The definitive guide to Learning Management System

Ever been on shopping for the Best Learning Management System and found you returned without buying one?

Now that you are here, we assume you’re probably one of those looking for your “first” or “next” Learning Management System. Getting the best bang for your buck can be quite a challenging and confusing task. Well, that’s just the beginning. There’s so much to care for! This definitive guide for Learning Management System has everything you would want to know about LMS. Few minutes spent here is certain to help you spot on the right one that meets your fundamental requirements, without any distractions.

What is an LMS software? The Learning Management System definition in easy words.

LMS in short refers to the Learning Management System. The right way to explain is by splitting up Learning (to deliver online and offline courses efficiently) + Management (helps to organize the courses) + System (translates to a software or a computer program).

Learning Management System software is a platform that aids digital learning by allowing its users to create, manage, deliver online courses, monitor learner participation, assess performance, provide data, analytics with instant notifications.

What does an LMS do exactly?

LMS automates and delivers educational courses, training programs, or other learning and development programs.

It allows its users to create individualized eLearning content, organizes them into courses, delivers the content to a larger audience, enrolls students, and lastly, monitor, assess, and report student improvement, all from a centralized place.

Just like a Gmail or a Facebook, this user interface runs inside your browser as a web, making lives effortless for administrators, instructors, as well as students.

With a single sign up process, it lets students and instructors easily access on-the-go learning & teaching, the administrators to monitor student progress, address gaps, and make improvements.

Our blog on what is an LMS will give you more insights.

What are the types of LMS?

LMS's could be of one of the following types;

Cloud-based or On-premise

While cloud-based is hosted on off-site servers, the on-premise LMS’s are licensed products installed on the server of your choice. 

Of the two, the cloud-based is always the better choice as it comes with better security and easy-to-maintain features, start-up costs, quick set-up, automatic updates and upgrades, faster deployment, allowing educational institutions and corporations to better educate and train their students and employees.

Integrated or standalone

While the former allows data to flow freely into any third-party integrations seamlessly for improved user experience, the standalone LMS operates independently without the use of other computer applications or hardware.

Enterprise or Mooc (Massive open online courses)

LMS and MOOC may appear to be pretty similar but differ in terms of learning location, blended learning, social integration, and customization. LMS are customized to be used in large companies with a huge list of built-in features, but the Moocs comes with limited features, cannot be claimed as a platform, they could be an element of education, but not the means to attain education.

Academic LMS or Corporate LMS

Both of these give access to learning materials online, automate custom learning and training processes, still have some differences. They have different learning goals, course timeline, certification & grades, tools for social learning, content updates, different data backup options, etc.

Reasons why higher education institutions look for an LMS?

A recent survey report shows you the incredible jump higher education institutions and K-12 have taken towards the LMS recently. 

What could be the reasons? We managed to churn out a few here.

Reason #1.

The functionality of incorporating blended learning approaches. 

Reason #2.

Reliability during unforeseen situations.

Reason #3.

Consistent content delivery, feedback with room for improvement. 

Reason #4.

Promotes an organized eLearning environment with access to learning materials, anytime, anywhere. 

Reason #5.

Time-saving for all the stakeholders involved.

Reason #6.

Easy to implement and less training required

Reason #7.

Triggers better student-teacher involvement with a collaborative effort.

Reason #8.

Gives a complete learning experience in virtual space.

Who uses LMS in educational institutions?

Education is no more the same now. There is a massive upturn of events with the study from home initiatives. Most LMS’s are used to augment course delivery options and to better attract student numbers. There’s so much it does to all stakeholders including Coordinators, Students, and Faculties.

For Coordinators

• Saves a lot of time, resources, and cuts down on the learning and development costs to meet the changing needs of modern learners. 

