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Learning as we know it is undergoing a sea of change. Education institutions and Corporates both share the need to keep updating their learning and training tools to keep abreast with the tech savvy millennial learners. Nowadays, the process of learning has transitioned from the classroom to the online/virtual space, colleges and companies alike have started making use of online learning platforms in India to conduct effective training sessions.
Cloud-based Learning Management Systems are replacing traditional classroom-based training at an increasingly rapid pace. LMS features and tools are improving learning outcomes across the board while helping cut the cost of providing high quality education and training.
If you’re curious about e-learning or have started exploring the space, then you’ve probably heard about Learning Management Systems (LMSs). This is primarily due to the fact that LMSs are one of the essential tools of e-learning, upon which all online courses and training modules are built. In fact, research suggests that around 98% of businesses plan to meet their learning requirements with the help of LMSs.
Before moving on to how LMSs are beneficial for organisations, let’s understand what exactly are LMSs.
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What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?
In simple words, a Learning Management System or LMS is a software that helps in producing, organising, and distributing online courses. It takes care of all aspects of e-learning such as registration of learners, submitting assignments, evaluating and grading them, and tracking the progress of individual students. They can be built on various platforms such as PHP and Java and they are linked to a database such as MySQL or SQL Server.
Benefits of Using a Learning Management System (LMS)
There are several benefits of Learning Management Systems or LMSs. Here is an exploration of the role of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and how they can benefit any organisation. LMSs are an essential part of the e-learning design & development process, particularly if you have a great audience and a great deal of subject matter to deliver. If you’re still undecided about whether an LMS is right for you, here are just a few of the reasons why you should get an LMS for your organisation now.
Centralised Learning
LMS helps bring all types of learning content, resource, and material in one place. In the traditional learning approach, it’s common to have all your data scattered across various systems and hard drives. One of the advantages of LMSs is that they help you to organise your content better by keeping them in a single location. There are several advantages to this. This greatly helps organisations in preventing loss of data since all of it is stored in one location and can be accessed at all times. It works well for organisations which have several branches around the world. Having all the training data in one place makes it easier for them to review various programs and their progress. Moreover, it also helps ensure a certain consistency in distributing learning since everyone gets equal access to all materials and can be evaluated through common tests. It also becomes easy to update and modify the existing content. It helps in saving the time, money, and efforts of organisations.
Easy Access
LMS software is taken up by most corporate companies because learners can gain access to the eLearning tools anywhere and at any time. It depends on whatever is convenient for the trainee so that it does not hamper their role as working professionals.LMSs help make the course content available and accessible from anywhere at any time. All you need to do is upload the content on the LMS software and publish it and it’ll be accessible to all learners out there. The learners will be able to access it from anywhere and at any point in time. This is helpful since different people have different schedules. Having the entire course content accessible online ensures that learners can choose to learn whenever it’s convenient for them. Considering that most learners use smartphones, it’s possible to login to LMSs on the go from your mobile, tablet, or any other device. The easy accessibility to content is ideal when your aim is to reach global audiences who function in different time zones. LMSs ensure that everyone gets equal access to content wherever they are and whenever they want.
Easy Tracking
Top Learning Management Systems feature the ability to track data that is related to the trainees progress and efforts. This includes the time spent on the software, completion of assigned tasks, and progress on the learning paths. In traditional learning, it was not easy to create a unified learning path due to the different geographical location of learners, travel time to attend training and availability of experts. LMSs help solve that since it’s easy to track the progress of learners and ensure that specific milestones are met. The system is built in such a way where you can create specific learning paths, set desired targets or deadlines, track the progress of learners against those learning paths, review successful meeting of targets and deadlines. This also helps in devising learning strategies to meet the needs of individual learners and facilitating them to meet their targets easily. Trainers benefit from these insightful tools because it puts them in a better position where they can identify any problem areas of each employee and work towards fixing them while improving the students’ performance. This will help maximize the training output and increase employee motivation as well. For example, if you find one learner a little behind schedule, you can support them with additional training materials to help them pick up. Or if you find many learners learning struggling with a certain part of the course, then you may modify and update that part or add more resources to that section. It also enables automatic generation of learning reports and it issues completion certificates as well giving learners a sense of gratification.
