- What’s a Learning Management System?
- Types of Learning Management Systems
- Different LMS and Their Comparison
- Features of a Learning Management System
- 20 best LMS on the Market
- Learning Management System Benefits for Users and Businesses
- For Users, LMS benefits are in
- For Businesses, LMS creates benefits in
- How to Choose a Perfect LMS for your Organization?
- Final Thoughts
Education has always been of great value in the world. From ancient times until today the world has gone through so many changes based on the new knowledge humanity acquired in each unique period of growth and progress. Today, with the digitization of every existing industry, education is inseparable from software solutions and advances at a steady pace in this direction. As education has been redefined and the academic settings became more computerized, new ways of education delivery fill up the education sector.
It is predicted that the education software market will gain a $10.4 billion U.S. more profit increase in 2021 than in previous years. What’s more, the trend of developing education software will go on reaching $11.3 billion by 2024.
If you have a vague idea of what the education software market offers, here’s a little tip for you. Every application or tool that has a purpose of teaching and obtaining knowledge in any subject belongs to the education market and a learning management system.
What’s a Learning Management System?
A Learning Management System or LMS is a software that creates, manages, and shares educational content between teachers and their students. To be more precise, this is the technology that helps you gain knowledge in a faster, more convenient, productive, and relatively inexpensive way. Online courses and apps giving the ability to learn something new have always been popular among tech-savvy learners. For instance, in the first quarter of 2020, there were 466 million downloaded educational platforms from Google Play, and 470 million of such apps from the App Store as Statista shows.
The best Learning Management System is created to promote educative and learning processes with the help of
- individually-adapted content
- teacher’s notes and content management
- ‘student-teacher’ collaboration
- integrated common tools
- culture-based environment
- accessible built-in analytics
The key audience of any LMS is teachers (who upload materials and give assignments), students (who would like to learn sth new), and administrators (who extract learning analytics for school student report purposes).
Types of Learning Management Systems
The variety of educational content is extensive as well as its purpose. So, for this reason, there are different types of learning management systems. These are divided specifically according to the aim they attempt to fulfill within the particular scope of people and organization. To name a few, the list includes such LMS as
- individual and enterprise
- commercial and free
- licensed and SaaS
- on-premise, cloud-based, and integrated
- pre-developed CMS and built-in add-ons
Different LMS and Their Comparison
Features of a Learning Management System
There is an abundance of different types of LMS present on the market with various features included. However, the choice of functionality has to be smart to get users’ attention. For example, the most common features every app should have are:
- to create a course and manage it
- to set up events in calendars
- to provide an assessment (online)
- to be able to check attendance
- to participate in discussions at the ‘discussion board’
- to include gamification mode
- to support ‘teacher-student’ communication
- to have a dashboard with organized information
- to include course reporting/analytics
- to create student profiles
20 best LMS on the Market
According to g2.com, there are numerous LMS popular on the market. The site offers a long list of the LMS, where the first 20 platforms are: Canvas, Blackboard learn, Google Classroom, Schoology, Docebo, TalentLMS, Edmodo, Moodle, Tovuti LMS, Brightspace, eThink LMS, ThinkUp! Standards Mastery System, Showbie, Lambda Suite, Infinite Campus, Chamilo LMS, Neo LMS, WizIQ, Edsby, and Kannu.
Learning Management System Benefits for Users and Businesses
For Users, LMS benefits are in
- accessibility even on the go
- flexibility in learning
- promoting personal learning plans
- providing numerous learning sources
- containing learning analytics: personal pattern analysis
- mastering automation processes
For Businesses, LMS creates benefits in
- cost-effectiveness (you pay and receive best results)
- secure training access (training for certain groups)
- faster employee results
- continuous advancement of employee skills
- adaptable learning sources
- effective learning activities based on employee preferences
- private information security
How to Choose a Perfect LMS for your Organization?
The first and the most important thing is to decide what problems will your LMS solve in the organization. Do you need to boost employee skills or integrate new features into the LMS you already have? Second, perhaps, it would be wise to ask all the stakeholders, who will be working with LMS about their concerns and preferences. Every person is individual enough to highlight their own needs and give you ideas and insights on which type of LMS would be suitable for them.
Third, think about all the essential features your LMS should include. Will it be customizable? Can it include numerous crowds of learners or should be limited to a certain group? Should it be extended to promote the best organizational experience or not? All these features matter as incorrect visualization of your future LMS will bring additional features deployment and integration as well as cost you more time and money. Fourth, think about the 24/7 support. Will you need it? Or support is not that obligatory. Sometimes errors are not easy to fix, especially if the system is new. Handy support can prevent delays and promote a better user experience within a shorter period.
And, also, try to think about the following criteria. A good LMS for organization will:
1. Provide the analytics of results. Measuring successes and failures can be critical towards employee satisfaction and learning abilities.
2. Be completely accessible and user-friendly with regards to design. For instance, if there will be troubles logging in or loading a particular page as well as illogical navigation with the inconvenient placement of buttons, employees will be frustrated with the LMS. These features should be thoroughly designed to ensure the best positive user experience.
3. Be adaptable to any user device. It is necessary to offer users the ability to continue their studies from any device they have and log in to the LMS. Also, they need to be able to do it as naturally as possible so as not to waste additional time on finding the right course section or trying to adjust device parameters to view the course in the best quality.
4. Be secure. In the organization, any course should be encrypted and secure from possible information leakage or privacy disclosure. Also, to ensure every authorized user has secure access, the log-in process can have two-factor authentication. Protected privacy adds a lot to user satisfaction and enhances positive experiences within the LMS.
5. Provide continuous support. When starting something new, every user should watch the LMS training tutorials to become aware of how to navigate the platform. Also, errors may occur and employees, who have no idea how to manage them on their own, might need technical support. This factor is important as the ability to turn to an expert and get the much-needed answers right away is potentially a good thing. Without support, the process of education might not be as positive as you’d like to.
Final Thoughts
Different learning management systems have already become our future. They are convenient, adaptable, relatively secure, and easy to use. More and more people engage in e-learning and are satisfied with the results. An LMS for specific purposes is easy to deploy, but it takes time and knowledge to meet user expectations and ensure positive feedback.
As per today, guide2research states that
- there are 73.8 million LMS users worldwide
- 87% of active LMS users have a web-based access
- top LMS users are corporate managers (65%)
- 37% of LMS users are adults while 28% are significantly younger
- 90% of students prefer learning online to offline
- 4.6 million college students have online classes
- 2% of the LMS software market includes government institutions
- education sector covers 21% of the entire global LMS market
And these numbers are going to grow.
