The Key Thing to Understand When Searching for an LMS

Purchasing the first Learning Management System (LMS) for your business is always an exciting time. Now is your chance to revolutionize learning at your organization. For many, that early optimism quickly fades into either frustration, confusion, or both. Not only are there several hundred different LMS options for you to choose from, not a single one is likely to completely please you. Despite the lack of a perfect fit, you will go through a lengthy review process and spend a lot of money before your new system is up and running, only to be thinking about purchasing something else before your first contract renewal. 

After going through four different LMS implementation processes with multiple companies and after listening to more software pitches than I can remember, I have come to realize there is something extremely fundamental you need to understand to make sure a LMS will work for your company. Perhaps not surprisingly, what you need to understand most is not covered in the normal sales pitch, and you could actually get all the way to signing a contract without ever talking about it.

What People Normally Talk About

You might ask, how is it possible to go through a lengthy review of a LMS without understanding the fundamental aspects of a system? Well, if there is one thing that LMS vendors are good at, it is chasing industry trends and talking about them. You want gamification, they got it. Social learning, OK! How about user generated content, yep, that is there too. 

Don’t get me wrong, these can be important aspects of a system. Depending on the culture of your company, you may want to make user generated content a big part of your learning strategy, in which case, you need to make sure the system you choose makes that easy. But the heart of any learning strategy is still going to be the basic blocking and tackling of assigning learning and tracking its completion. This is where something I call learning objects come into play.

What are learning objects?

Learning objects are all of the individual things that can contain knowledge or be assigned to learners in a LMS. Depending on the LMS you are looking at, they may go by many different names. Bridge Learn, for example, has Courses, Live Events, Checkpoints, and Programs. Workday Learning has Digital Courses, Blended Courses, Lessons, another thing called a lesson, Programs and Campaigns. I call them learning objects because every LMS uses a different name. 

Learning objects are incredibly important to understand because this is how the rubber actually meets the road in your learning. As early as possible in the sales process you should stop your sales rep and simply have them list out all of the learning objects in the system. This might take a few tries because they may have never thought about their system like this before.

As a general rule of thumb, you can expect the more learning objects there are, the more difficult it is going to be to administer learning using the system. Once you have a list of all the learning objects, there are a few questions you need to ask.

Where does learning content go?

The answer to this question will likely depend on what kind of content you are talking about so make sure you ask about everything you plan on using, live events, SCORM files, mp4s, etc. In many systems, the learning object you use will be dictated by the type of content you are trying to deliver.

With this answer in mind, you can really start to get a sense of what your content creation strategy is going to entail. Will you be creating dozens of lessons which then go inside a course? Are you going to be utilizing all the learning objects or are some of them unnecessary? Once you have your head wrapped around the creation strategy, the next step will be getting people to take the training, which leads to your next question.

What gets assigned to learners?

This may seem like a strange question but sometimes, not always, where the content lives and what gets assigned are two different things. The most common occurrence of this is lessons within a course. The actual content is put into a lesson, but the course is what gets assigned to an individual.

As you start to understand what gets assigned, you should also be able to understand exactly how it gets assigned, which uncovers a number of additional questions. Can assignments be automated? Can an assignment have expirations or recurrences? All of this information is going to allow you to set up your assignment strategy. Of course, after assignment, the next thing we care about is completion.

How do I track completion?

This might be the most important question for you to understand the answer to because it will help make sure learners don’t get really frustrated with your new system. In the answer to the above question, you may have learned that learning objects can be grouped together and assigned as one big package for people to take together. For example, a Bias & Discrimination course may get put into a package of new manager content. That same Bias & Discrimination course might also get put into a package of content for interviewers.

The question is, what happens when a learner gets assigned both packages? Does the course get assigned twice and require two completions or does the system know that the learner completed the course in one package and is marked complete in both? As you can imagine, having to complete a course twice would be incredibly frustrating to a learner, so the answer to this question is very important. To make things more complicated, the answer to this question may vary based on the learning object you are talking about.

Learning strategies that work

Deciding to invest in learning for your organization by purchasing a LMS can be a huge step forward. However, you need to make sure you can finish taking the step and actually use what you purchase in the way you want. An initial focus on understanding learning objects will help you get past buzz words in the sales process, ensure you know what you are buying, and ultimately make sure you design a learning strategy which will make a difference in your organization.