E‑learning: how to choose your LMS platform?

LMS (Learn­ing Machine Sys­tem) are more and more pop­u­lar among com­pa­nies who want to train their employ­ees. How­ev­er, there are so many e‑learning plat­forms that it is some­times dif­fi­cult to make a choice. Although some com­par­isons are avail­able on the inter­net, this is not always enough to make the right deci­sion. In this arti­cle, we pro­pose you to dis­cov­er how to choose your LMS (Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem) plat­form thanks to some pre­cious advices.

What is an LMS platform?

The LMS plat­form is a dis­tance learn­ing plat­form. On the web, you can find oth­er names such as e‑learning plat­form or e‑learning plat­form. This dig­i­tal train­ing plat­form is a soft­ware that hosts ped­a­gog­i­cal con­tent and allows to deploy and man­age dis­tance learn­ing for train­ing cen­ters and com­pa­nies. Thanks to all the resources uploaded direct­ly on the plat­form, they are then eas­i­ly acces­si­ble for all the peo­ple who wish to learn at a dis­tance. The LMS plat­form is often com­pared to a kind of ware­house that allows to store and track information.

The different types of LMS? platforms

The LMS plat­form can be pre­sent­ed in dif­fer­ent forms:

• The SaaS mode is the most com­mon today and most plat­forms are mar­ket­ed in the cloud as a sub­scrip­tion. No need for instal­la­tion or tech­ni­cal oper­a­tion on your part, just ini­tial con­fig­u­ra­tion and cus­tomiza­tion. All data is stored in the cloud.
• The “On Premise” mode, or host­ed on your serv­er, still exists even if it becomes mar­gin­al. The inter­est depends of course on your abil­i­ty to man­age the tech­ni­cal aspects of the ser­vice (instal­la­tion, host­ing, updates, secu­ri­ty, back­up, main­te­nance in oper­a­tional conditions …).

What are the criteria to take into account when choosing an LMS platform?

Cer­tain cri­te­ria must be tak­en into account in order to choose the right LMS plat­form. First of all, you need to take stock of your cur­rent and future needs in terms of e‑learning. Also ask your­self how com­plex the plat­form is. For exam­ple, if you need to man­age mul­ti­ple for­mats, this may be an impor­tant selec­tion cri­te­ri­on. In short, to choose your LMS plat­form, you should ask your­self the fol­low­ing questions:

• What is my budget?
• What are my dig­i­tal learn­ing needs: blend­ed learn­ing, social learn­ing, MOOC, Adap­tive Learning?
• What type of host­ing do you pre­fer? SaaS or local?
• What e‑learning stan­dards do you need? SCORM, Tin­Can, xAPI etc.?
• Do you need your LMS to inte­grate with oth­er plat­forms (your direc­to­ry, your HRIS, exist­ing con­tent cat­a­logs, etc.)
• Does the plat­form have func­tion­al­i­ty to gam­i­fy learning?
• Does the plat­form offer a native mobile application?
• …

The advantages of Thaleia, authoring software for e‑learning

In addi­tion to the man­age­ment needs met by the LMS plat­form, your needs may also include the abil­i­ty to cre­ate your own train­ing cours­es, in com­plete auton­o­my. This is called “author­ing tool”.

With Thaleia, cre­at­ing an e‑learning mod­ule has nev­er been so easy! Indeed, Thaleia allows you to cre­ate your train­ing mod­ules with­out any tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, because the cre­ation is done from a sim­ple Excel file. You also have the pos­si­bil­i­ty to man­age a screen data­base and to gen­er­ate your mod­ule auto­mat­i­cal­ly. The han­dling is imme­di­ate and very sim­ple. More­over, you can fol­low the activ­i­ty of each learn­er, in a total­ly indi­vid­ual way. We offer 2 weeks of free test­ing with Thaleia, take advan­tage of it.

Pho­to by NESA by Mak­ers on Unsplash