Evaluate LMS Reporting Features During Your Free Demo
When you’re shopping around for any type of new software, it’s a great idea to try and get a free demo of the system to see what it’s like in real life. A product’s website might make a new system look like exactly what you need, but when you see it running in person, you may be able to spot any shortcomings it has before you’ve moved through to the purchasing stage.
If you’re looking for a new Learning Management System (LMS), there will be lots of different features you will want to focus on, to see how they perform for your company and also what sort of eLearning experience they will give your students. However, today we’re just going to focus on the things you should be looking for from your Learning Management System’s reporting function, to make sure you’re getting the visibility you need to your eLearning offering.
Here are the questions you need to ask to get an accurate picture of whether this LMS is for you or not!
1. What Can I Report On?
The main thing you need to find out is what data can actually be included in the reports you want to run. Ideally, you want to be able to report on any piece of data which you LMS can produce, such as number of learners, number of hours spent learning, assessment statistics, specific details on which modules from a course have been completed and how long this took, which classes are proving popular, etc., as all of this data is extremely important to your training measurement efforts.
However, some LMS reporting systems may have limits on what you can report on, and it may not give you a clear enough picture of your training business as a whole, and therefore will be ineffective.
2. Can I Customize Report Fields?
This is tied to the point above, but it specifically about what data points you can include in each report from all the data you are able to report on. A lot of reporting systems will have pre-set fields for their reports, meaning you could either be missing out on lots of vital data that you want to include, or you reports could be full of extra data that you don’t need, making it hard for you to drill down into the detail you want to focus on.
Ideally, you want to be able to pick exactly the fields each report will feature, as this will mean you can focus on the data you want to, and be able to create lots of different reports, which all focus on different elements, with ease.
3. Can I Automate Reports?
Creating reports can be a time-consuming experience because you need to find the most up-to-date data every time you create a report. However, if you have the ability to automate your reports, you will be able to create updated versions of the same report in seconds!
Automated reports mean you create the report once, decide on what data you want to be included and how you want it displayed, and then you never have to compile that report again, as your LMS reporting system will do all the hard work for you. Every time you need to see the new version of the report (every month or every quarter etc.) you will be sent an updated version of the report, featuring the latest data for each of the data headings which you picked in the first place.
This means you will also have the most up-to-date version of your data to report on, but you won’t have to do lots of manual work to get it!
4. Can I Link Reports With Other Data From Across The Company?
While being able to report on all your LMS activity separately is a good feature to have, it is always a bonus to be able to report on all the data from across your entire company from one place, rather than having to manually combine reports, which can be time-consuming and end up confusing!
A good solution to this could be to look for a Training Management System which has both a reporting system and an LMS built-in, meaning when you compile reports you will be able to include data from across your entire company, and not just from your Learning Management System!
5. Can I Download Reports?
Having your reports available online is probably how you work most of the time, but it’s also a good idea to be able to download your reports into files such as Excel spreadsheets or .CSV files, so that are able to share the data with people both inside and outside your company, without worrying about them having access to your LMS. It also means if you want to keep a record of certain reports on your computer, you can easily download them for future reference.
