With the growing need for e-learning, it is absolutely important for an educational institute to choose the right learning management system. LMS is a system that helps in managing the learning needs of every student present in an educational institute.
It is quite popular because it provides unlimited access to the content, comes with videos and other interactive modules, comes with an assessment metric like timed quiz, blocked navigation quiz, easy to organise content and several other advantages.
A survey has recently revealed that over 46% of the schools are dissatisfied with their learning management system. This grave problem can be avoided if the institute is clear with what they need from their LMS and what they want to provide to the end user.
There are many companies that offer learning management systems and hence it is crucial to select the perfect ones based on your needs. If there is no clarity with the objectives, you might end up spending your money in an organisation that might not fit your needs. You must also realise that with the right LMS, you can cut down the cost of future training.
Criteria To Choose The Right LMS
1. Know your people and their requirement
Before you invest in any company to develop a learning management system, it is necessary for you to know the main objectives and purpose of using a LMS. You must know the right audience before hunting for the perfect sites to make the best LMS portal for you.
It is also wise to remember the number of people who are going to benefit with the implementation of LMS. If you have about 1000 young minds, LMS will be the perfect option for you to grow.
2. Have a clear vision of your goal
A mission without a vision goes in vain. Hence understand your goals. Ask yourself why you want an LMS. Is it to monitor the progress of the audience? Is it to make your business famous by making it available indefinitely to the people who have affiliated accounts? Or is it to make the learning experience lively, interactive and fresh? Think of the several reasons why you want LMS and accordingly plan out your purchase and investments in the software.
3. Have an idea of features to incorporate
LMS is a new system that comes with varieties of features like e-book access, powerpoint presentation access, document access, spreadsheet access, video access, animation access, external link access and so many more features.
It can also provide you with assessing features like quiz, timed quiz with navigation restriction, quiz with order variation and online exams. There are plenty of features that can be added and hence it is important to have a specific idea of the features to be included. Based on the required features, the cost might go up and down. Hence be particular about the features.
4. Select the best vendors according to requirements
After having a clear objective and goal, look out for vendors who offer the learning management system build. The cost is one important criteria to shortlist them. Know your requirements thoroughly and hence look for the vendors who can offer service and are also budget friendly. Keep in mind that cost is not the only criteria.
You must understand the complexity of your requirement and it is important to strike a perfect balance between the need and the cost. A simple LMS page might not be filled with great details and might not even satisfy your requirements whereas a complex one which might feed you with all cool features might not be pocket friendly. Hence use the best fit algorithm and then finalise the vendors.
5. Try to look at the future aspects
Implementing new technologies can cause a huge impact to the company especially on the financial side hence we must ensure whatever we are implementing will work in the long run. If you are planning to conduct courses that work well in the short term, but might exhaust in the near future, rethink about adding it in the LMS because getting a learning management system is not an easy task.
To Conclude….
Learning management system (LMS) is a growing need for every school and college because of the sudden shift to online learning. It is important to have quality assessment of the students because with the online exams, the number of students who pass by copying and cheating has grown exponentially to 92%. LMS can offer various features like timed quizzes which can reduce the copy rate by 60%.
It can also be a platform which can be used to organise all the contents in a single place. Varieties of content can be put up on LMS like videos, pdf, excel, presentation, word document and more. With all these advantages, there comes a huge question on how to choose the best vendor for developing your own LMS. The basic idea is to know what your people want and see if the vendor can provide it easily with minimal costs. It is also necessary to have an idea of the features to be incorporated in your learning management system.
