How To Choose An LMS Portal?
The first consideration is whether the LMS vendor is a brand name or not because when it’s a brand, you think it is trustworthy. Apart from this, the delivery time of LMS platforms is an important issue. Some buyers prefer a shorter delivery time even if this means compromising on the quality of the LMS. Branding is also important for a company because they might choose the company's logo to appear on every screen of this software. So, customers must have the freedom to choose the layout of the LMS from their dashboard and customize it easily with the right choice of colors and fonts.
5 Benefits Of Getting An LMS From A Large Company
1. Customer Service
When you are buying an LMS from a large vendor who has thousands of employees, you might think that there will be excellent customer service. This might not be true because such companies might have bad customer service, and customer support for an LMS portal is very important. This is because the LMS might experience a breakdown and employees won't have access to some critical information on it.
Also, after implementation, the IT staff of your company might not be able to handle all the aspects of LMS administration which include registering new learners, adding or removing courses, etc.
So, your IT staff might need accessible customer support from your LMS vendor. Customer service is important for smaller LMS vendors because they want to retain customers. This is because they appreciate the small number of customers they have as compared to the large number of customers a brand name might have.
2. Account Management System
The most important feature of an LMS is the account management system. An LMS portal might provide the freedom to employees to get registered on the LMS. In case you don’t want a dedicated IT staff to create employee accounts on the LMS with a specific domain name, then it’s better to get LMS accounts created with employees' official accounts. Using employees' official email accounts will ensure that LMS accounts are created quite easily without the aid of IT staff.
3. Budget
Also, LMS platforms should be within the budget of a company. An LMS should have content templates so that you add content to an existing course. If it does not have such templates, it will be necessary to get help from the LMS vendor for creating new courses, which will cost more. Paying more for designing new courses is troublesome for a company that does not have much money.
When choosing an LMS platform, make sure that you have the right support services available. When you have such services, you may not have to spend extra on the IT team. So, you should ask the LMS platforms vendor about the availability of such services before getting the product.
Sometimes, new courses need to be added frequently to an LMS because it is the requirement of the industry. But sometimes the need to add new courses is not that frequent and they have to be added every three years. So, in that case, companies can get help from the current IT staff to design such eLearning content.
4. Accessible On Smartphones
Sometimes, LMS platforms need to be made accessible to employees who don’t have access to laptops. In this case, an LMS must be accessible on a mobile phone. A business might have its own "bring your own device" (BYOD) policy, which implies that an LMS could be used as a mobile app. When an LMS can be used in such a way, employees from different parts of the world can use it for accessing content and learning about data updates.
5. Availability Of Courses
You should also know before getting an LMS about how many courses can be uploaded. This is because this determines how usable an LMS will be. An LMS should also have security features like an OTP sent to users before they can log in. Apart from that, it should have social learning features, like Facebook, integrated with it. It should also be usable in different languages so that users anywhere can switch to their local language.
These are some of the factors to consider when choosing from so many LMS platforms.
