1. Involve And Empower People
A Learning Management System is meant for people: making people smarter, qualifying them for new tasks and making sure they have the right knowledge for good decisions. Key in Learning Management therefore is to involve people in a way that makes them use provided learning material, indicate their process and collaborate with others to keep the learning experience relevant. Your LMS is your tool to engage people in the learning process. Therefore, it needs to be easy to work with, have an appealing, modern interface, well-structured learning content and give a comprehensible overview of learning progress.
2. Make Training Relevant
Once an LMS provides relevant information and performance support, people visit it frequently and take up the information easily. Therefore, it is important to revise courses regularly, ask for participants’ feedback and adapt content to make it more user friendly. Microlearning is a helpful method to achieve this. Also, participants need to access courses in their LMS in the moment of need, which can be anywhere: on the road, in the factory, at a customer’s site. Browser-based access and a responsive design make your LMS flexible enough to be used outside the organizational context and help keep the training activity relevant.
3. Stay Flexible With SaaS
Faster than ever, technology develops into forms we had not known before. What you really don’t want is to be stuck with tools that rely on one system only, that cannot adapt to new screen sizes or modes of access. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a must in times when employees and other LMS users are increasingly working from abroad or from their home-office. It gives them the freedom to access training in a moment of need and makes you independent from software installation and maintenance. With flexible license models and continuous platform development, SaaS helps you reduce costs and stay competitive for the future.
4. Delegate To Assistants And Co-Trainers
Use a role division that is simple yet effective: employees and partners can be participants with rights to comment on learning material and review their own learning progress. On top of that: trainers who deliver relevant knowledge and material. Those should be able to create and adapt content, monitor results and give feedback to participants. Mostly, trainers are experts in their field of knowledge, not in technical course development. Therefore, it is important to a) give trainers tools that are extremely easy to work with, and b) assign assistants or co-trainers who can do part of the administrative or content adaptation work. Essential for that is a clear and secure role division in your LMS.
5. Build Up Continuous Exchange
An LMS is often used for temporary skills training courses: once completed, courses are redundant to the user. The better idea is to think of Learning Management instead as an ongoing project with opportunities for self-reflection and future referral to learning material. This helps you make much more of your platform and enable a stable framework for qualification and upskilling. Remember: your LMS is not meant to make you struggle with technique and content, but as a helpful tool to make learning easier and more flexible.