In a time of ever-evolving technology, modern learning requires more well-coordinated and engaging educational methods for learners to reach their potential. Today, organizations, schools, universities, and even billion-dollar corporations already have or are about to get a Learning Management System (LMS).
If you’ve never heard of an LMS, you may be wondering what it is, why people use them, how you can leverage them for your corporation, and much more. After reading this article, you’ll know everything there is to know.
So, let’s begin.
What is a Learning Management System?
A Learning Management System is an application that provides a framework that handles each aspect of the eLearning process. This lets you create a central source for online courses and training materials, making it a one-stop solution to create, deliver, manage and track performance.
With the word “management” in its name, an LMS offers excellent functionality for organizing and structuring online courses. Simply put, LMS allows you to create and store online courses, provides learners access to the content, and helps you evaluate the results.
Who Needs a Learning Management System?
Learning Management System platforms are used in different industries and now have a global reach. The general adoption of Learning Management systems is sharply rising, and the LMS global market is expected to grow at a rate of 23% annually.
Anyone can use an LMS; some of the more frequent users are listed below:
- Educational Institutions: Similar to educational institutions, LMS systems can house the necessary knowledge structured in the form of courses. Learners can easily access this knowledge off-site.
- Organizations: Companies need to continuously train hundreds to thousands of employees around the globe each year. An LMS system allows them to keep all parties involved up to date and well-trained.
- Entrepreneurs: The use of LMS is not limited to large organizations alone. Small and medium-sized businesses implement LMS to educate employees and develop their skills with fewer human resources and training costs.
- Anyone with a Passion for Teaching: People with the right expertise or knowledge use LMS to create and sell courses via the internet. This is a fast-growing segment and has gained vast popularity in a varied number of fields such as photography, workout regiments, cooking, etc.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Learning Management System?
If you’re still confused about why you should use one, let’s examine the benefits:
Instead of hiring teachers or instructors for every classroom, LMS automates the learning process and provides educational institutes with an economical way to get courses and materials to their students.
Similarly, LMSs can reduce the dependency on physical venues for classes. Institutions will no longer have to expand venues to accommodate more students, saving on rent expenses. Less dependency on physical venues also means fewer instructional materials, desks, whiteboards, projectors, etc.
As stated before, automation is one of the biggest perks of LMS platforms. With automatic checking & grading features and the ability to accommodate more students than what is possible in traditional classrooms, LMSs save teachers a lot of time. Moreover, it also streamlines the management process like organizing courses, maintaining instructors’ and students’ profiles, revenue sharing among multiple instructors, and more.
Feedback is vital for improving a learner’s performance. A learning management system streamlines the process of feedback. Teachers can easily share feedback on the LMS portal. Students and their guardians can access this, allowing parents to keep track of their child’s performance.
Learning on the Go
Once the information is stored in a cloud-based learning management system, it can be accessed remotely, even on the go. Many of the best learning management systems make their applications mobile-friendly and accessible with smartphones and tablets. Students can attend lectures, submit assignments and check their grades without access to a desktop or laptop computer.
Encourage Social Learning and Communication
A common misconception about eLearning is that it isolates students and keeps them from socializing. In reality, a well-equipped learning management system promotes interactions and social learning. Using an LMS, instructors can design group tasks, schedule group studies using video conferencing, share their screens and hold community discussions in the forums.
What to Look For Before Choosing an Lms
User-Friendly Interface: A Learning management system must be simple to use, understand, and troubleshoot without investing hours of training or troubleshooting to make it run effectively.
Busy educators don’t have time to learn complex new ways to deliver their instructional materials. If the platform isn’t convenient enough for learners, they will likely have a poor learning experience.
Key Features: Once user needs are identified, it’s time to evaluate key LMS features.
The LMS of your choosing should include all the features you require and should not have too many features you do not need.
Responsive Design: When a user logs in using a tablet or smartphone, the LMS interface automatically adjusts depending on the device. All the elements of a responsive design site, including columns, pictures, and feeds, will automatically rearrange to accommodate the learners with a seamless and comfortable transition from one device to another.
LMS Security and Reliability: One of the biggest concerns in modern history is data confidentiality and security. It is valid for both personal data and fee payments. A security breach can result in a sharp decline in popularity and confidence in your services. Learners should not be able to log into each other’s accounts, and data should be kept secured at all times.