For Learners

• Helps curate a personalized learning path and provide equal opportunities for everyone.
• Boosts the morale of the students by building up their self-esteem with lots of collaborative components with their peers

For Faculties

• Offers multiple collaborative and communication tools for applying various learning models in a wide range of digital formats. 
• Allows faculty to indulge in various pedagogical experiments and innovations including blended learning, flipped learning, rapid learning, social learning, gamification, etc

Elearning being the future of learning now, LMS will continue to be a part of the general education offering now. It is through an LMS, instructors try to create and integrate course materials, spell out objectives and learning goals, align goals, conduct personalized assessments, track progress, and address gaps.

What are the features of an LMS?

Learning Management Systems could be extremely functional, yet overcomplicated. From the plethora of options available in the market, it could be challenging to pick the right LMS that best suits you. However, we remember the promise we made you earlier that we could help you get the right now.

Investing in the right LMS provider can happen only after analyzing its features, in and out! Such an instance could bring a win-win situation to you and your institution, on the whole. Rather if you were to take it as an easy task and delve into it with no proper research, then, mark us, you could land yourself in a hot soup.

Here’s one more piece of advice. Before deciding on a specific LMS solution, list out your institution’s goals including safety certification updates, regulatory compliance, internal extended learning opportunities, etc. This way, you could arrive at the best LMS solution that best fits your needs.

However, on a larger scale, there are 15 definitive features that one ought to consider before making a purchase decision.

What are the benefits of an LMS?

Let’s cut it short! The benefits of using LMS for education has been proved time and again. They are huge. We have summed up the main ones here.

Creates a centralized learning hub

The significance of an LMS system is that it houses all learning contents in a single place, which makes it beneficial for learners and instructors. One can go back and come to it anytime!

Creates personalized learning for all kinds of learners

It is proven that when learners are exposed to having control over their learning in terms of time and direction, they get motivated to learn further. Most LMSs offer this benefit of personalizing content by providing its learners with engaging learning programs that they most deserve. Most LMSs come with personalized dashboards that provide greater insights about the learner’s progress.

Matchless learner experience

Students take charge of their learning with interactive playback options for recording past sessions—they could pause, rewind, or fast-forward lessons, and provide comments to topics.

Non-stop on-the-go learning for students

Students interact and engage with their classmates/batches and access material the way they could do in their classroom, from their favorite device, virtually, across geographic boundaries.

Faculty reach out from anywhere

The Faculty provides complete virtual support with collaborative learning tools, flipped classroom, and video conferencing for Gen Z’s from wherever they are.

Access to learning content, digitally

The learning management system makes digital course content and learning materials more accessible to all its stakeholders. Instructors could create & manage course contents with videos/files, delivers material to students, assigns tasks, and administer them, track progress, & manage record-keeping. There’s complete transparency in lesson planning, tracking course activities, schedules, and grade settings, all in one place.

Collaborative and engagement tools for ultra learning experiences

LMSs offer a range of collaborative tools for rich content in use, video uploads, application/desktop sharing, and other tools for interactivity. They support on-demand and pre-planned sessions with a mix of course delivery tools, multi-point video, digital whiteboard tools, application & desktop sharing, that allows the institution to deliver an ultra learning experience.

Powerful reporting tools for better progress

Recent LMSs allow its users to track a host of activities to make informed decisions using different real-time reports, data, and analytics. All these could be shared across a single click for greater insights.

What is the future of LMS?

The future that’s standing before us is more demanding. With globalization, there is increased mobility of students and programs, across boundaries. There are massive reforms in the educational system with better utilization of technology, emphasizing research, and development activities. The recent release of the National Education Policy 2020 testifies this.

In such a scenario, education institutions are working toward digital transformation to enhance learning. Unlike the past when institutions were traditionally closed with controlled learning access, now both faculty and students are enjoying the blended form of learning.

