Optimize Your Online Training Using An LMS
Do more with less. That’s the directive from your C-suite. For leaders in Learning and Development (L&D), working with the right educational technology today is essential for optimizing the efficiency of your L&D program. With the right Learning Management System (LMS), you can empower your L&D team to create, manage, distribute, monitor, and market all your instructional activities and products cost-efficiently. Here are four ways the right LMS will lift a significant load of administrative work off your team’s back.
4 Ways To Optimize Online Training With The Right LMS
1. Automate Most Administrative Tasks
Consider some routine tasks your administrators need to carry out during an employee’s journey through a training course: verification of prerequisites, enrollment, notifications of different types (e.g., confirming enrollment, reminders, or wait-listing), control of the time of access to the course, correction of exams, and awarding of certifications.
When your team works with siloed software and enters the same data repeatedly, you overload your team with low-value or repetitive tasks. On the other hand, the right LMS empowers you with end-to-end integration and automation to reduce or eliminate many of these tasks. As a result, your team has more time to focus on work that delivers higher value to your organization.
2. Make Compliance Simple
Often, employees need to regularly update or attest to their knowledge of industry standards and practices. For your L&D team, this recurring compliance process means tracking individual compliance needs and ensuring timely enrollment, testing, completion, and certification. All this activity can become an administrative ordeal.
Not with the right LMS. It will automate recertification. For example, the LMS’s recertification feature can set a validity period for a compliance course (e.g., 24 months), then automatically send reminders before the expiry date to employees, supervisors, and administrators to ensure the training is taken in a timely way. Administrators can also stay on top of everybody’s compliance status at any time through exportable reports.
What’s more, monitoring progress and course completion are simple: you glance at customizable dashboards that update you in real time. Want to assess proficiency? Your LMS quiz tool enables you to easily create tests with automatic correction for a variety of question types, such as multiple choice and true-or-false, or open questions that can be graded right on the LMS.
- Protect the integrity of your testing, simply and economically
But to test trainees without a high assurance of the integrity of the results puts your organization at risk. This need for test integrity and the rise of remote work have led many organizations to recognize the efficacy and cost-efficiencies of an integrated automated online proctoring solution or auto-proctoring for short. While there are various types of auto-proctoring, a solution that includes a human review of the results offers two big advantages: cost-effective scalability and critical human analysis to assess suspicious behavior. Furthermore, your trainees can take advantage of convenient times and locations for test-taking while your administrators are freed of all the logistics and costs of in-person testing.
3. Monitor Performance To Make Proactive Adjustments
To ensure training efficiency, you need to monitor and measure how various facets of your training program are doing. Here, too, an LMS offers you several valuable tools:
- Survey tool
For example, with the right LMS, you can poll how your learners feel about your course. As a result of their real-time feedback, your L&D team can make the necessary adjustments to your training to enhance its effectiveness. - Segmenting feature
Sometimes, you need to understand how a specific segment or group of your learners is doing. Your LMS can group your new employees based on your criteria. With the benefit of the reporting and analytics features, you can assess how specific groups are performing (and individuals within them) so you can make the training adjustments necessary. For example, one group may be better off with more advanced content while another would benefit from a refresher course. Your team can intervene as needed in real time. - Analytics tool
Analytics reviews your data to help uncover meaningful patterns and insights. For instance, your LMS analytics may reveal that group "A" may be averaging better results than group "B." Or, the average completion time of a course is longer in its daytime slot compared to its evening one. With this insight, you can make better business decisions faster. - Real-time reporting
Insights like these can become more easily understood and acted on when your LMS presents them in reports that include spreadsheets and data visualizations. If your LMS benefits from API architecture, you can also export the data, without any added input on your part, for further analysis. Count on your LMS reporting capability to support your drive for efficiency.
4. Turn Your Training Program Into A Revenue Stream
Perhaps you’ve never considered taking your organization into the training business. But imagine the possibilities that selling your training may open up. First, and above all, you may be sitting on an untapped revenue stream. You’ve already invested in creating the training. Keeping this material updated and online is a minor incremental cost compared to the potential profit center it could become.
Remember, the information you’re sharing with your team is valuable to you. Why wouldn’t others also value it, assuming, of course, you’re not giving away the recipe to your organization’s special sauce? Think of potential vendors and partners interested in working with you. Wouldn’t they be open to investing in courses that would ease their doing business with you? Selling such training would become a win-win because you’d be working with organizations already familiar with the business practices you prefer.
The Mutual Benefits Of Powerful eCommerce Capabilities
If you do choose to turn your training courses into a profit center, make sure your LMS has powerful eCommerce capabilities that will benefit you and your customers. For example, your learners should find it almost effortless to enroll in a course, make a payment through a secure payment gateway, and set off on the appropriate learning path. While customers are in a buying mood, your LMS shopping cart should simplify the sale of any kind of digital content, such as courses, videos, or audio files, or physical items like books, instruction manuals, and DVDs.
To unlock potential sales, tap into the waiting lists that your LMS automatically generates when courses fill up. Or, explore your learner’s wish lists to incite them with a coupon code to make the purchase. Promotions are an essential part of eCommerce. Let’s say you’re running a "back-to-school" promotion. The right LMS enables you to create and manage your coupon codes for insertion in your social media, emails, and newsletter. Through these codes, you can then track the sources of new enrollments.
Variable pricing can be labor-intensive if managed manually. Let your LMS do the work of automatically assigning prices for specific groups, bulk purchases, or even date-based purchases, such as early-bird specials. All in all, your LMS is a powerful labor-reducing platform. Make the most of all its capabilities to optimize the efficiency of your L&D program!