Technology has changed every aspect of our day to day lives. In the past 20 years it has made transportation safer, massively increased consumer choice, connected people all around the world, improved health care availability and affordability, and even given us smart fridges.
Training and education are no exception. Both have seen huge rises in the uptake of these technologies, and one estimate put the value of the education and training market (EdTech) at around $252m by 2020.
What is a Learning Management System (LMS)?
The LMS, or Learning Management System, has been around for a while. It started off in universities and large institutions that needed to manage and assign work to large numbers of students or staff. Those original systems were often clunky and not very user friendly, and they were used mainly because the next best alternative was doing it all in Excel or on paper.
In recent years, new players have come to the market. The resulting competition pushed companies to redesign the humble LMS into something accessible to everyone, following the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
The practical result: an LMS is now a scalable, cost effective and viable option for organisations of any size that need to train their people.
What does a Learning Management System (LMS) do?
The clue is in the three words. An LMS handles the learning content, the management of the people doing it, and the system that delivers it all.
Learning
Create training content for your teams. There are three broad methods for this.
1. Courses
A linear collection of resources that users work through in a set order, completing one item to unlock the next. A course might be made up of videos, presentations, quizzes, PDFs and document uploads.
Courses work well for onboarding new team members and introducing new concepts. Add quizzes and you can also track how much a learner is actually engaging with the content.
2. Collections
A collection of content where users pick what they want to look at. Collections suit recurring training and material that does not change often, such as health and safety regulations or core product knowledge.
3. Question banks
A collection of multiple choice questions (MCQs) or extended matching questions, split into topics. Question banks are an effective way to revise for professional or student exams, because they continuously test knowledge and show clearly which topics are passing and which are not.
Management
Groups and hierarchies let you manage your team's learning at scale. Grouping users into departments or cohorts makes organising and setting recurring training much easier, and a good LMS will let you create custom groups with their own permissions.
Most organisations end up with three types of user:
- Admins. Senior managers and department heads who manage the LMS at scale. They want an overview of all users and control over how the LMS looks, but they are usually not the ones assigning courses day to day.
- Moderators. People who are not changing the LMS itself, but who engage with learners by assigning courses and content and checking uploaded documents.
- Learners. The end user, and the person a good LMS is designed around. They interact with content rather than changing how anything is set up.
System
The "System" part of LMS is a relic of the 1990s, when these were big pieces of software that had to be installed and configured inside an organisation.
Today, any LMS worth having should be online and accessible through any modern browser, with users signing in via email and a secure password. Good ones integrate with your existing website and offer Single Sign-On. Most businesses will want a cloud-based LMS delivered as Software-as-a-Service, and it should be:
- Easy to set up
- Fast to load
- Secure
- Usable on all modern browsers
- Fully responsive on mobile devices
- Intuitive to use
- Able to offer white labelling and customisation
For organisations with users in the European Union, GDPR compliance means services should be located within the EU. Ideally, a good LMS will also:
- Offer support for admins, such as a chat widget
- Provide an academy for all types of user
- Allow custom domains and integrations
- Let you customise features and settings
- Offer some form of self service
Self service gives people a chance to try a system out before committing to it. Only a handful of providers offer it, so it is worth asking whether you can get into a trial environment, test the platform properly, and invite colleagues in before you buy.
Who is a Learning Management System made for?
An LMS has many applications, but the core value it offers is to reduce learning friction. In practice, that shows up in four broad areas:
- Organisations and businesses
- Educational institutions
- Training providers
- Individuals
An LMS can work for businesses or institutions of any size. Training matters more than ever, partly because of growing market complexity and rising customer expectations, and partly because employees themselves rate it highly. In a survey by SurveyMonkey, 86% of employees said on the job training was important to them, and three quarters were willing to learn outside work hours.
Organisations and businesses
An LMS can hold a business's training content in ready to go courses that are easy to assign and manage, with a detailed audit trail behind them. The most common uses are:
1. Employee onboarding
Training material for new starters can be delivered in a deliberate order that introduces them to the culture, policies and protocols of the business. It replaces printing off reams of material, or dropping it all in Google Drive and hoping people work through it.
2. Product knowledge
Staying on top of product knowledge is vital for everyone, and especially for a sales team. With an LMS, new product knowledge can be rolled out and existing knowledge refreshed across every branch, anywhere in the world. Everyone gets the same information, and can refer back to it whenever they need.
3. Knowledge retention
An LMS is an excellent complement to face to face training. Treat the first session as a "loading dose", then use the LMS to reinforce it so the information sticks.
