IT Engineer
The COVID-19 pandemic hit our planet hard, and its dire effects will affect our lives for years to come. Education is one of those areas that is not directly related to the disease but has suffered a lot from it. The pandemic revealed an underlying leadership problem that is severely affecting the entire education system.
Teachers found themselves in a situation where their primary concer
n was not teaching themselves but leading students. They realized that outside of the traditional classroom, they have little or no tools to reach all students, share resources equally, make a fair assessment of information, and receive timely feedback from learners.
Educators and educational institutions could have been more flexible and prepared if they had a learning management system.
So in this article, I would like to look at the definition of an LMS and the benefits of a hands-on learning management system. Let's start with the basics: what is a learning management system?
The Learning Management System (LMS) is a software platform, data warehouse, and online classroom.
The purpose of this software platform is to manage, store, track, report, and deliver a variety of training materials and courses. You can think of it as an advanced archive of learning resources and courses that all authorized users can access and use as defined by the instructor. You can also think of it as an online classroom where learners communicate with teachers, achieve their learning goals, and evaluate learning progress.
Learning management systems are actively used in universities and the business sector. The best known examples are Moodle, Opigno, Dokeos, SkyPrep, BlackBoard. Another personal and corporate learning management system we recommend is SelfLeaders.
Deploying an LMS is the perfect shortcut to improving the performance of your business or institution. Your business is determined by the people who work for you, and their personal progress is directly reflected in the progress of your business.
A learning management system can be used to train employees about the latest operational or technological changes. For example, if you install an expensive high-end device, you may not want inexperienced employees to come straight to work with it. Instead, you would train them first through a virtual LMS. A customized learning platform can also be used to improve the soft skills of your staff and train them in their communication, conflict resolution, or decision-making skills.
Likewise, LMS promises to improve your students ’learning performance. It makes the learning process more individual, interesting and flexible - it’s easier for users to focus if they decide on their own schedule. In addition, LMS provides access to a variety of multimedia files and tools that diversify learning and make theoretical studies more exciting.
A customized learning management system is the perfect opportunity to leave your office or traditional classroom. When all the information is in a virtual environment, people would have access to it or complete training at home, in a cafe, on the road, in a park, or on a sick vacation. This is great for the new generation of students and employees who don’t want to work from 10am to 6pm five days a week from the office. The modern generation strives for flexibility, creativity, and communication, and giving them complete freedom in time and place during their studies is the perfect way to keep them motivated and committed.
However, such flexibility cannot be just an advantage but a necessity - as the COVID-19 situation has shown. Schools and companies willing to move their operations online beat their competitors greatly. However, the coronavirus left little time for reflection or preparation - everyone had to act quickly, and learning management systems became the lifeline of the education and training sector.
A custom learning management system can be used to centralize data storage. Data centralization by itself is not a convincing advantage — at first sight, it does not offer any practical value. However, there are four significant benefits of using a learning management system data centralization offers:
1) People get faster answers
Most people nowadays do not fancy the idea of going to the library or flicking through numerous papers. The modern generation wants to have all the answers here and now, and a custom LMS satisfies this demand.
You can store all the training materials, company policies, job guidelines, documents, or personal notes in one place. To make better use of it, your custom LMS should give you an opportunity to manage the access rights of people. This is how you let your students or employees access the information they need with a single click, at the same time, without being worried that they can see something that they are not supposed to.
3) Learners are provided with equal knowledge opportunities
Such a system also lets you be sure that, regardless of the physical location of your employees, all of them have relevant and up-to-date information. In this way, learning management systems help to ensure compliance with corporate ethical and legal guidelines. This is how the learning management system turns into a centralized knowledge hub.
4) You can analyze and adjust knowledge base efficiency
Finally, a comprehensive knowledge base will help you analyze what learning materials, books, courses are the most and the least popular among learners. Respectively, this will let you adjust your teaching strategy to make the process more interesting for your learner
Efficiency is one of the key benefits of LMS. With a custom learning management system, you can save a lot of time, effort and money. While developing such a system is expensive and time consuming, it is a one-time expense that will certainly pay for itself in the future.
With a learning platform at your fingertips, you minimize the time and resources you spend training employees or teaching students. Training employees in its traditional understanding is quite expensive, as it requires hiring a coach, developing additional materials, and some work time. Instead, a learning management system enables employee training at no additional cost.
However, the main reason for choosing a customized learning management system instead of a ready-made solution is that customized development allows you to get a product tailored to your specific interests and needs. As the owner and administrator of the future learning platform, you will need to decide what features you will enable and what the optimal interface should look like. In addition, an online learning platform is the perfect opportunity to brand your business or educational institution. Make sure your interfaces and learning materials follow your unique style guide, with company logos and company colors. Your students and employees are sure to enjoy your unique style.
Ensuring that all of your tools and products are in line with your company’s overall strategy can be more important than it looks.