With LMS there has now come a promise for students. The adaptive learning and the collaborative learning environment that the LMS creates can foster positive outcomes in both students and teachers. The future of the LMS should hence

• create an active learning environment
• promote seamless collaboration like never before
• provide endless possibilities with the state-of-the-art learning platform
• align with institutional goals
• be AI-powered with built-in analytics
• support Gamification
• be compliant with Bloom’s Taxonomy & outcome-focused
• possess LMS chatbot features

What is blended learning?

Blended Learning (BL) or hybrid learning with the flexibility to execute both online and offline classes is the choice of the time. BL is a mix of both in-person lessons and distance learning; with it, students can switch between the two at any time due to the impending COVID situation.

It is, in other words, a technology-assisted classroom, where students become independent learners, learn effectively by submitting assignments, participating in quizzes, and assessments digitally. Their real-time progress is powerfully tracked and reported for further improvement measures. There’s everything that blended learning has in it to support continuous learning.

How are students assessed in a Learning Management System?

Assessments are a unique part of an LMS, unexpectedly, the most overlooked segment by most software systems. It is through Assessments that students are allowed to judge the performance. LMS offers many ways of conducting assessments—both online assessments & offline assessments, pre-tests & post-tests.

It could sometime take the shape of online quizzes, MCQs, long papers, articles, etc. Faculty could easily build assessments and assignments through simple steps using an LMS.

After every session, students are made to take up predefined online assessments, or simple quizzes to estimate their knowledge about the day’s session. With threshold values set to them, these assessments help to track student progress to the next level.

On completion, students are instantly evaluated, followed by results publishing.  This way there are chances for students to review, redo, and get staff feedback immediately.

Based on the mapping of learning outcomes, the system would then be able to tell you their attainment levels, individually. There are several other flexible testing and assessment features, including on-screen evaluation or the automatic marking and manual marking, tracking and storing of complete student assessment portfolios, etc.

The AI-infused elements in the online learning platform give real-time insights about students’ exact learning status. One gets to know the learners’ current, past, and future course progresses, along with the tasks due, in a single click. Besides, there is learning and weblog analytics that provide additional insight into learner’s time spent during online learning.

How to choose the best LMS for your college or university?

Higher Education Institutions requirement might differ when it comes to choosing LMS. Therefore before making a purchase, here are few factors to consider to understand which LMS system will be ideal for your domain.

Consider these factors before making an LMS choice.

1. Define your Learning & Development strategy to start with

Questions that need to be pondered here are, what are your core L&D objectives and aims? What are the features that they would like to see in the new LMS? Will the learners use mobile devices to access the information, which needs you to pick an LMS platform the supports mobile learning platform. Would you need the LMS to be integrated with your current technologies or software?

All this will help you arrive at what you would want to accomplish with your LMS and how it could help you attain your goals and objectives.

2. Does the LMS have all the essential features your institution needs?

With tons of LMSs in the market with many fancy features, pin down to the ones that you need the most for greater ROI and rule out the rest. If yours is a higher education institute, then your’s should be mobile-friendly, should come with a content reusability option, customer support 24/7 personalized learning, self-directed learning, gamification, social learning, and micro-learning is a “must” for you. Think!!

3. Choose an experienced vendor with a proven track record

LMS implementation applies a lot of time, effort, and resources. Hence, colleges and universities should choose an experienced vendor who can support you in the long term. Questions that can be asked can be, how long have you been in the business, especially in the LMS space? Do they have any worthy customers who could give substantial feedback about their experience with the vendor? Do they have a business model and a record of supporting a broad customer base?

4. Look for stability and security. Is it mobile-ready?

The technology that you choose should meet the demands of increasing mobile users. Raise questions like,

Does the LMS provider benefit all modern capabilities? Is it built on a stable platform, and does it support the privacy and security of information? Is there an option to deploy LMS in any which ways, including Cloud? How is the scalability of the technology? Is it flexible to meet the needs of now and the future? Does it have a responsive design that gives a seamless experience for users, regardless of the device they log in?

