3 foxy steps to choosing the right learning system
With over 800 learning management systems (LMS) and other elearning platforms on the market, choosing the right one can be a nightmare. But taking a smart, structured approach will give you a far greater chance of avoiding the pitfalls and selecting the right digital learning system to meet business and organizational needs. We lay out your key decisions.
Step 1: Start with the business and functional requirements
This might seem obvious, but far too many people begin by looking at what’s available, with only the fuzziest idea of what their organization might actually require. Doing it that way, you will quickly become baffled, confused and possibly hoodwinked by the marketing hype and neurobabble that is such an enduring feature (more’s the pity) of the vendor market in our sector.
So it’s really best, if you want to be more foxy about it, to define your functional and business requirements upfront.
This starts with your audience and their user stories (or use cases). It’s more clear-cut when there is just an internal audience to focus on, but increasingly learning departments also have external audiences to cater for, which could involve members, volunteers, customers, partners, resellers, salespeople, franchisees, extended supply chain … the list goes on.
These people will need to be educated, or have learning resources provided to them, on particular topics including your products and services, processes, techniques, compliance rules and regulations, leadership, induction … again, the list goes on. But the topic area of learning to be provided, as well as the characteristics of the audience, will have a bearing on the system you ultimately choose.
There again, if you are a training company selling online courses, for instance, you may have very different requirements, including functionality to support ecommerce and digital marketing.
Once you’ve gone through this process of identifying your audience and user stories, fleshing out the functional requirements becomes easier. Go through each user role and specify what they would need to do on the system e.g. different types of learner, trainer/ facilitators, administrators, etc. You might need to make a segmentation according to different functional areas of the business, or geographical regions.
At this stage it is really useful to get input from somebody who knows learning platforms well (but is not a salesperson), if you are to avoid coming up with an unfulfillable wish-list – but also to avoid overlooking possibilities you didn’t know existed. Further down the road, this will greatly help your market evaluation and conversations with vendors.
2. Define your top criteria
You should now be in a position to answer the question of what you actually need right now. What are the must-haves and which features are just nice-to-haves? What do you need straight away and what could be left until ‘Phase Two’?
An important consideration is the maturity of your learning culture. You might personally desire all the bells and whistles of the latest cool tech you saw demoed at Learning Tech, but just think: if you were to implement an LXP with personalised curated content and social learning features, would your learners actually use it?
Bear in mind that transformation is a journey of incremental steps, and that it starts with improving what you’ve got by overhauling the tools, platforms and learning assets you already have. Engaging your audience of learners is a process that builds on this (see The 5 Essential Stages of a Digital Learning Transformation).
Of course, you should also keep in mind your likely future needs and what kind of platform could best service them. Vendors are always keen to discuss what they have on their roadmaps.
3. Research available systems
Having outlined your requirements and defined your criteria, you are now in a much better position to narrow the focus of your vendor search.
It helps at the outset to make a rough categorization of the systems on offer, since this could narrow the field quite considerably if you find that your need falls into one of these broad categories:
· Open source LMS
· Proprietary LMS
· Learning experience platform (LXP)
OPEN SOURCE
(e.g. Moodle, Moodle Workplace, Totara)
How much do your functional requirements vary from standard use cases and functionality offered in most proprietary platforms? Are your requirements likely to change often? Do you want to own the IP on your platform and even commercialise your product offering in the future? Then perhaps self-hosted open source or open source with a partner that can heavily customise the code might be the right choice for you.
Or would you like the flexibility and reassurance of a fully managed service for your open source solution?
PROPRIETARY LMS
Out of the box functionality from Day One, tried and tested …
Here you have a huge variety to choose from. But it might narrow the field if you’re looking for an LMS with a built-in authoring tool. If, conversely, you want to author your own learning content with an external authoring tool, then compatibility with the tool you have selected might be a factor.
LXP
Since LXP has been the major source of innovation in the learning platform market over the last few years it is worth giving this category close attention. However, the term ‘LXP’ is increasingly overused and misused and causes a lot of confusion.
Analysts Fosway have decided not to even use the term ‘LXP’ in their 9-Grid* and instead differentiate platforms as Learning Suites or Learning System Specialists.
• Learning Suites – platforms supporting and integrating a broad range of traditional and next gen learning approaches.
• Learning System Specialist – a platform that has a particular specialism (usually a disruptive approach to transforming digital learning).
Many vendors are adopting the term ‘LXP’ in their marketing. This tends to be seen in the following ways:
Some traditional LMSs refer to themselves as LXPs in order to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Some LMS (learning suites) are adding LXP style functionality & AI features to surface recommended learning blurring the boundaries between the two.
Some LXPs are adding LMS-lite functionality becoming more of a next gen learning suite.
Newer hybrid platforms are springing into the market and calling themselves LXPs.
The original LXPs on the market (Degreed, Edcast, Pathgather) were developed as purely experience layers to sit on top of a traditional LMS in order to provide a better UX and to aggregate content from different providers, surfacing it to learners using machine learning.
The purpose of these would be to plug into an existing learning ecosystem for a large and complex organisation e.g. big multi-nationals like Unilever have multiple LMSs but have Cornerstone as their global L&D managed platform with Degreed over the top as the user interaction layer. Users only interact with Degreed but all the ILT & hosted SCORM and xAPI content is managed on Cornerstone and surfaced to users via Degreed alongside other content subscriptions such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy and Accenture.
In terms of a proprietary SAAS solution, a midsize customer or one with limited budget or resource (like a not-for-profit or charity) would be best catered for with a one-stop-shop learning system so therefore what Fosway describes as a learning suite, preferably one that has adopted some LXP style functionality to future-proof the platform and keep it in line with volunteer expectations.
Here’s a quick reminder of the broad differences between an LMS and an LXP (see more in my blog on LMS or LXP, but bear in mind the lines between the two are blurring:
An LMS is:
• Focused on the essential learning management functions (or pillars) underpinning the learner experience
• Admin-driven
• Excellent at managing different modes of training into learning pathways
• Ideal for managing ILT (face-to-face & virtual)
• Good for managing progress through complex qualifications
An LXP is:
• Typically focused on the user experience layer
• User-driven
• Has a Netflix-style interface (ribbons or channels)
• Can use AI to recommend content to users based on different attributes such as their skills, usage, prior learning consumption, etc. – enabling a personalised experience
• Facilitates skills recognition and management
• Modelled on consumer grade platforms that we are all used to using in our personal lives and should therefore be easier and more intuitive to use (e.g. Facebook, Netflix etc)
• Typically manages micro learning (e.g. video & consumable bitesize content) and subscriptions to external content
Having defined your needs and priorities, and surveyed the available relevant marketplace, you will be in a much stronger place to start having conversations with vendors of learning platforms.
And if you feel you could benefit from some independent help and support in:
· Demystifying the learning platform market
· Platform selection
· Defining your wider digital learning strategy
Get in touch today!
Photo by Hugues de BUYER-MIMEURE on Unsplash