When considering data security and reliability in an LMS, the following need to be taken under consideration:
- Data storage location
- User authentication
- Data Access Control
So, check if the vendor company employs industry-standard data protection measures and a solid commitment to consumer data rights and confidentiality.
Monitor Progress: A good Learning Management System should keep track of the student’s development as well as the courses’ performance.
Pricing / Licensing: Pricing for LMS platforms can vary from vendor to vendor. So your budget will play a vital role in the selection process. Whatever your budget, do your research and make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
Customer Support: Before making a final choice on selecting an LMS, check if the LMS providers offer round-the-clock support.
Choose the Right CMS Platform
A significant choice you must make is picking the right platform to build your LMS website. A CMS (content management system) allows users to build and manage a website without having to code it from scratch or without any coding knowledge at all. The CMS market is vastly competitive; however, the most popular CMS in the world is WordPress. From lower costs and an easier learning curve to a vast community of users, WordPress has it all. To better understand why WordPress reigns supreme, learn the details here.
The Right WordPress LMS Plugin for You
WordPress LMS plugins are currently very popular right now. The application itself is hosted, maintained, and regularly updated by vendors making WordPress LMS plugins some of the hassle-free and easily accessible.
Speaking of being in high demand, Tutor LMS is a powerful and feature-packed LMS plugin for WordPress. It lets you create, share and sell various courses online fast and efficiently.
Tutor LMS allows you to create engaging, challenging, interactive lessons, quizzes, and detailed reports. It also allows you powerful administrative tools and integrates the latest technologies.
To provide a better overview of Tutor LMS, I have listed the most note-worthy features below:
Intuitive Front-End Course Builder: Tutor LMS allows users to build their academic or training courses through an intuitive drag-and-drop tool. It also comes with a front-end course builder for a more user-friendly appeal, allowing instructors to create their courses without being in the backend WordPress panel. This is highly beneficial if you want your platform to have the least possible barriers to entry, as teachers or instructors don’t have to learn anything about coding or WordPress.
Reports and Analytics: Quickly run reports and get an overview of your learner’s progress. The report gives you a bird’s eye view of various LMS activities like enrollment, completion rates, performance, and earnings.
Task Assignments: Tutor LMS has an integrated assignment add-on allowing you to add assignments to your courses. Assignments are an excellent way to measure a learner’s understanding of course material and give constructive feedback.
Multiple Instructors for Courses: Tutor LMS allows you to assign multiple instructors for the same course. This is a very productive way of maintaining a high level of engagement amongst learners and making your courses resourceful.
Advanced Quiz Builder: The quiz builder in Tutor LMS offers ten unique question types and the option to randomize the question order and add short descriptions for every quiz.
Tutor LMS supports various media, automated difficulty levels, quiz attempts, set the quiz time period, and much more. You can also choose to grade assignments manually.
Drip-feed Lessons: Tutor LMS gives course creators control over the delivery of their courses. The Drip content model limits access to courses. Instead of giving admission to all content at once, Drip-Feed enables users to set up a schedule to make course content available over a specific period or only when desired prerequisites are met.
Quickly Sell Your Online Courses: Tutor LMS not only helps you create and organize your online courses; it also helps facilitate the marketing aspects of your eLearning business. Tutor LMS is designed to seamlessly integrate with other applications such as EDD, PaidMembershipPro, and WooCommerce.
Other notable features of Tutor LMS are easy revenue sharing amongst multiple stakeholders, commission allocation, money management, and uninterrupted distribution, among other things.
Gradebook: The Tutor Gradebook add-on allows you to introduce the grade point system for grading all the course work. It has many features to let you configure the grading system to your preference.
Gradebook improves student interaction by helping them know where they stand in a course and pointing out areas where they can improve to get a better grade.
Tutor LMS Pricing: As previously discussed, pricing plays a vital role in selecting an LMS platform. Tutor LMS offers multiple plans which deliver the best value for creators. This level of flexibility in pricing is scarce in the industry and enables users to select the specific plan which best suits their objective. Not to mention with the paid version, you will get access to all available add-ons without any additional cost.
Learning Management Systems are the future of education and offer both students and eLearning providers the ability to deliver and receive content that can educate them further.
However, finding the perfect LMS for you can be a time-consuming process. First, establish clear and concise goals with eLearning, and then use this article to decide the features and benefits you need.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and let me know in the comments which LMS you are currently using or are thinking of getting.