This matters most in industries with high staff turnover that need to train people quickly. Call centres are a good example. Many businesses buy seats at a call centre rather than run their own, so the staff answering the phone do not actually work for them, and may be answering calls for several different companies. Those staff need to be onboarded fast and brought up to speed on each company's policies, and an LMS keeps that training organised and accessible.
4. Compliance
Highly regulated industries such as financial services, legal and medical have to keep up with new regulations and refresh their knowledge of existing ones. LMSs were used in 2018 to help businesses prepare for GDPR.
Financial institutions regulated by the FCA can use an LMS to produce a detailed audit log of training to show the regulator, and the same applies to health and safety training and inspections.
5. Continuous professional development
Training extends into softer skills and personal development. This type of learning rarely produces a simple pass or fail, but it still adds real value to someone's skill set.
An LMS lets people upload documents for a mentor to review, chat, and book meetings, whether those happen online or face to face. Feedback can be collected through the platform too, and good LMSs let you build surveys internally to inform future training decisions.
6. Push training
We increasingly have a mobile workforce: people away from their desk most of the time, or who simply do not have one, such as medical professionals. An LMS that is fully responsive or has an app means training can happen on a phone, wherever and whenever there is time.
Push training is training that has to be done immediately. If an unexpected snow storm hits a transport network, notifications and materials can go out to the mobile workforce straight away to remind them of the protocol.
Education
Whether it is in schools, colleges, universities or the workplace, everyone has to sit exams at some point. Universities and schools have used Learning Management Systems for years to give students an online portal for their assignments, and Moodle and Blackboard are both examples of LMSs.
As the market has grown, specialist LMSs have appeared that cater to particular types of learner, alongside specialist tools that plug into an existing LMS over open standards such as LTI 1.3 rather than replacing it.
1. Schools
Simple, easy to use LMSs help students review material at their own pace. Not everyone learns at the same rate, many students need the opportunity to go back over something a few times, and every student needs to refresh before exams. With an LMS built for schools, students, parents and teachers can all see what has been covered and where more work is needed.
2. Universities
Most universities already have an institution-wide Learning Management System, but with so many courses on offer, different degrees have different requirements.
Medicine, law and engineering tend to benefit from a question bank led approach, while part time courses and distance learning benefit from linear courses, document upload and one to one meetings.
3. Graduate training
Learning does not stop at graduation. As more companies offer graduate schemes, an LMS becomes an essential tool for onboarding graduates into their first job, and for giving managers the insight to decide who to keep on afterwards.
4. Professional exams
Helping employees gain qualifications lets businesses grow talent internally, which is often more cost effective than recruiting, and it improves job satisfaction. An LMS gives people the structure and the freedom to work through the material and go into a professional exam with confidence.
Training providers and individuals
People who deliver training or learning programmes, face to face or online, can use an LMS to keep engaging with clients and scale their business.
Take someone who coaches public speaking. They might run a day with a client and follow up by email and phone. With an LMS, they can keep working with that client and give them more material to work through, which adds a lot of value to what they are selling. Good LMSs integrate with an existing website, so the move into the learning platform feels seamless.
What sort of insights can a Learning Management System give?
An LMS provides information for admins, moderators and learners alike, and tracking training and progression means future training decisions can be driven by data rather than instinct.
Admins can typically:
- Get detailed reports on an individual's engagement, progression and activity levels
- Compare cohorts and groups to see how departments differ
- Compare the same group across different time periods
A good LMS provider will help you build customised reports and advise on which metrics are actually worth watching.
Where does an assessment platform fit alongside an LMS?
An LMS is built to manage and deliver learning. High-stakes assessment is a different job. It needs secure delivery, proper question banking, proctoring, marking workflows, and results you can defend to a regulator or an appeals panel.
Plenty of organisations run both: the LMS looks after the learning, and a dedicated assessment platform looks after the exam.
Synap is an online assessment platform rather than an LMS. It covers authoring, question banks, secure and proctored delivery, marking and analytics, and it is designed to sit alongside the LMS you already use instead of replacing it.
That connection runs on LTI 1.3:
- Learners launch a Synap assessment from inside Moodle, Canvas or Blackboard using their existing login, with no second set of credentials to manage.
- Scores are pushed straight back into the LMS gradebook.
- Synap is listed on the Blackboard App Center.
- A REST API, webhooks and Zapier cover deeper automation, and the full list is on our integrations page.
If you are working out how assessment should fit alongside your LMS, book a demo and the team will walk through your setup. After the demo you can carry on exploring in a free 14 day trial.
