According to the book, Digital Transformation and Innovative Services for Business and Learning, edited by Kamaljeet Sandhu, digital learning management software has the potential to improve the work and education quality in all industries, being an inevitable part of digital transformation. It’s especially relevant for developing countries, where such transformation boosts economic growth and increases living standards each year, providing millions of people with work.
Each online learning platform is different. CleverLMS, for example, is a highly customizable option, shaped to motivate employees. Other ones may be more complex, but less customizable as well, or even free and open-source, with limited support and thousands of community-made plugins. We’ll explore this variety.
But first, the introduction.
A quick intro to the e-learning platform deployment
We start by evaluating the pain points targeted by the learning management platform and therefore see how to choose the one based on these pain points. That means, before making any decision, you should explore your company’s workflows to understand how your company works, so your LMS will just automatize and optimize everything here.
According to the analysis by Angela Siew-Hoong Lee & Don Passey, there is a need for personalized support in companies, oriented to learners’ personalities, to motivate them to be curious and inquire into various subjects. That’s no wonder. A growing amount of information of various kinds requires the ability to operate with it without being overwhelmed and distracted. So, strong motivation and personalized approaches to learners are essential.
But not only this. Let’s see.
What constitutes a good learning software?
Various features are required to optimize every workflow in your company without creating more mess. And there is a lot of potential for that! If your chosen platform has features you don’t need, or conversely, doesn’t have essential features for you, your information proceeding abilities will rather decline, and your efficiency will drop with that.
While a good LMS always has a good support team, they cannot help if the LMS doesn’t fit you. However, before diving deeper into the LMS peculiarities, we need to see the basic features.
Let’s see the already mentioned CleverLMS as our example. It won’t be fit for everyone, but it’s quite universal. What it can do?
🎯Motivate learners using a scoring system, and learners can use their scores to buy gifts in the corporate gift store.
💡 Has a knowledge base where everyone may upload their own materials or works.
💬 Has a communication platform for discussions, feedback, and ideation.
🚻 Personalize learners’ experiences, enabling the creation of customized courses.
📲 Enables the whole app’s customization according to your brand and objectives.
📋 Enables task and events scheduling, connecting the learning with actual work.
📈 Generates learning reports for you.
Choosing a learning management system software
That’s good, but how to be with such a wide variety of learning tools?
No wonder that making a choice may be hard when you have a saturated LMS market. They are so different, while seemingly similar, so the tempting option is to choose at random or just the cheapest one. There are free LMSs indeed, but they can lead to larger expenses actually when you experience regular crushes and inability to solve your urgent work questions.
How don’t get lost in such a variety of learning management softwares?
The first step is not to be distracted. According to Turnbull et al research, commercial providers usually make their products specifically for some area, be it a business type or an industry. That’s why choosing the right one can be defining for your success.
Now we’ll overview a list of LMS examples, so you can understand their strong and weak sides and how to manage them.
The best learning management system
LMS software has various sides, and each side must solve some specific issue arising in your company. Otherwise, you may be disappointed by your choice.
- CleverLMS is affordable, has strong motivation tools, and is very customizable, being able to solve, but its limited feature set may not be enough for some companies.
- Absorb LMS has many advanced features such as AI for analytics and content generation, but is quite expensive and cannot be customized.
- 360Learning has existing social learning features, such as a robust group and messaging interface with AI tools, but lacks motivation features.
- Docebo Learning Suite can proceed with large amounts of data and has various useful extensions, but it’s very expensive and clumsy.
- TalentLMS is also affordable and has robust tools for content management and onboarding but is quite weak in motivation and social features.
- Moodle is free and open-source, with a thriving community and hundreds of plugins. However, it lacks centralized support and doesn’t have many features crucial for corporate education, such as task planning and scheduling.
- Valamis has a robust AI system to search the web and select the content based on your preferences for each learner personally, but it requires fine-tuning and is very costly.
Therefore
don’t be confused by the loud titles about the best online learning platforms, and ask yourself instead, for what they are the best.
As you see, all of them are strong in some particular areas, but weaker in some others, despite in principle, all of them can be used similarly. However, as we have limited resources, everything should be optimized. Compare the list of your company’s objectives with the list of LMS examples and choose the one that fits you best. Write to their support teams to know more.
Or search for similar software, as now you see how your objectives may be resolved.
The rise of e-learning software: Our digital future
While that doesn’t mean you should follow trends blindly and install LMS in your company if you don’t want to, consider it at least. Remote work becomes increasingly common, while employee satisfaction and corporate learning are heavily interconnected, as people always want to have a place for growing. So, incorporating digital learning will put you ahead of those who didn’t catch this opportunity.
Choosing the right platform for online learning means that you’ll be prepared for the digital future, transforming your business into an innovation hub, opening new opportunities constantly, and being ahead of time. That’s the result you’re going to reach, and your chosen learning management system must connect you with this result.
Otherwise, you’d better choose the other one.
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