What Does LMS Mean for Employees: 15 Critical Tips Explained

Online learning or e-learning is the fastest-growing market in the learning and training sector. According to market research by Arizton, the global e-learning market will reach revenues of over $345 Billion during the period 2020-2025 (Source: Arizton, April 2020). E-learning uses information and communication as a learning mode and delivers electronically, using databases and LMSs. But what does LMS mean? Why should we use an LMS? In this blog, we will speak about all this and more.

What does LMS mean?

LMS means Learning Management System. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software-based application or web-based technology that helps you automate employee training. Learning Management Systems take all traditional teaching and learning-related processes into the online world. An LMS can gather all the learning materials in one place and make them available to all learners all over the world in just one click. You can create a different group of learners according to their function or job position. An LMS also helps you to easily track each learner’s progress.

Who needs an LMS?

A wide range of different organizations, from learning institutions to large corporations, can benefit from using a Learning Management System by reducing expenses for things like transport and accommodations of the training instructors and participants, instructors’ salaries, and learning materials. A well-aligned LMS helps organizations to save time and money, overcome learning goals, set a structured learning environment, and assess and develop employees’ knowledge regularly. Therefore, organizations that need to improve the learning and development environment require a Learning Management System.

How to select the right Learning Management System (LMS)?

A Learning Management System empowers learning and development (L&D) programs with training and development for the learners, so they can continue an organization’s growth and success and ultimately drive revenue. To really achieve these, a Learning Management System (LMS) needs to be an intelligent and modern solution. Here are a few features that an LMS should include:

Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI-based LMS helps to personalize the learning for each learner by offering individualized courses and suggesting courses with topics relevant to those already completed. AI-based LMS begins to understand the learner’s preferences and sets them on the right path. Personalized learning paths make the journey easier for the learners.
Intuitive user interface: A learning journey should be easy to follow and facilitates a cohesive flow between dashboards and course objectives. This user-friendly nature results in spending less time learning how to use an LMS and more time learning how to advance your career.
Multi-domain: Build different platforms to suit the users by assigning customized elements for each subdomain, including custom branding, from a central location.
Accessibility: An LMS should follow the e-learning standards. It develops learning content that creates the best learning environment for everyone.
Platform consolidation: An LMS should manage different platforms and multiple systems for different uses. Using one single LMS saves time, money, and unnecessary hassle for its users.
Social learning: An LMS must support informal training activities to encourage idea sharing and replicate the success of others. An LMS should include features that encourage collaboration, discussion forums, peer mentorship, and knowledge curation.
Globalization: Learning must happen and be accessible everywhere for all learners. Therefore, it is important to have an LMS that is equipped with broad language localizations, domain management, and global payment gateways for e-commerce.
Integrations: An LMS allows for third-party integrations and plugins with other platforms, such as your Salesforce CRM, video conferencing tools, and so on. For example, Moodle Learning Management System supports integrations. LMS Moodle can integrate with some of the premium software portals seamlessly, like Webex, Adobe Connect, CMSs like WordPress and SharePoint, CRMs like Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, e-commerce portals like Shopify, and collaborative tools like OneDrive and Dropbox. Moodle Learning Management System can be integrated with an endless variety of programs and software to meet the customized needs of the learning and training department.
Gamification: It increases the learner’s engagement by allowing learners to achieve points, badges, awards, etc., in all learning activities.
Microlearning: Providing easily accessible learning content helps to better accommodate short learner attention spans and encourages learning at the point of need. An LMS should provide an opportunity for microlearning.
Mobile learning: Learning content should be accessible anytime, anywhere, regardless of device. LMSs should allow content to be accessed on mobile devices to better enable learning at the point of need.
Content integration: LMSs should support learning content packaged according to interoperable standards such as SCORM, AICC, and xAPI.
Course management: An automated LMS will enable course management where the users can create courses, assign them, send notifications, change layouts, upload, and manage course material, bulk enroll users, configure advanced course settings, and filter courses, channels, and learning plans. It should also allow for the tracking and management of all certification and retraining activities. A Learning Management System should hold all e-learning courses and course content, where users can create and manage courses and course catalogs to deliver more effective learning.
Content Creation: This allows learning and development users and learners to access, browse and purchase courses from content providers within the learning platform. An LMS should allow this as well.
Reporting: An LMS must include the ability to track and measure the impact that the learning programs are having on the organization. An LMS should allow you to derive learning insights through customizable reports and dashboards that provide metrics on learner activity.

Benefits of using an LMS

A Learning Management System gives its users the ability to track the improvement of learners in the course material. It creates interactive courses for your learners in a safe, accessible, and highly engaging online space. It has the following benefits.

Convenient to use: A Learning Management System lets you store all the content in one place, reduces the risk of losing data, and even makes organizing the content very easy. Each e-learning management team member, instructional designer, or another user can then access information, data, or anything else through the cloud storage system anytime.
Easy to access material: Once you upload your material on the LMS, it will become available to all users all the time. It is easy for learners to get courses from anywhere and in a timely manner and use any mobile device or intelligent possession.
Easy to track the learning journey: An LMS gives you the ability to track the progress of learners in the course material. More precisely, one can track their understanding of the material, measure their interaction with the content provided, see if it meets all their needs, or be enhanced with some text, audio, and video files to enrich it.
Cost-effective: A Learning Management System (LMS) provides much mobility to attend lectures since the actual presence of the facilitators and learners can be avoided at the same time. It reduces the cost of learning and training development.
Reduce the duration of training: An LMS allows direct access to learning content that the learner has not yet been able to learn. A system of evaluations enables the learner to be able to confirm that some units, sections, or parts can be exempted from the subsequent study.
Easy to update materials: If the facilitators/ instructors want to add, delete, or update online modules for an electronic learning course, they can simply access the Learning Management System and make the necessary adjustments, which is easy and cheap, unlike traditional paper courses and programs.
Promotes social learning experiences: A Learning Management System lets you integrate the social learning experience into your e-learning course, which makes it useful to learners. You can also market the e-learning course on social networking sites and educational websites to attract more learners.

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What does LMS mean

Conclusion

Due to the abovementioned reasons, any kind of business can benefit from an LMS. An LMS gives access to learning materials anywhere, from any device, and an unlimited number of times to refresh knowledge anytime they need to. As well as provides an opportunity to collaborate with each other during the learning process.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)