5. Consider the LMS’s feature and capabilities

We all know that today’s LMS is a finished product of what was developed over the previous years. It is much advanced with modern capabilities including creating contents and dispatching grades/assignments besides being an effective collaborative tool that maximizes student engagement. While referring to feature sets, you need to be mindful of the following;

Does the LMS solution offer enough collaboration tools to allow students to participate in discussions and activities, even out of the classroom? Does is vouch a safe and secured browser-based conferencing for tutoring? What about whiteboard applications to annotate the content, easy-to-use chats, and discussion boards?

Learning Analytics: Analytics that allows students to be on control of their learning is a must. Does the LMS solution provide timely reliable, actionable data about the student’s performance? What about the rich learning analytics that allows slide and dice of data? Does it help improve at-risk students with both predefined and customizable features? Does the system support automated alerts and notifications?

Flipped learning: Does the solution offer tools to record sessions and share later through mobile? Recently this has proven to be of great benefit with both students and facilitators recording lectures for later use.

6. Bang on a system that is simple and easy to use

The biggest hit of an LMS is the appeal it creates among both novice and expert users. These questions will guide you find an LMS that’s simple to use. How well the system supports faculty in accomplishing their everyday tasks? How intuitive is it to create, post assignments/assessments, share feedback, set up discussions? Does it require a lengthy training for stakeholders to understand the flow? Does the LMS system offer contextual actionable insights for individual users? Is it user-centric, giving the best what the users most deserve?

7. Look beyond when it comes to cost - the best system doesn’t come for free

Here is a tip-off to campus leaders while making the LMS decision. Never overlook the cost over time, while focusing on the up-front cost of an LMS. Questions that are worth pondering are; Is the vendor trying to hide any hidden costs from you, which might include integration, training, etc? Are you guaranteed a maximum cost increase from year to year? This is because some providers explicitly quote only the first-year price, which only forces institutions to opt-out the next year.

8. Does the system support third-party Integration?

Campus operations will get easy if the LMS you choose supports integration with your existing ERP or other third-party software. Questions to consider here; Does the integration extend to all features, negating none? Do the LMS favor LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) Framework and other industry standards? Are there any add-ons, extensions, other software programs that the system has developed for the LMS? Is it extensible with third-party tools or home-grown solutions?

9. Steadfast support and services is a must

The amount of support you receive from the software provider should be a key factor while making a decision. Choose a provider that backs you up at the right time when you need them the most. Ponder over these questions while judging on services and support: Does the support promised extends to end-users as well as system admins? What are the means of support offered—phone, chatbot, etc? Does the provider offer staff training? Do this training cost extra?

10. Do not ignore stakeholder perspectives

If you are switching over from a legacy LMS, our advice is to select a handful of LMSs based on the above considerations. The next thing would be to involve faculty, students, program directors, admissions committee, deans, members of the Information Technology to evaluate the learning management systems. Get their opinion on how difficult it would be for them to adapt to the new system. This would help you get buy-in from the stakeholders, which helps in easier adoption.

11. “Try out” various solutions

The best way to know how good the LMS works is to see how it functions. Some providers provide a pilot run for 3-6 months, involving few courses and a set of students. This will help narrow down to the system of your choice.

Conclusion

At Creatrix Campus we keep constantly exploring the technology-enhanced academic deliverance through customized Learning Management System (LMS) that conforms to the needs of educators.

Our LMS is a contemporary, versatile, customizable, mobile-friendly, time saving, and easy-to-use companion that makes the learning and teaching route clear.  The more engaging way it is designed makes it effortless to attain your educational objectives. Creatrix Campus comes with future-ready features that boost content creation, builds a collaborative environment, increases self-learning with pre-defined assessment elements, and outcome-focused.

Deploying Creatrix LMS in your institution will surely make you future-ready and prep you up to battle those unpredictable times like the one we are in right now. Our team would be happy to take you into an in-depth product tour. Contact us for a demo now.