and contextual training content. Managing users in an LMS usually involves adding and removing new users, assigning user roles, creating groups, and more.
Step 3: Provide training.
The next step in the training process is for the administrator to plan and execute the training program. Ideally, the administrator should choose an optimal mix of training styles, such as self-paced online learning, instructor-led virtual training, mobile learning, and more. They can also choose to include concepts like gamification and social learning to improve training effectiveness.
Step 4: Monitor and Evaluate the Training Progress
With an LMS, you can measure your student's progress and activity. Administrators can track performance and evaluate and understand the impact of training with reports and analytics.
An LMS can help track some key training metrics, such as
Why should you use Green LMS?
Green LMS helps deliver impactful business education with a simple, intuitive, and powerful learning management system. Create interactive training courses using a powerful course creation tool. Increase student engagement through gamification and social learning. Track training progress without-of-the-box reports and interactive dashboards. Green LMS Zoom integration allows you to host online training. Provide your staff with a continuous learning experience with the Green LMS mobile application.
Contact us and find out how Green LMS can help you transform your corporate education, or visit us at thegreenlms.com. Find more details,?LMS for Automobiles?| LMS for Banking and Finance?|?LMS for Construction?| LMS for Customer Training?| LMS for Education?| LMS for FMCG?| LMS for Government?|?LMS for Healthcare?| LMS for Hospitality?|?LMS for Information Technology?|?LMS for Logistics?|?LMS for Manufacturing and Retail?| LMS for Non Profit?|?LMS for Oil Gas | LMS for higher education | LMS for Business | K-12 LMS for Students, and?LMS for Corporate