Features Of A Cloud LMS Every Higher Education Institution Will Find Useful
Learning happens most effectively when stakeholders collaborate together to achieve the institutional vision, mission, goals, and objectives. Teaching and learning allow effective interaction between instructors and students which paves the way for the highest level of academic achievement to solve real-world problems.
Today, higher education institutions are meeting several complicated and challenging issues including increasing enrollment, improving student learning and performance, enhancing faculty teaching, and providing access to learning materials from anywhere, anytime. To achieve institutional goals, various types of LMSs have been introduced in colleges and universities. Even though LMSs have successfully been adopted in various institutions, stakeholders such as academic leaders are planning to replace their existing LMS to meet the ever increasing demands of higher education.
A cloud-based LMS offers the most advanced and user-friendly solution for course creation and distribution to learners in minutes across the web, social and mobile devices. Here are the top 5 LMS features to look for in higher education institutions.
1. Onboarding
Customizable And Flexible
For meeting the Learning and Development needs, higher education leaders have to find a Learning Management System to accommodate everything. A cloud LMS offers highly customizable and on-demand solutions to create courses and access the learning material wherever and whenever you need to drive better learner adoption, engagement, and completion.
Interactive Learning
With advances in technology like Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and gaming, learners expect interactive elements in courses. Cloud-based LMSs offer an immersive learning experience for complex courses through videos, customized audio, interactive images, chatbots, and digital stories to boost engagement, motivate learners and increase retention.
Seamless Integration
A cloud-based LMS provides a highly secure and role-based authentication system and enables institutions to seamlessly integrate the LMS with other applications to deliver better User Experience (UX) and deliver efficient learning.
Student Success
The right cloud LMS is dedicated to supporting education and promoting student retention and success. It is a cost-effective way to allow instructors to create courses, manage assessments, view results and predict success.
2. Courses
CO/PO Mapping
Program and course mapping tools enable instructors to create a mapping matrix of course outcome and program outcome, and then align teaching and learning activities, graduate attributes, and student assessment items to the learning outcomes.
Course Planning And Availability Management
Engage students in the learning process through personalized learning and achieve their learning outcomes. Simplify course schedules and optimize utilization of faculties, rooms, and equipment.
Faculty Mapping
Enable faculty to identify and align course learning, activities and assessments with the learning outcomes, graduate competencies and standards.
Course Builder
Flexible and easy to use tools to create, distribute, manage and assess courses including videos, PDF files, even quizzes, and student evaluation surveys in online and mobile devices and syncs learner data instantly.
Course Syllabus And Lesson Planning
Create and track syllabus or lesson plans and help students to access resources in order to improve learning interaction and outcomes.
Course Evaluation
A course evaluation system is cost effective, time efficient and maximizes student response rates. Custom evaluation forms and surveys provide the highest reliability, accuracy, and validity for data-driven decisions.
3. Assessments
Assessment Planning
Powerful tools to create and schedule online assessments including lectures, discussions, tests, assignments, games, quizzes and more for various groups and use of rubrics to measure a student’s progress in a particular course and help your students improve learning.
Course Assignments
Allocate assignments to students including images, audio, and video elements and meet your deadlines. Enable students to conveniently access all the assignments with attachment files, and web links with auto-reminders. Check submitted assignments for originality and send feedback to students.
Course Resources
There is a variety of resources including tutorial videos, pictures, documents including slides, a question bank, quizzes, surveys, collaboration tools, rubrics, email lists, discussion forums and more.
Quizzes And Tests
Creating assessments is an enjoyable process for instructors. Create a variety of online tests and quizzes with powerful customizable features such as question bank, role-based security, automated grading, and report cards for students at all grades and skill levels to help you both assess and improve student aptitude and knowledge acquisition.
Survey, Feedback, And Polls
Create surveys and take polls in classes to assess students discretely by sending a true/false or multiple choice question with the option to receive your student’s answer anonymously.
Weightage-Based Grading
Instructors no longer have to spend time on grading calculations and reports in writing. They can automatically grade using standards, point systems, weighted averages and flows into students report card and then enable faculty to assign grades or even post comments.
Transcripts
Digital transcripts processing to place requests and receive a digitally signed and verified electronic transcripts.
4. Learning Paths
Learning Pathways
Create customizable pathways for each learner with engaging delivery methods to attain learning goals.
Personalized Learning
Cloud LMSs empower higher education institutions with a more personalized, student-centric educational experience. They can effectively manage programs and courses, track performance in real-time, customize courses and differentiate instruction to meet students’ individualized needs.
A cloud-based LMS delivers a competency-based curriculum through an autonomous, interactive self-paced learning that provides flexibility and delivers learning excellence.
Social Learning
Enable students to share learning materials with peers on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Encourage students to discuss and share their ideas on forums for courses or subjects and receive feedback to improve their level of comprehension.
Mobile Learning
Access course resources, lesson plans, syllabi, and grades, and then track student performance data whenever you need from anywhere, anytime and improve User Experience.
Gamification
Gamified learning is an effective technique to engage learners to solve problems and improve knowledge retention. Auto-generate game concept maps for the achievement of specific learning outcomes and compare with peers.
5. Insights
Dashboards And Reports
Generate customizable dashboards and reports with charts and graphs in a single click of a button to identify patterns and trends, track progress, and maximize student retention and success.
Course Analytics
Cloud-based LMSs bring together the best of education technology, expertise, insights, and action analytics to enable instructors to track students' performance and help students learn better and by increasing student success.
Leaderboards
These are collaborative tools through which you can improve student engagement, participation, and performance. Configure rules for leadership boards, learner groups, and activities for different courses. Enable students to interact with peers, share feedback, and show off their accomplishments.
Online Notice Board
Keep the students, faculties, departments, alumni and parents updated regularly by providing them with useful information and announcements so that you can improve the campus experience.
Messaging
Automatically send notifications through email and SMS alerts to students on their academic performance.
These are the most comprehensive features to look for in colleges, universities and higher education institutions. You'll probably have to personalize features to meet the unique needs of your institution.