Reduced Training Time
In the traditional learning approach, conducting training was a cumbersome process since it involved huge amounts of travel and setup time to bring learners from across the world in one place. When it comes to LMSs, much of the online training time is saved since learners can access the content directly at one location without having to travel anywhere. Instead of having to attend long training sessions in a different location, LMSs make the content available online so that it’s just a login away to users. It also makes consuming different types of content such as videos, presentations, interactive situations and simulations possible in a single place. Moreover, the time taken to evaluate the performance of various learners is also saved since they can be easily graded online.This is useful for trainers and trainees because it makes assigning tasks, grading, reporting, and feedback, quite simple. Also, everything is automated so it saves valuable time that can be used for completing other company tasks. When you receive instant results and feedback it helps expedite the learning process and nudge trainees in the right direction in terms of their career path.
Reduced Training Cost
It was not only time that was wasted in the traditional learning system but cost as well. Training people from diverse geographical locations meant huge travel costs, cost of renting out training site, and printing course materials. LMSs help save a major portion of your training budget by making everything available online. For example, in the erstwhile learning system, you’d have had to print training manuals, book a hotel room for the trainer, and rent out a conference room for the training. In the case of LMS, you can easily do away with all of these overheads and just invest in the software which will take care of everything else.
Compliance
The rules and regulations in any industry change over a period of time. It’s important for organisations thus to be updated about these changes and ensure that they are compliant to them. LMSs can be an effective tool in this. Compliance rules change frequently, so the training courses should also reflect that. In a traditional learning setup, changing course materials can seem like a painstaking task since it’ll mean reprinting all manuals again and conducting fresh training sessions. In the case of LMS, updating your content to meet the compliance standards doesn’t take a lot of time and is pretty easy. It’s easy to upload the training materials on the latest regulations and distribute them to your employees. In this way, you can ensure that all your employees are updated about the latest regulations. This is also a great way to update your employees on company policies too. From a company point of view, this will help you to boost employee satisfaction and reduce employee churn rates.
Convenient
With most learners being tech-savvy nowadays, sticking to traditional learning methods is going to lead to lesser retention rate. LMSs provide and simple and easy learning process with methods, approaches, and mediums that learners are comfortable in. For example, most learners today won’t be comfortable spending hours attending an instructor-led training session in a classroom. They may well be more comfortable with a self paced online course scheduled to suit their working hours. LMS training systems by virtue of their accessibility help in creating a comfortable learning experience. It’s an effective alternative approach to learning and training.
Social Learning
The world today has gone global and social. So have the learners. You can fulfil your organisational training needs by creating an interactive social learning experience. LMSs give you the opportunity to integrate your social media channels such as Facebook Pages and LinkedIn Groups into these cloud-based e-learning platforms. You can even integrate online forums in the system. This not only creates an effective site for collaboration among peers but also creates a wide community of learners all over the world. The social media space can also be a great platform to share your training programs which will help you to expand your orbit and reach out to more potential learners.
Personalization
This is one of the most sought after features of eLearning and is the main reason online training is preferred over traditional training methods. By studying each learner’s needs, the software tool can cater to the needs of each student. LMS providers in India have also started providing options to localize the content in regional languages to improve the efficacy of training material. Another major benefit is that trainers can host various formats of content from video content to audiobooks and infographics to ensure that even learners who don’t fare well with text content don’t have problems in understanding the gist of the training.
Innovation
Unlike traditional training methods where the teacher has to follow a fixed training methodology, online learning platforms in India have evolved to catalyze innovative training methods. Trainers can choose to create interactive, gamified content, quizzes, pop tests and more on LMS platforms. They can also ask learners to create user generated content, run contests, create leaderboards and more to help improve engagement with the content.
Customization
Trainers can customize LMS software to set up features such as reminders, notifications, restrictions, authentication, and so on when setting up a training session with employees. They can also personalize LMS software with company branding and colour scheme, especially in the case of on premise implementations in large MNCs.
Collaborative learning
The collaborative features of eLearning platforms such as live chats, social integrations and messageboards help trainers and employees to connect with peers for learning, sharing new opinions, and collaborating on various assignments. This encourages a sense of democracy in the learning process rather than a one way street from trainer to trainee.
Choosing your LMS provider
Today, LMS software is offering up an unmatched learning experience for learners across diverse industries. From an organisational point of view, it helps you create effective training content that matches specific learner’s needs as well as help them meet the company training objectives with ease.
Our LMS software will give you the power to create, manage, deliver, and track courses online, effortlessly. It’s been consistently ranked as one of the best cloud-based learning management systems in the market due to its intuitive interface and expansive set of prebuilt tools and features that help simplify your training process.