You know that a learning management system (LMS) is important both for your teams and the future productivity of your business. Yet with so many features available from an LMS, choosing which one to buy can be difficult. Which option is best for you?

For example, larger institutions like universities and or multi-site corporations will need a different suite of features from smaller businesses and organisations: back end management, course creation, hosting platforms, open source for instance. That’s before you get to properties such as reporting capabilities, user experience and budget. 

As you can see, there are a number of questions you’ll need to ask yourself about your business, your team and yourself so you can successfully conduct an LMS comparison. Let’s start at the start – what do you want from a learning management system?

Here are some of the features to discuss with suppliers about when you’re comparing learning management systems.

Administration

Find out what tools come as standard. This includes content management for course creation as well as tools such as reporting, planning and tracking. Ask what administrative controls the system offers.

Analytics

Good system analytics will let you understand how students are performing and progressing. They’ll help you guide them along learning paths while letting you export helpful user data to create real-time reports.

Authoring Tools

Many LMS only let you import courses from external authoring tools. Others will let you create courses in the single environment and customise features like question randomisation, unique content and required responses. Find out how much customisation you actually need. Is branding, for instance, a nice-to-have, or a necessity?

Integrations

Learning management systems typically let you install plug-ins to expand your capability. These integrations can help streamline your processes, such as HR & payroll systems and CRMs. Again, ask yourself how important these are as they’ll weigh on your budget.

Offline Teaching

Asynchronous learning lets pupils complete course work at their own pace…

Pricing

These are just a few things to consider when doing a learning management system comparison. Why is this important? Because it will help you (and your team) get the most from the training programmes at your organisation. Not all LMSs are built the same; how one is used at a university is completely different from a small business. If you don’t carefully compare the features of each system, you may find yourself without the capabilities you really need or you may buy one that is over-engineered. Either way, it leads to a poor user experience, wasted resources and a negative outcome.