Why Use an LMS?
Hi, I’m Damian from Capytech. I thought it’d be valuable to run through some reasons why you might use an LMS, a learning management system.
Now, some organizations are doing a lot of training. They don’t have platform to manage this, a learning platform. Some organizations have LMS kind of thrusted upon them from like an SAP or Oracle included within that. I thought it would be valuable to go through five reasons why you might use a learning management system in LMS.
Let’s get started. First of all, it gives you the ability to centralize learning. So rather than individuals going to a variety of different tools or directories, folders and so on, or individuals looking for their learning and their training, then you’ve got a central, I guess, area of truth and that can be your LMS. People can come to one resource, they know where to get it, it’s available on their home screen and so on, mobile applications and so forth.They know the exactly where to get any resources that they might need for any training. And this will go into more of how you manage the training too, you can enroll people and whatnot. Giving you a centralized area of truth for all your organizational learning would be the first point.
The second, and this is key for any HR or L&D professionals, is monitoring and tracking. Now if you’ve got an organization of any real scale, then pretty quickly you’re going to be overrun with the need to track who’s completed what training and when, probably through ever more complicated spreadsheets and so on. And that just doesn’t really scale particularly well. If you are spending a lot of time generating reports, trying to understand exactly where your organization is when it comes to compliance, perhaps onboarding as well, then an LMS can really save you a lot of time and a lot of headache and perhaps automate a lot of the processes that you are doing now manually as well.
This is probably actually the top reason for many L&D and HR professional to want an LMS, because really it saves them some headache. It gives the ability for flexible learning. And I often like to think about this when it comes to onboarding. As part of an onboarding program, often a lot of organisations are doing that in a classroom, which is great. Often that means that some individuals are doing the same presentation every week.
That can be a bit mind numbing. It can allow a lot more flexibility, both for the learner to go through content as well as the individuals to deliver materials that perhaps repeat themselves on a more flexible platform. People can come onto the system at a time that suits them. They don’t need to go to a specific location. They can access the learning at a time that suitable for them and they can go through it at their own pace as well that’s very important.
In a classroom, you’re often driven by the, I guess, the slowest individual or those that lowest amount of familiarity with the content. You need to pitch it at that audience with the delivering it on LMS and using e-learning. People can go through the materials once they go through very quickly if they’re very familiar, or they can go through it many times if they so wish. Another key element for an LMS, and this is when often organizations start looking for one, is when they need scale. This is very common when it comes to, for instance, compliance. In compliance programs, you might need to roll out a new compliance regulation to your organization, perhaps thousands of staff, and know that they’ve done it, but know that they’ve passed the test and do that relatively quickly.
And LMS allows you to do that, rather than needing to bring people into a classroom or send them a document and have some, I guess, hope that they’ve read it and gone through, an LMS will give you a much greater level of comfort that they have understood what you’ve sent them. You can don this for e-learning through assessments through scenarios and so forth. You can send that out to ten people or 1000 people, usually with on click of a button.
And what I mentioned before with the monitoring and tracking, you can very quickly generate reports to know who’s done it, when they need to do it again, who hasn’t done it, and so forth. And the other areal I’ll cover here is, I guess, greater capability. What I mean by that is I don’t think that we’ll ever fully replace classroom with alert management system or e-learning, or eve our great metaverse solutions. They will always, always be a place for that I say that as a instructor myself. There are certain elements that you can gather or gain by using LMS. And I’ll just focus on two areas.
First will be on Social Learning. What I mean by that is on an LMS you have forums, you can have chats and so on, so where individuals can obviously meet each other online if they’re perhaps in different locations. They can also ask questions to the facilitators, the subject matter experts and each other about content what that means is that someone can ask question, someone another student could answer that question and then the facilitator is just reinforcing it or guiding the discussion.
Social Learning is an exceptionally powerful wait to increase the learning outcomes. Getting people involve with that learning, getting them answering questions and so forth is incredibly powerful. The other area is Gamification. Often people think gamification, they’re thinking actual games. Well, typically for an adult audience, that’s not what we’re looking at most of the time. We’re looking at things like leaderboards, points, badges, level, these kinds of elements. This can really encourage people to, I guess, to compete as gamification is there, but get acknowledgements of what they’ve what they’ve learned, what they’ve participated in, and gain value from that.
Gamification can be really, really a strong way, a powerful way to motivate learners to complete programs. I always say the best gamification capabilities are those where you’ve got some kind of incentive at the end. Your top learner for the month might receive a gift voucher or get some kind of recognition of that they’ve learned, what they’ve accomplished.
The best gamification not just puts people competing against each other and allows them to excel, but also rewards them for those efforts as well. After all of this, do you want or need an LMS? The answer is not always straightforward. If you feel like you’re spending too much time doing paperwork or spreadsheets, if you don’t feel like you have a good grip of the compliance levels or you don’t have a very robust onboarding system, then perhaps the answer is yes.
So if you’re interested in learning more about the Capytech Learning Management System, then of course, feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to discuss this with. Thank you.
