As a business owner, it’s your job to ensure that your team members possess the necessary skills to move your company in the right direction. The easiest way to achieve this feat is by making continuous learning a part of your work culture.

Although there are many ways to make employees learn new things, all leading organizations and most innovative startups follow eLearning. It gives users the flexibility to learn as per their convenience, and to you, the freedom to track their progress without making them feel nervous.

You can opt for an e learning portal to get the desired outcomes in a smooth and clutter-free way.

What Is An eLearning Portal?

As the name suggests, an elearning portal is a unique platform through which learners can access various resources, training modules, and digital instruments to enhance their knowledge and become better at what they do. Like any other website, it stores and offers learning material, such as videos, podcasts, text documents, presentations, etc.

Unlike standard training platforms, a learning portal enables learners to access various digital data resources, engage in discussions, ask doubts, write emails, access calendars, and do many other tasks without facing any problem.

In short, an e learning portal facilitates formal & informal training and promotes collaborative learning in a corporate setup.

What Makes A Good eLearning Portal?

A good learning portal is learner-centric and puts learners in control of what they want to learn and how they want to do it. Besides, it facilitates collaborative learning where users can share their ideas and discuss doubts in a friendly environment.

If your goal is to strike a perfect balance between formal and informal training or promote competitiveness among employees in a fun way, then implement a learner portal as soon as possible.

However, given the wide range of options available in the market, you may get confused while selecting the one for your organization. A wrong pick can cost you a lot of money and delay the time your employees need to improve their skills. So, be careful whenever you decide to choose an elearning portal.

In this guide, we have shared seven crucial tips that can help you in this regard. Keep them in mind to make this job easy and error-free.

eLearning Portal Vs. LMS Vs. CBT

Learning portals are knowledge repositories used to integrate an ongoing learning culture in an organization. They can be different from an LMS or CBT or co-exist with them depending on your organizational goals and the learning mechanism you follow. In any case, refer to the next few paragraphs to know what separates a learning portal from LMS and CBT.

A learning management system (LMS) is designed to help an organization’s senior management team create an eLearning course, share the same with new candidates, and assess their performance based on various pre-determined factors.

From onboarding new employees to helping customers learn new concepts, it takes care of an end-to-end eLearning process in a corporate setup.

On the other hand, a learning portal is all about facilitating learners with different content types, such as podcasts, videos, text material, images, etc. in a collaborative and friendly environment. It enables them to learn new concepts, ask doubts from senior team members, and have meaningful conversations with their colleagues.

In short, an elearning portal promotes ongoing learning culture in an organization by offering a hassle-free experience to learners. In contrast, an LMS is used to manage a wide array of eLearning goals by businesses selling digital courses.

The difference between these two may not be that huge, but it exists nonetheless, and you should be aware of it.

It’s comparatively easy to differentiate between a learning portal and a CBT (computer-based training). A learning portal can be accessed through desktops, laptops, smartphones, or tablets easily, whereas the CBT focuses only on delivering training through a computer.

It may be a cost-effective solution for some organizations but cannot match the diversity and flexibility of an elearning portal.

Depending on what eLearning goals you have in mind, choose an appropriate option to get the best long-term results.

Users & Course Limit

A good learning portal should have enough bandwidth to offer a unique learning experience to your employees. So, whenever you decide to pick an elearning portal for your company, get clarity about its users and course limit.

If you think the maximum number of users or courses allowed in a portal isn’t enough (rare these days), you can always go for higher bandwidth for a hassle-free experience. Talk to your vendor before selecting a plan and go for the one that meets your criteria.

Pricing of eLearning Portal

Implementing an elearning portal is a major financial decision for any organization regardless of its size and annual revenue. So, it’s better to think carefully about the long term impact this decision will have on your business and if the investment you are about to make will help you shape up your company’s learning culture.

Based on your requirements, choose an eLearning portal that fits within your budget and has the potential to serve the purpose for the next many years.

Features & Integrations

Just because an eLearning portal has dozens of features and can integrate many different platforms doesn’t mean you need all of them. Be clear with what you want to achieve by implementing a new learning portal in your organizations, and opt for those features and integrations essential for it.

Following this approach will make your job easy and save you a considerable amount of money in the long run.

Flexibility & Customization

There is no point in going for an eLearning portal that does not offer enough flexibility and customization. You need to be very careful with these two aspects as they directly impact how conveniently your employees can use it daily.

Flexibility means how comfortably you can use an e learning portal across multiple devices and access content in different formats like audio, video, and texts as per your requirements. Customization means if it allows learners to modify certain features to improve their experience.

Based on what your learners wish to have in a learning portal and how they want to use it, look for an option that can live up to their expectations.

Mobile Friendly

Many candidates prefer to access learning portals via mobile. It allows them to continue learning after work or during the weekend without sitting in front of a computer screen for hours. You can’t expect them to have a perfect experience if your learning portal that doesn’t work correctly on smartphones.

So, test its mobile compatibility well in advance and go for the one that offers multi-device support.

User Friendly For Learners

Eventually, it all comes down to how user-friendly an e learning portal is. If you are committed to changing how your employees learn and use those learnings to grow your business, then look for a learning portal that can live up to their expectations. The best way is to try it out yourself and see how you feel as a learner.

If possible, involve a few other beta testers in this exercise to take their feedback about its ease of use and user-friendliness.

These are the top seven tips for choosing the right eLearning portal for your organization. Pay close heed to them to be able to pick the right option.

If you still need any assistance in choosing the right learning portal, head straight to our demo page and request a free trial to learn more about how the Academy of Mine can help you with your eLearning requirements.