How to Choose your LMS Development Company

The LMS market is expected to grow $38.10 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 19.7%. As the demand for e-learning platforms grows, people are looking for the right LMS solutions, but don’t have enough insight into how they should go about finding one. 

There is a lot of time and resources one must invest in getting an LMS developed. To make sure you don’t end up with a sloppy or unsatisfactory piece of software, It’s better to go searching for LMS only after you understand your requirements and the questions you should be asking your LMS development company. 

7 Tips to Choose an LMS Development Company

Do they Cater to your Specific Use-Case?

An LMS has many applications. Some of them are: 

• Employee training
• Onboarding
• Compliance training
• Customer training
• Educational purposes
• Extended enterprise

The LMS development company you choose will depend heavily on your use case and the industry you operate in. Ideally, you should go for a company that can get domain-specific experts working on your LMS project. 

A Learning Management System made for employee onboarding and training is going to be structurally different from one that is being made for, say, an educational institute. 

In the sense that academic courses on an LMS have to facilitate blended learning strategies which include – live teaching sessions, virtual simulations, in-class gaming, and more. Whereas an employee training and development LMS typically does not need such extensive capabilities. 

Check their Pricing Structure

Check especially if they’ve included hosting, third-party integrations, and custom designs within their pricing structure, or you will be charged additionally later on. 

Based on the budget you’ve set for your LMS platform, check out each vendor’s pricing structure, and assess if it’s in line with their brand’s reputation and the feature set they’re offering. Getting an LMS developed is going to be an extensive procedure, so make sure that the LMS development company you’re choosing has transparent pricing models and there are no hidden costs. 

Just to prepare you before you begin searching, a typical LMS platform with basic functionalities costs somewhere around $37000-$53000. 

Look into their Data Security Measures 

Learning management systems need to have tight security because people enter critical personal details into the systems, and any data breach can cost your customers heavily. You’ll have to thoroughly check if the LMS development company is following all data privacy and compliance procedures properly. 

Also, think about the following factors:

• Your data’s location
• User authentication options
• Who has access to your data
• Software integrations 

For maximum control over your data, you can explore private or dedicated hosting plan options with LMS development companies before making a choice.

Ask about their Content-Format Capabilities 

No matter your use case, your LMS should include multiple content formats like video, PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, flash files, webinars, videos, etc. Your course learners, be it students or employees, will need different content formats to stay engaged with their learning experience.  

So make a list of all the formats you want to include in your course curriculum. Accordingly, reach out to various LMS development companies and ask if they’ll be able to deliver a powerful and flexible LMS platform that can include your desired content formats without compromising on the system’s overall performance. 

Explore their Reporting and Analytics Features  

An LMS with excellent reporting capabilities will give you deep insights into your learner’s interaction with your courses, their behaviour on the LMS platform, and their learning tendency. 
For example, you can get access to detailed assignment reports that tell you how many times a learner attempted that particular assignment, which questions they got stuck at the most, etc. 

Reporting features in an LMS platform can be of the following types:

• User reports- they track the user’s overall progress, time taken to complete, etc.
• Course reports- these include courses enrolled in, schedule, assessment, results.
• Custom reports- overall report of a batch of users based on demographics.

I’d suggest you look beyond basic reporting and find out if the company offers AI/ML-based reporting insights. For example, AI-powered data analytics can identify your learner’s behavioural patterns while completing a course. You can also find out useful insights like if your users are finding your topics interesting or leaving them midway. 

Look for a Mobile-Friendly Design

Most online experiences are happening over smartphones, and e-learning is no different. Learners have now started accessing courses over their mobile devices, which makes it imperative for LMS platforms to have mobile-friendly designs and their own mobile apps. 

A huge number of students or employees who enrol into online courses are millennials and Gen Z, and they find mobile learning easier and more convenient as they are habituated to it. So make sure your LMS development company will be able to create a mobile-friendly design and app for you.

Assess their Project Roadmap

As I’ve mentioned before, getting an LMS platform developed is going to be an extensive and complicated procedure. You need to have some idea beforehand as to how the LMS development company you’re choosing is planning to execute the entire project. 

Ask them for a proposed project workflow and then assess it thoroughly before going ahead with it. Make sure that the deadlines mentioned are realistic and achievable, and at the same time, the agency is not missing out on any of your requirements. 

Also, see if they have any contingency plans in place. There’s a lot that can go wrong while creating software as intricate as an LMS. How does the LMS development agency plan to tackle possible situations like delivery delays or possible structural errors?

You should also consider how much visibility they’re allowing you throughout the process. Meaning, will they take feedback and approval from you from time to time? Do they have timely and regular communication plans in place?

Conclusion

You’ll have to meticulously do your due diligence before deciding on partnering with an agency. I’d suggest you prepare a list of questions/criteria that can help you guide you through the process.

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Team EMB

Our team of expert writers is committed to bringing insights on topics ranging in the fields of technology, marketing, and business. With a wide-reaching range of services on our platform, we help businesses achieve digital transformation end-to-end.