Have you ever come across the term LMS when dealing with an eLearning and wondered what is it? If yes, then this read will give some valuable insights.
LMS stands for Learning (as it is used to deliver training programs or courses), Management (as it helps in organizing these training programs, System (as it is a software). In other words, LMS is a software that allows educational institutions and organisations to create and maintain courses, modules, quizzes, and other instructive materials. Organizations also use an LMS to deliver training materials to its employees and partners.
Components of an LMS
You can call an LMS as an engine that empowers an eLearning. It has two individual components:
- Server: The server component is responsible for the core functionalities like creating, maintaining, and delivering training courses, throwing notifications, authorizing users, and so on.
- User Interface: The user interface component is utilized by instructors, administrators, and students and runs in your web browser like Facebook or Gmail.
Working of an LMS
To understand the working of an LMS, let’s go through a simple example of how it can be deployed. Let’s say an organization requires to make its Finance team learn about an application that will be deployed in the organization soon. To achieve the same, their team of course developers uses the course builder function of their LMS to develop course slides, job aids, quizzes, and certifications. After the training materials are complete, the Finance team can access these materials by logging into the LMS and start going through the course.
Each Finance team member can then undertake the quizzes and appear for the certification whenever he/she is prepared for it. The certification proves that the team member is now ready to use the new application.
In this example, LMS can track each employee’s progress. It generates a report on how well an employee is progressing, his/her qualification to use the application, and the areas where employees are struggling to understand the application.
Benefits of an LMS
Here are some top benefits of using an LMS in your organization:
- Centralized Content: An LMS lets you store all your training materials in one centralized location. This prevents data loss in a situation where content is spread across multiple devices and hard drives.
- Learners’ Performance Tracking: It allows you to keep a tab on learners’ performance and progress. If a learner is not progressing or failing continuously, you can provide him/her supplemental training resources to help him/her succeed.
- Cost and Time Efficient: An LMS helps an organization eliminates the costs that goes in making the instructors travel, printing training materials, and renting online training sites. Moreover, it can help reducing learning time, as information is provided in an organized and direct way.
- Flexibility: Changing existing courses is easy. All you have to do is log into you LMS and make the required changes.
- Unlimited content access: Needless to say that once a course is live on an LMS, learners can access it whenever and from wherever they need.
If you are looking to deploy an LMS in your organization, then do a thorough market research and analyse your organization needs. Talk to your course development and IT teams to get dig deeper, and keep in mind that finding an apt LMS is not a one-day job.
